Brian O'Meara

@omearabrian

I study diversification, species delimitation, trait evolution & similar questions, often using new methods. Also random coding projects. College prof living in Oak Ridge, TN, USA. Opinions my own. He/Him

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Brian O'Meara@omearabrian· 11d

NSF is definitely back to awarding grants at a decent clip, but total award $ still below historic norms. bomeara.github.io/rnsf/index.h... #AcademicSky 🧪

Line plot of grants awarded per day, two week rolling average. For many years, grants per day are near zero in October, rise slowly until May, and then rise to a peak in late August. Last year (blue line) it was similar but lower, with dips especially in May-June. This year, it was even lower for much of the year, and almost non in late June, but started rising again and now is back in the usual amount of grants per period.

Bergogram line plot of total grant amounts cumulative per year; this year is slightly above last year at this time but below every other year since 2020.

Brian O'Meara@omearabrian· 11d

Folks at #AOS2026: See my coadvised student Renata Beco's talk "Do female ornaments influence territorial responses in a socially monogamous suboscine bird (Myrmoderus loricatus)?" Room 163, 3:30 pm, Thurs Aug 6 [photo by Ciro Albano / Brazil Birding Experts, macaulaylibrary.org/asset/179111...]

Photo of a brownish bird on a stick, facing the viewer. It has a black head, but a prominent white back and white and black throat

Brian O'Meara@omearabrian· 22d

I'm perennially amazed that this cool organism just grows freely in my backyard

Purple passion flower growing on a wall with a fruit behind it

Brian O'Meara@omearabrian· 23d

I'm still enjoying playing with meshcore ($20 radio lets you chat with people hundreds of miles away, in theory good for when other communication goes down). But it's funny how many of the messages are "I hear you!" "I hear you, too!!" It's like everyone trying out their new walky-talky

Map of the southeastern United States, showing all the locations my radio has heard messages from in black and other known transmitters in blue circles that aggregate many stations

Brian O'Meara@omearabrian· 25d

When I win the lottery, I'm going to give myself an Endowed Chair in Evolution. I'm also very literal.

Photo of a person sitting on a green fiberglass dinosaur bench.

Brian O'Meara@omearabrian· 27d

A relative in Boston just reported a frog falling from a tree onto their foot. So for those keeping track at home: 1. The skies have turned yellow and the air is dangerous to breathe 2. The sun burns red overhead all day 3. The lettuce (maybe?) causes gushing of the bowels 4. It's raining frogs

A shoe with a small gray tree frog on it, with a deck board in the background

Brian O'Meara@omearabrian· Jul 12

"they wanted to hold": they = editor(s) at the Ecology Letters journal that is, not Eppley, Lee, et al., just to be clear. Trying to slow publication by months until the journal can get a critical response ready to a paper, but failing to execute b/c publishing workflows are hard: Ecology Letters

We had planned to publish two Viewpoints on biological sex in the same issue of the journal. In retrospect, this was not a good idea because it failed to account for how long manuscripts can take to move through peer review. When I was assigned Eppley et al.'s manuscript, I felt it merited review but knew its publication in Ecology Letters would be controversial. When the reviews arrived, one by Tim Janicke made a particularly compelling case for the prevailing (though increasingly contested) view that biological sex is binary. We therefore invited Dr. Janicke to write a Viewpoint on the subject, invited Dr. Eppley and other experts to review it, and intended to hold both manuscripts until they had completed peer review.

Unfortunately, this plan conflicted with the journal's normal workflow of publishing accepted manuscripts as soon as possible. Although an exception was supposed to be made in this case, it was not, and Eppley et al.'s manuscript appeared before Janicke et al. had finished writing theirs.

Brian O'Meara@omearabrian· Jul 5

Good news: #NSF is back up to normal number of grants awarded per two week period, after quite a lag. Bad news: total amount awarded per state is, for most, way below normal for this day of the year. github.com/bomeara/rnsf

Line plot of NSF grants awarded per day over a two week sliding window. Most past years are in shades of gray; 2025 is in blue and 2026 is in red. Both of those dropped far below the others, including as recently as mid June, 2026

Scatter plot by state of days since most recent grant and percentage of normal funding by this state. Only three locations are over their usual average (PR, OK, WV), most are around 50%

Brian O'Meara@omearabrian· Jul 4

Ok, I've done this for over 3000 individual US colleges and universities at collegetables.info Here's U Illinois: collegetables.info/145637.html#... . I only used a ten year window. Let me know if folks have suggestions or ideas. Thanks @kateclancy.bsky.social for the thread!

Expense percentage by cost: a line plot showing instruction wages and academic support being about 15% of the cost, each

Table of undergrads per tenure track and all instructors, as well as trends in number of instructors, at U Illinois Urbana-Champaign and similar institutions

Graduation rate by demographic at U Illinois and other institutions. 84.9% for all, but varying by different demographic groups

Illustration of the "demographic cliff" showing a gradual decline in potential people in the 18 year old cohort. Text: There is a concern that giving changing US demographics, the number of students in the age groups who most commonly attend four year colleges will drop off, decreasing overall enrollment. This is often referred to as the “demographic cliff”, and it can be a concern for colleges concerned about the risk of falling enrollment. For this section, the analysis uses US census data on the number of people in each state by age, and the proportion of students that come from each state for this particular college, to crudely model what will happen if everything remains constant except the demographic change in the population of 18 year olds in each year – it does not account for things like the college increasing its admission rate, attracting more students from states without the same demographic changes or from other countries, or changes in the proportion of students who go to college.

Brian O'Meara@omearabrian· Jun 29

It looks like uskeywords.org has now incorporated the words identified by @maxkozlov.bsky.social's important reporting. The site also allows searching one's writing against words used in assessing science as well as downloading lists of the focal words and phrases. 🧪 #AcademicSky