DoggCatcher >> Spotify

My lab at Indiana University is searching for a *postdoc* and *technician* to contribute to our work studying the evolution of social behavior using fruit flies as a model system. Details below, feel free to email me with any questions! More info on our research: saltzlab.com

When I was in the Air Force, many of my troops were on SNAP.

"The toppings contain potassium benzoate." Whenever getting ice cream.

**PhD POSITIONS** I am recruiting 1-2 PhD students to work on sociality and cognition in Monk Parakeets, starting Fall 2026. Full ad is here: hobsonresearch.com/index.php/20... (please help spread the word!)

By my departmental colleague.

This was the most played non-kid song on my playlist last year.

I once wrote a sentence that stated that the iterative development of weapons technology was akin to what evolutionary biologists call an "arms race."

48 - 50 (not counting airports or drive-bys). I'm pretty sure I have not visited Tucson or Tulsa as an adult, but maybe as a kid. Disappointing that this does not include cities in Alaska or the entire upper half of the country between St Paul and Portland.

Applications are open for SFI's 2026 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships If you’ve recently earned a Ph.D. in any scientific field and want to pursue independent, transdisciplinary research, consider applying. Deadline: October 1, 2025 Apply here: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

Here are my two for the Double Feature.

Dream internship for someone out there! Paid, Remote, and with @xercessociety.bsky.social 🐝 🪲 🦋 recruiting.paylocity.com/Recruiting/J...

In non-lab fields, faculty typically help MA/PhD students develop solo projects that aren't part of the faculty member's research, and that the faculty won't be a coauthor on. Faculty in non-lab fields also typically increase their advising load post-tenure, limiting their own time for research. 2/

I watched the whole Frozen movie with my daughter, and not once does Elsa wear a dress with her own picture on it.

'Meredith,' some guys ask, 'why won't you shove AI into Signal?' Because we love privacy, and we love you, and this shit is predictable and unacceptable. Use Signal ❤️

In the four-year-old's process of sorting out "real" from "pretend," my favorite part is discovering the fantastical, yet very real, things that she insists are pretend. This morning's examples are "the Taj Mahal" and "bats." The world is full of wonders.

“The gender-equality paradox entails that countries with more equality have larger gender differences in behavior. Positive associations between equality & gender differences disappear or reverse when accounting for cultural clusters of countries. The paradox appears to be a methodological artifact”

New 2 year post-doc position on cultural adaptation in complex environmental management.

Grammerly is now telling me to replace all instances of "use" with "utilize." It used to be pretty good at finding typos, now it is trying to get me to write like a stochastic Internet parrot, I guess.

Our in-house journal (Countering Threats Exchange) has a call for a special issue on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. They are looking for submissions from various angles. nps.edu/web/ccht/con...

I'm presenting virtually at HBES this year. Thanks to @humbehevosoc.bsky.social‬ for adding us stranded folks to the program. You can see our talks online or come to ACA 314 on Friday at 5:50 EST / 2:50 PST to see us on the big screen.

Does anyone have an accessible guide for best practices in presenting DAGs and associated regression estimates in a paper? This is for a student thesis project (and, frankly, for myself, as I have done it admittedly ad hoc, although no reviewers have so far complained.)

Our #MBARIFromTheVault series comes to a close with an animal that needs no introduction. MBARI researchers last encountered the giant phantom jelly in November 2021 during a dive in Monterey Bay. While exploring the midnight zone, this ghostly giant emerged from the darkness.

To reiterate one of my academic themes for 2025: It’s a real problem that students feel incapable of operating without genAI, particularly given that they do worse with it. I don’t care if slackers slack, but if insecurity x manipulation shields well-meaning students from their education, I care.

Congrats to Rob Boyd, @scottepage.bsky.social, @alisongopnik.bsky.social, and others on election to NAS!

LLMs are nothing more than models of the distribution of the word forms in their training data, with weights modified by post-training to produce somewhat different distributions. Unless your use case requires a model of a distribution of word forms in text, indeed, they suck and aren't useful.

All, for a thesis student, please recommend any good guides for analyzing *qualitative data*, especially, but not exclusively, with examples using R/tidyverse?

It's neat when you make a model to explain one puzzling empirical finding - and it ends up also predicting another one. Yes, this is vague. Preprint hopefully up soon...

What is a good alternative to audible for audiobooks?

Does anyone outside of the United States need to hire someone to ID freshwater benthic macroinvertebates anytime soon? 👀 I come with SFS certifications 💗

What are the best resources for a new graduate student on survey design?

"Information Architectures: A Framework for Understanding Socio-Technical Systems" is in press at npj Complexity. Normally I might wait until publication to share, but given the relevance to our rapidly-changing world, it seemed worth sharing now. osf.io/preprints/so...

Zefferman's rule: other disciplines are not as interdisciplinary as you think.