by Greg Mayer
When I posted about Daniel Matute giving the Dobzhansky Lecture at the evolution meetings, one of the commenters asked if his talk was recorded so it could be viewed online. At the time I didn’t know– I knew some talks were recorded, but I didn’t know which ones. Well, the recordings which were made have now been posted at a dedicated Youtube channel, Evolution 2014. Daniel’s, alas, is not among them. Since we all like squirrels though, here’s one on squirrels, “A history of high latitude adaptation in Holarctic ground squirrels (Urocitellus)”, by Bryan McLean from the Museum of Southwestern Biology at the University of New Mexico.
Recording talks for posting online was an experiment at this year’s meeting, and about 80 are available. You can usually see the slides well, the speaker not so much; the audio is soft, but audible on the ones I checked. You can browse the Youtube channel linked to above, or look at a list of the talks in a searchable spreadsheet format here. The number recorded may increase at future meetings.
Here’s one more talk, on “The tangled evolutionary histories of Madagascar’s small mammals”, by Katie Everson, from the University of Alaska Museum. This talk I saw “live” at the meeting– island evolution is just about my favorite topic.
Great will check some of these out.
Color me shocked that these haven’t been recorded before. Better late than never, I suppose. Hopefully the camera work will improve somewhat, the Madagascar presentation could have been zoomed in a bit, and the poor girl needed a bit more altitude (mic at forehead level, head barely above the podium) but those are minor details and in no important way do they detract from the presentation. Thank you for putting these up.
let me amend my earlier comment, having watched the holarctic ground squirrel talk that the constant camera jiggling and refocusing very much does impact the presentation, and I hope that next year the camera is roped off so as to prevent the late-comers from walking in front of it. Just a suggestion.
Jerry, the UC connection must be noted. Katie Everson is a student of Link Olson, Committee on Evolutionary Biology grad.