Just deleted my account academia.edu

Very happy to see this out. Use of LLMs to simulate study participants is something we'll see increasingly, if we want it or not. This paper is a super helpful guide to understand the impact of seemingly minor or unimportant decisions while doing so!

HEY GUYS Let's take money from basic science and use give it the outcome of basic science 🤡 #NZGovtAntiScience www.nzherald.co.nz/business/ret...

Another day, another hour debugging BioConductor install problems. Just why? #R

Realised I'd been searching for 'stochastic character napping" rather than '*m*apping'. I'm so confused I need a nap now.

Happy to see that all of DeGruyter's journals link clearly to "Safety and product resources". Handy to have this so accessible in case, I don't know, you get a paper cut while flipping through the journal. #academicpublishing

From the archive. A biological anthropologist reflects on how scientific research can be used to reaffirm or undermine Indigenous land ties in Argentina. Read more: www.sapiens.org/biology/anci...

what is this garbage? www.reviewer3.com

We are delighted to announce that the CES2026 conference website is now live! We invite you to submit your presentation proposals using the link on the webpage, deadline November 16th: airess.fgses-um6p.ma/ces2026

Presentation submissions are open until November 16, with four submission formats: standard talks (15-20 minutes), lightning talks (5 minutes), poster presentations, and thematic sessions.

The count down starts for #CESRabat! Follow @ces2026.bsky.social and join us May 11-13 next year for an exciting meeting in Rabat, Morocco. Massive thanks to the #CESRabat organising committee: Sarah Alami (co-chair) Mathieu Charbonneau (co-chair) Zachary Garfield Edmond Seabright

The thought police are running the universities. Shame on you @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I'm reminiscing on how lectures used to be (instead of revising mine for next month)

Hypothesis: You can tell how old an academic is by the number of FarSide cartoons they are familiar with.

Lovely memoriam for Bill Labov by @betsysneller.bsky.social Death to the enemies of sound change! www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour...

@roopekaaronen.net saw this and thought of you. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

More cuts to the Marsden Fund of @royalsocietynz.bsky.social. This takes it down to $10/capita in real terms when it was over $16 for most of this century. Australia's equivalent, the ARC, is NZ$42/capita, as is the US NSF (despite ongoing attempts to gut the latter). www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

Context: this knocks back Marsden funding levels next year a whole two decades to (inflation adjusted) the same level funding as the 2005 Budget.

Applied research is digging for gold, basic research is figuring out where to dig. Marsden used to fund it all. Each grant is rigorously assessed in 2 rounds by a panel of local & international experts. It is risky research, with potentially high rewards.

🤬

The Sudden Surges That Forge Evolutionary Trees www.quantamagazine.org/the-sudden-s...

Genomic imputation can boost dataset quality and benefit research on wild populations. In hihi, we found high #imputation accuracies despite a small reference panel of high-fecundity individuals. Imputation improves downstream #ConservationGenomics analyses. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Did you catch news that the Universities Advisory Group (UAG) reports were released, but the government binned or balked on many of the key recommendations? The whole process went from shelved to buried yesterday morning. www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/2025/09/03/u...

I got bored with the tired old tree visualisations you see everywhere and asked an AI to make me an exciting one. Here is the Uto-Aztecan language phylogeny visualised in what it calls "space jellyfish" mode. #phylogenetics #spacejellyfish

EPFL, @ethz.ch and the @cscsch.bsky.social released Apertus today, Switzerland’s first large-scale, open, multilingual language model — a milestone in generative AI for transparency and diversity. Find out more here: ai.epfl.ch/apertus-a-fu... @abosselut.bsky.social @icepfl.bsky.social

Great new paper: Patterns of genetic admixture reveal similar rates of borrowing across diverse scenarios of language contact #linguistics #language www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Thrilled to share our new paper out in BMC, part of my postdoc at @cornellvet.bsky.social! 🐘🐀 We found that larger mammals evolve more diverse morphologies, while smaller ones can explore many locomotor strategies without much change to their forelimbs. bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

I am delighted to report that the following paper, written by my former team at Microsoft, has been published in PNAS. Echoes in AI: Quantifying lack of plot diversity in LLM outputs. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New paper! ⚡ With Gabriel Aguirre and Marcelo Sánchez, looking at patterns of blowgun types and use across societies of the world. We find areal patterns, similarities mediated by cultural connections, and specific types characterizing distinct branches of the Austronesian language tree. 🎯

I should be revising a paper right now but instead I'm just going to spend the morning being mad about this. It's basically everything that should worry us as scientists about the incorporation of LLMs into our field in one place, and I fear that it's a microcosm of things to come.

A study of 48 languages shows "fundamental stability" in intonation units across languages, people, age groups suggesting these play a central role in structuring human communication. "A universal of speech timing: Intonation units form low-frequency rhythms" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

"The Cultural Macroevolution of Arcade Video Games: Innovation, Collaboration, and Collapse" #gaming https://doi.org10.1017/ehs.2025.10015

as a Greek specialist I’m not ever going to be able to not mentally translate ORCiD as ‘testicle’ I hate my brain sometimes

Large Language Models underestimate moral differences across societies: "The tested models seem to propagate a homogenized view on cross-cultural moral values, identifying most topics as cross-culturally agreed on as more morally acceptable than empirically observed." arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21319

Hmm... Corded Ware and Bell Beaker traditions do not match Steppe ancestries. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🧠 Want to integrate cultural evolution into your course using award winning materials created by the field's experts, and get paid $2000 to do it? 💵 🚨 The Cultural Evolution Society is seeking applications for the ACE Teaching Innovation Awards. 🔖 Apply here: vuw.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Gee, I wonder where the latest round of R&D cuts puts NZ now? Govt must be long overdue in report R&D spend to the OECD. #nzgov

The growing body of evidence showing children actively maximise the learning affordances in their surroundings - and that optimal input changes dramatically depending on developmental level - is a potential game changer for intervention approaches.

New in @science.org : 20+ AI scholars—inc. @alondra.bsky.social @randomwalker.bsky.social @sanmikoyejo.bsky.social et al, lay out a playbook for evidence-based AI governance. Without solid data, we risk both hype and harm. Thread 👇

#OnThisDay in 1858, a seminal journal article comprised of papers by Alfred Russel Wallace FRS and Charles Darwin FRS on the theory of evolution by natural selection was published by the Linnean Society, the first public announcement of the theory of evolution. bit.ly/3k8fq4u

#NZGovt is trying to compete with the USA in "who can ruin science" stakes. www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

Herzog & Demps argue for the role of adversity in shaping the human adaptive niche onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

"Ditch Bishop and Bell. Stand up for the workforce" #anu @nteunion.bsky.social www.canberratimes.com.au/story/904099...

Halt all work. I have found something that I need to read right now.

Cybernetics was cutting edge about the same time as Don Draper was.

The core role of the university in society is the generational transmission of knowledge and rare skills. This has been already long forgotten by administrators who have prioritised rebranding universities as publicly-funded job-training centres in recent decades.

So happy that this paper lead by Joseph Mine is finally out! Was cool to be part of this project on the social learning of multi-modal communication in chimpanzees, which is slightly outside of my usual scope (and it’s my first co-authored paper too, yay!) :) journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

📣 Interested in cultural evolution and artificial life? Call for abstracts for our upcoming workshop at @alife2025.bsky.social. Accepted abstracts will be presented as flash talks, and are not archival. Deadline is the September 12, w/ rolling acceptance. Details: sites.google.com/view/planetx... 🧪

@gralefrit.bsky.social You have to see these! A friend of mine has been collating a series of images entitled "Things my students have written turned into Philomena Cunk quotes" and they're just glorious.