Ecotour logo opinion - round 2

-update - which of the color ones do you like better?-

Designing a bright yellow t-shirt for the ecotour guide in Haiti so his clients don't loose track of him inspired me to create a logo for his tours, and my educational program in Haiti. Though it's really about the ecotours. Which do you like better? Here's the parrot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispaniolan_Amazon On the front will be the guides name

(PS SpSq will be in town - email me if you'll be around and can come to our gathering).

Tenured Professorship

A little birdy just reported that the snail-trail-studying one among us was just granted tenure.
Way to go Snail Studier!

Hawaii friends' tsunami

Hawaii forest friend - let us know what happened with the tsunami! The Japan earthquake is bringing back sad emotions from the Haiti quake.

Inconsistent colleague corrections?

I am fortunate to work in a department where all of my collegues are professional and competent (this is a rarity in academia as elsewhere). That doesn't stop me from wanting to change some of their behaviors/notes/questions/policies.
For example: 1) Our majors intro class has several lecture sections and many lab sections. My lecture is a week behind where we should be based on my syllabus (which is based upon the official course outline). Another professor is at least 2 weeks behind me. This bothers me because it does affect lab (I teach 3 of the 5 sections and they are scheduled to correspond with lecture) and it means that there is NO WAY she will cover evolution effectively and we will have students leaving our majors class without hitting Hardy-Weinberg.
2) I just received my fall reviews saying how hard I am (typical) in my non-majors class. Just as I was thinking that I wasn't any harder than anyone else, I learned of a section that is receiving points for doing a WORD SEARCH in college biology (and, sadly, one of our student aides had to correct said word searches).
3) I'm guest lecturing tomorrow and the mitosis powerpoint from the instructor (which the students already have) includes the sentence "Eukaryotic organisms do not rely on cell division for reproduction." (HUH?)
I know that I should just shut up and be thankful that I work in such a generally good environment, but I would be delighted to hear of tactful strategies for dealing with peers in such situations.

Request for a friend

A friend of mine needs some botany assistance - let me know if you can assist.

"My work is large scale paintings of tress. I need to know more about endangered trees or habitats or human behaviors and practices that is causing undue stress on trees. Specifically, what species of trees and were are they located. I'm looking for someone in the field of botany or ecology that has that expertise.

If you could recommend someone or a place, an organization where I could look for information, that would be very helpful to my work.

If you have any questions or if I need to get more specific let me know."

Thanks

Hi everyone! Remember me. . .the non-biologist?!

Hi all--remember me? It's been a while, been busy with the PhD'ing stuff but I figured it was high time to stop over and say "Hello" and let you all know what we've been up to.

The old man has got to be the most hardworking person I know. He's currently got three jobs: Post-Doc, TA for intro bio lab and still killing bugs on the side two times a week. He's nuts, which is probably why I like him so much. He's also still been brewing lots of tasty beer to keep us and our Larryville friends happy.

PhD for me has been going very well. I've gotten to know our Raman spectroscopy lab "the cave, or the closet" as we like to call it, very well. I'm swimming in data. I've given a couple of talks on my stuff at the Goldschmidt conference (geochemists) and the Geological Society of America in the past year or so, which was an interesting experience. Always interesting when you end of telling people something some of them really, really don't want to hear.

And, gonna toot our horn a bit here, (not too much though, lest it be annoying) we got our first paper out of my PhD work recently published in the geoscience division of Nature (Nature Geoscience). Kinda exciting. Better yet, one paper done for the PhD.

I'm glad this blog is here, it always lets me keep up with the going's on of the diaspora and even if I don't comment frequently, know I'm probably lurking around not too infrequently. The old man and I do miss you all, and hope everything is going well in your lives!

Celebrations

Happy Birthday to Molly!
Happy upcoming (Ides of March) birthday to SalSis.
Happy recent (well, within the last two months) birthday to Erin and TucTrek
I hope you all continue to celebrate with verve.