Talk:Gail Ashley

Flagging for cleanup

Hi Wikipedians :) I found this article and it looks like it needs some love. There's a lot of info and some decent references. There are a couple of issue that seems to be affecting the article. 1. Some content was directly copied from other places in the internet (sourced, but not quoted or paraphrased.)

One identified source: http://www.geosociety.org/awards/12speeches/sloss.htm

2. Some of the content appears to read like a research paper, instead of an encyclopedia article. There is even first person commentary within the text. I am boldly deleting this section (shown below) for the following reasons:

a. It sounds like first-hand research b. The writing contains run-on, nonsense sentences c. The section is jargon-filled and scientific

Understanding Gail Ashley's actual science works she did and study for non science students in the following areas: Reconstruction of paleoenvironments is by definition investigations and or study which are undertaken to reconstruct the climate and vegetation of a specific time and place. Paleoclimatology is the study of climate changes over a period or on a scale of history of the earth. Sediment is a natural deposit of particles or materials e.g. rocks, soils, that are broken down because of natural causes e.g. erosion, weathering. These materials or particles are relocated by water/flood, wind or ice and or by gravitational forces.

There is a historical context in Gail Ashley's study and as well, being a female makes it more challenging to succeed over time. Author Glenn Dolphin in his book, argued on Drawing the Lines of Controversy, that the dynamics of developing science of geology years ago certainly helped in giving context to its history and prior to any systematic investigation of the surface of the earth and the processes that affect it, common knowledge through Europe was Biblically inspired. The earth had been created for humans, and humans had been there since the beginning and the earth was static and unchanging. People, for ages had been finding fossils, but not considering them remnants of prior living organisms, until Steno has his experience connecting the teeth of the great white shark with the tongue stones he and others had found in the mountains around Tuscany and elsewhere. This leads Steno to believe that the surface of the earth had changed and he set about developing the principles all which rely on the idea that the surface of the earth has changed since its formation; that the earth has a history I do suggest, that Gail Ashley is part of this dynamics of developing science. e.g. According to Geoscience world, Gail's study represents the first dated terrestrial record at the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary with sufficient resolution to link lake cycles (a climate proxy) to astronomic forcing and the geochronometry of the sequence was determined using the paleomagnetic record (top of subchron CN2, 1.785 Ma), the ages of two tuffs (Tuff IB and Tuff IF), and sedimentation rates. Insolation (W/m2) variations calculated as a function of eccentricity and precession predict five cycles of varying insolation (±10%) between 2.0 and 1.5 Ma. Rainfall would have increased by one-third between dry and wet portions of each ∼21,000 k.y. cycle. The wet-dry climate pendulum may have been a factor in the natural selection processes of hominin evolution and the first wave of hominin migrations out of Africa (1.8 Ma)

If you strongly feel the content should be replaced, please first removing the original research and improve the overall grammatical structure of the sentences. Thank you! :) Curdigirl (talk) 23:11, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

In 1977, the year she earned her Ph.D., Ashley was hired at Rutgers University, where she remains a full professor. For the first 23 years she served as the sole female role model and mentor for the female students in the department, as the female students started to increase in number. She has also served as a role model for female geoscientists at the national and international level through her leadership as an editor of premier journals such as the Journal of Sedimentary Research, as President of high-profile scientific societies including SEPM (Society for Sedimentary Geology), GSA (Geological Society of America) and AGI (American Geosciences Institute), and her leadership on NSF (National Science Foundation) and NRC (National Resources Canada) panels charting research directions in sedimentary geology. For most of her tenure, she was the only female professor in her department. She has also been an editor for several journals, including the Journal of Sedimentary Research (associate, 1987-1990 and 1992-1995; chief, 1996-2000), for which she was the first female editor, and the Geological Society of America Bulletin (associate, 1989-1995). She also did a public lecture on "The Paleoclimate Framework of Human Evolution, Lessons from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania" at Rutgers University and was given publicity by WISE (Women in Scientific Education) in 2014. She has published 91 scientific papers, presented 150 papers at meetings, and given 85 invited lectures over her 34-year career.

Copy edit and bias clean-up

I have done a substantive copyedit and deletion of extraneous materials and have removed those templates. I believe the entry now reads as a more balanced account of Ashley and her work. I have not tracked down the concerns that portions of the text are copied and pasted from other sources. Robertnola (talk) 15:48, 14 March 2019 (UTC)