Open Biology Journal.- They added me to their editorial board. The only benefit is than I can publish one paper per year free of charge. By the way, they list me as being with the ECEE, but it was officially closed a few years ago because of a lack of financial activities.  I am also on the editorial board at Wiley's IJZ, where I have a similar deal.

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Moved to Wix.- I moved the web site to Wix.  Some of the links might not work and some of the information and documents might not be available, but eventually everything will  be as before; it will just look nicer and have greater potential utility.

 

​​Bariatric Surgery.-As the prevalence of obesity continues to increase across the world, people are turning to surgical solutions. This short paper examines the expectations and quality of life consequences of people about to undergo and having undergone the procedure.

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​​Returned from China just as the Wuhan flu was beginning to spread across the planet. As I was leaving, rumours about the virus were already floating around. The two years that followed turned out to be a fascinating  experiment on human physiology, exposing a large portion of humanity to a relatively untested and unnecessary vaccine,  and psychology, exploring the ease with which fear can induce people to embrace authoritative governments.

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​​Inner Mongolia University.- I spent late 2020 in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China! It is a very different culture! The biggest problem was that Google did not work, or any other site for which you use your email to log in. That is when I started using ProtonMail.  The worst part was never knowing whether a web page had been blocked or it was just taking forever to load.

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​Immunoecology in Species with Alternative Reproductive Strategies and Tactics, by Albert Ros and I: a critical review paper of all relevant hypotheses and studies. We conclude that  the immunocompetence handicap hypothesis has generated the most work, but not necessarily the most understanding. Furthermore, blanket concepts such as “immunocompetence” and “androgens” might be useful to develop a rationale, but predictions need to be more explicitly articulated.

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National Institute of Ecology.-I spent most of 2016 at Korea's NIE. It is an amazing facility, extremely well funded, and with top-notch scientists, but severely hampered by painfully mind-boggling bureaucracy.

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SAD Effects on Grantsmanship.- I once submitted a research proposal for a competition specifically for "high risk" and "innovative" research. It was evaluated from October to December. However, at that time of the year, under the effects of SAD, people become risk-adverse, and prefer the same old stuff, the safe, the boring. Any truly high-risk and innovative research proposal had no chance of being supported.

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​Multi-authorship I.- With the internet facilitating the process, "language editing" services can easily become ghost-writing services. Here, I explore the various types of "editing" services and examine at what point those contributions ought to be sufficient to warrant authorship. It turns out many researchers are standing on the shoulders of nameless giants.

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Ruff Sex and Immunoecology.- Part 3 of the epic trilogy, this time including the third male morph: female mimics called faeders. As predicted, their investment in immunocompetence is between that of females than that of the other 2 types of males. Immune responses were congruent with an investment in immune function based on the expected risk of injury, not energetic constraints.

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​The Demise of the Impact Factor.- In the digital age, we read papers, not journals. This simple observation led to the prediction that the relation between the Impact Factor and papers' citations had to be weakening. It turns out to be true! The paper has been featured in several magazines and websites (link)

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Impact Per Dollar.- Granting agencies ought to use the concept of cost-effective impact as an evaluating criterion for awarding research grants. It would be a better and more effective use of our taxes. The same idea was also proposed elsewhere a couple of months later (link).

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The Estonian Centre of Evolutionary Ecology (ECEE) began merely as a name, just because journals insisted that I had to have an "affiliation" when I published a paper. It later became an officially registered non-profit organization (reg. no. 80355697). After some years, the government cancelled because of a lack of financial activities. I tried re-registering it, but the name cannot be used again in Estonia, by me nor anyone else.