General Info and Organizational Meeting

First of all, welcome back or welcome for the first time. I am Dani and you will be hearing a lot more from me as the semester goes on. I am a PhD student in the biology department. You will also be hearing from Thomas, an MSc student in geology.

The mandate of this group is to discuss high quality research in the areas of evolution and palaeontology. We try to discuss topics that will interest all of us. This means we don't discuss descriptions or studies with a narrow focus. For newcomers, excellent papers for discussion are most often found in the journals Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Our discussions are by no means restricted to these journals, however. If you wish to see some of the papers we discussed last year please see our older posts. 

If you would like to contribute to the blog, please email me (dfraser1@connect.carleton.ca) and I can give you the appropriate privileges after you create a blogspot account. Blog posts should be on the topics of evolution and/or palaeontology. I encourage posting links to interesting papers. Please keep in mind that journal articles are copyrighted and should not be uploaded to the blog. If anyone does so their privileges will be revoked. Additionally, if any inappropriate comments or "author bashing" (making negative comments about authors we have discussed) is found on the blog, your privileges will also be revoked. The blog is public access and all of our professional reputations are "on the line."

Now that the nasty business is out of the way, I can get to my primary reason for writing this post. We need to have an organizational meeting so we can determine what day of the week to meet (last year it was Wednesdays at 5:30 pm) and we need to schedule the first few people to choose papers. In keeping with tradition, I will probably choose the first paper (time and date to be determined) because I would like to set the tone for the discussion group. This year we're going to be a little more technological. Please fill out the following doodle poll. I will be cruel and schedule the meeting using "majority rules."

http://www.doodle.com/kri65a4zkcvh7cp5#table

Once we have the date chosen, I will send another email to inform everyone. I will then be creating a google calendar that we can use for scheduling presenters. You will all be given access (provided you have a google account).

Can't wait to see everyone and to meet the newbies!