**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!)

"After the fall of the Roman Empire, elephants virtually disappeared from Western Europe. Since there was no real knowledge of how the animal looked, illustrators had to rely on oral and written transmissions to morphologically reconstruct the elephant" www.uliwestphal.de/elephas-anth...

New in Trends in Ecology & Evolution: 'Earth system engineers' and the cumulative impact of organisms in deep time 🔓 #ecoevo #openaccess www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... A thread 🧵:

RAPTCHA Off to heaven if you click the squares with things that take you higher.

Please boost! #linguistics student here at Swarthmore is running a survey for English speakers (who don't know Mandarin / any other tone languages) about how we learn tones. Take a few minutes to help out with this student research! swarthmore.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Imagine it's 1997. There's a Real World marathon on. You're randomly offered one factual sentence from 2025 as a glimpse into the future and it's this:

What's the drawback though

"Consider the implications if ChatGPT started saying “I don’t know” to even 30% of queries ... Users accustomed to receiving confident answers to virtually any question would likely abandon such systems rapidly."

Very glad to see that someone is doing the important work of aligning AI alignment. alignmentalignment.ai

wild to me that whenever Epstein is in the news, bsky science folk are up in arms about a couple of famous academics who barely knew the guy rather than Martin Nowak, who took millions of Epstein dollars to run his lab, hosted Epstein there often, and somehow is still teaching at Harvard

If you have submitted a preprint to PsyArXiv in the last year or so and it *isn't* currently accessible, there's a good chance it's due to the document listing authors whom you haven't entered in the metadata.

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

Marched myself out of the house this morning to take in fresh air and just heard a guy say "this mouse pissed in my fuckin mouth last night" so I think everything is gonna be alright 🌈

"Half the population” of greater Los Angeles "now meet the government’s criteria for reasonable suspicion," in the wake of today's 6-3 SCOTUS ruling. www.latimes.com/politics/sto...

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars. OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

Are we sure RFK Jr isn’t actually Meatwad from ATHF?

International enrollment also steady at Harvard, afaik US embassies abroad have been slow-walking student visas. V. limited appts. Who makes it through these barriers? The political, economic, & social elite - who send their kids to Harvard, Princeton, & Columbia www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/u...

Anyone in #sociolinguistics working on (or know someone working on) machine/AI "translation" between different varieties of English?

Wikipedia editors trying to fend off the onslaught of AI crap have crowdsourced some telltale signs of LLM-generated writing; it might be handy for editors and proofreaders generally. Thanks to @ellenrykers.com for pointing me to it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

Eugenics discourse reminding me, yet again, that the near-total lack of history of science education in various western societies is a PROBLEM

Race Isn’t Biological — So Why Do So Many Still Think It Is? @kevinlala.bsky.social and @kztwyman.bsky.social blog about their recent paper in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences www.cambridge.org/core/blog/20...

RFK's idea that disease is good, actually, is not just eugenicist - it's literally on the extreme bad edge of eugenics. Many original eugenicists understood that preventable disease killed "fit" and "unfit" alike. They wanted to prevent disease and practice public health. /1

About that... we audited the open source status of Lumo and found it came in rock bottom in the EU Open Source AI Index osai-index.eu/news/lumo-pr... — consider sharing more details to rise through the openness ranks, @proton.me 🫣 #OpenSource #OpenWashing #lumo

How does anyone let AI manage/seep into correspondence/emails etc? There are so many things I would not effectively think through, solve, or learn, if I outsourced any part of this to a sentence extrusion machine. Am I a dinosaur or is it absolutely the point that this would switch off your brain?

If you haven't listened to the podcast The Retrievals, highly recommend. Harrowing but very enlightening

This has now been published in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... The original authors also posted a reply: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Quick thread on some additional thoughts and then I'm probably done talking about this one 🧵

This is why it's prompting me to allow something at least once a day (and why I blanket reject every time)

Making them wear high-visibility vests over camo is such a good joke you couldn’t write it

hey @theguardian.com this piece is wildly irresponsible! To post an "interview" with an LLM, with zero context given that that it cannot answer questions about itself, and that you've basically just asked it to generate some science fiction dialogue? www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

NZers expect to hear an American-influenced phonetic style when they encounter language in song & they adjust their perceptual vowel space accordingly. They also find it easier to process a US voice in a music context, and harder to process a NZE accent. Fun! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

For folks not in DC: - There are full-on police checkpoints most nights - Gangs of 30+ federal agents roam DC - National Guard folks w/ guns patrolling a Harris Teeter - Every day, multiple friends see ICE kidnapping ppl - Daycares are scared to have kids go on walks due to ICE

It's my experience (from 25 yrs of teaching) that "learning management" tools like Canvas do nothing to facilitate student learning & make my job MORE, not less, time consuming. That additional time I put in contributes zero to improving the student experience. But Canvas gets our money regardless.

Well, I'll be damned. It's royalty free and there's already six, generic manufacturers lined up. newatlas.com/infectious-d...

The 'bubble' is definitely the wrong metaphor for this whole thing. Even if the stock values slide, the hype dissipates and the headlines vanish, there will still be a massive energy hunger locked in, along with a swathe of new fossil infrastructure projects that'll stick around for decades

Just for perspective, a few weeks ago roughly 100,000 turned up for the London Trans+ Pride march. By contrast fewer than 3,000 ACROSS THE WHOLE COUNTRY, have turned up to anti-asylum "protests". Yet we are meant to take the latter as "the voice of the people" and the former as "the minority".

This is the same in any field, and it’s why the current academic funding model of only funding “the best” is fundamentally flawed. The groundbreaking studies rely on mountains of smaller studies which assiduously build up a field to the point that the major works can be made

Tim Curry on the set of The Three Musketeers (1993), in costume as Cardinal Richelieu, holding an original GameBoy.

HEY friends: recently seen heaps of "disclosures" from AI companies of the energy cost per question you type into chatbots (most recently from Google)? Presenting per-query 'efficiency' is part of big tech's efforts to hide its extremely real and happening-right-now climate impacts! NEW POST -->>>

"our 4-level guide for gradual engagement: a) foundation; b) growth, adopting low-cost, easily implementable practices; c) community, contributing to open-science communities through actionable steps; d) leadership, taking on leadership roles or forming local communities to foster cultural change"

Light pollution is causing birds around the world to sing for longer each day, prolonging their vocalizations on average by 50 minutes, according to a new study in Science. Learn more: https://scim.ag/3Uz7vzP

Showing children of the future the unacceptable hair rendering on the left to explain why we had to get rid of the rainforest.

{truffle} is an R package for teaching users to process data. Semi-realistic psychological datasets with predetermined effects (via `truffles_` functions) are then hidden in common data processing headaches (via `dirt_` functions) for students to clean and analyze. mmmdata.io/posts/2025/0...

Relatedly I think journalism could maybe use stronger professional style norms around not anthropomorphizing the computer systems we report on/reference in our writing.

The ManyTones project is looking for several lead positions. See poster for details. 📢📣✨ Get involved! 🎉🤝🌟

Look upon your works, ye pundits, and despair

The heartbreaking thing about this is that there’s already a proven way to invest lots of money in a knowledge machine that produces unforeseeable results that include fantastically profitable ideas (and some life-saving ones) and generally benefit society and this machine is called a university