Over the years (age privilege), I sat on several hiring committees for French universities and research institutes. I also have students who are now in the position to apply for such positions. It had me thinking about what works and what doesn't work in job applications and interviews. Here are my 2 cents suggestions.

Following my previous post on [using ADMB to fit hidden Markov models](https://oliviergimenez.github.io/post/occupancy_in_admb/), I took some time to learn how to use Rcpp ([Eddelbuettel & Francois 2011](https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v040i08); [Eddelbuettel 2013](http://www.springer.com/us/book/9781461468677)), a package that gives friendly access to the power of C++ and increase the speed of your R programs. Kudos to Dirk Eddelbuettel, Romain Francois and their colleagues, Rcpp is awesome!

Some time ago, a student of mine got stuck when fitting dynamic occupancy models to real data in Jags because of the computational burden.

I just submitted to Oikos a paper entitled "Individual heterogeneity and capture-recapture models: what, why and how?". A pre-print is available [here](http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/26/120683). I also provide R codes on GitHub [there](http://bit.ly/2nqWzoZ).

Our report (in French) on foresighting wolf population dynamic in France is available from [here](https://t.co/a6ibQoF7Nr). My contribution was mostly based on the work of my present or former students, including L. Marescot, J. Louvrier and S. Cubaynes.

We held our annual 5-day [capture-recapture workshop](https://multievent.sciencesconf.org/) in Montpellier. As always, the attendees had challenging questions and stimulating datasets to analyse! Looking forward to next year.

Isabelle Arpin, a sociologist from Grenoble, organised a 2-day seminar on interdisciplinarity. The idea was for the participants to share their experience in practicing interdisciplinarity.

I spent 3 days in Berlin at the [Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research](http://www.leibniz-izw.de/welcome.html) catching up with friends and colleagues (L. Marescot, S. Benhaim, S. Kramer-Schadt, A. Courtiol, H. Hofer).

We organized a meeting between our lab and [Praxiling](http://www.praxiling.fr/?lang=en) a lab working in linguistic to explore potential collaborations between ecology and linguistic. Marie Chandelier and I gave a talk on our recent results on a content analysis we performed on wolf recovery in France and its coverage by newspapers. More soon on this front.

We had our first meeting for the project “Climate and management effects on COMmunity dynamics – Developing multi-species DEMOgraphy"funded by ANR. The website is operational and running, check it out here.