congratulations!

Alex is a huge loss - I miss him

Some inside baseball on the Curr Bio paper on Kea pecking orders, reported in the Times : the senior author of the research, cognitive scientist Alex Taylor, is in Barcelona rather than New Zealand because we failed to retain him

Database update 🌐 We launched a new version of CLICS 🚀 - the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications
clics.clld.org

The paper introducing the new version is available here: aclanthology.org/2025.iwcs-ma...

Utopia (Australian TV series) - Wikipedia

Have you seen Utopia? it's about a fictional Australian govt department but many of the storylines would displace neatly into academia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_...

Three cool scientists introduce their work "Our new theory has been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, but we feel its depths and intricacies are best appreciated on the limited-edition vinyl release."

My latest cartoon for @newscientist.com

Science-folks: If we run 100 experiments, we might find 1 or 2 of them may have results that can make many dollars.

NZ Govt: Excellent. We will fund those 1 or 2 experiments.

Heatmap showing phonological distances between Indo-European languages. Darker means more similar.

Phonological distances for linguistic typology and the origin of Indo-European languages

a "... significant correlation between phonological distance and geographic proximity"

arxiv.org/abs/2604.11565

CIPRES is shutting down at the end of June: www.phylo.org .

It's been such a good resource for the phylogenetics community. Thanks to #NSF and Simons for funding it and for all the people who have worked to grow and sustain this for so long.

I’ll be out standing in my field

a cow wearing a wig and a crown is standing in front of a neon background . ALT: a cow wearing a wig and a crown is standing in front of a neon background .

Wondering how I can write a grant application that inserts AI into cows to maximise chances of getting funded under the new NZ Science funding scheme. Thanks Govt.

Trait coevolution and causal inference using generalized dynamic phylogenetic models Phylogenetic comparative methods are widely used to study trait coevolution across biological and cultural domains. The most common methods are phylogenetic generalized linear (mixed) models, phyl...

Our paper on generalized dynamic phylogenetic models is finally out in MEE 🥳 The brainchild of @err-ring.bsky.social, GDPMs open up a vast new space for comparative studies on complex, coevolving traits, greatly aided by @scottclaessens.bsky.social's work on the accompanying R package. Check it out!

Please do -- it feels like the sector is being gutted by people who don't understand how science works and want to focus on shiny baubles (tech! AI!) at the expense of everything else.

#NZ Science funding policy

Science offers great benefits, but to get it you want to fund basic science as widely as you can, stably, not only "commercialise". You can later *add* support for focus topics, not at the expense of basic research.

This outlines similar concerns I have previously, 1/3

Cartoon depicts a scene in a science laboratory. 'GOVT REDIRECTS AGRI-SCIENCE FUNDING - NEWS' Lab worker male: "What does it say?" CHATBOT on a computer screen: "Take funds from labs and give them to tech." Lab worker female: "Our funding is gone."

Cuts to lab staff.... #FarmersWeeklyNZ #nzpol

Wow! I guess the next assignment is to email the editors to start retraction…

Truly one of the decisions of all time.

If the reviewers were overloaded, why not just make the applications more lightweight?

Now people spend months writing a B2 that no one reads, and may never get a shot at improving it. After 2 years an application idea is probably redundant, anyways.

There is a fully-funded PhD position at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology to pursue dissertation research among the Mayangna of Nicaragua, expanding a longitudinal study of subsistence strategies and behavioral ecology. Please share the posting!
www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...

TV and vhs tapes

This is what going on the internet used to feel like

I feel attacked

I didn't know that Peer Review meant ALIEN Peer review, but that definitely explains some reviews I've had.

In the footsteps of Linnaeus: scientists share their passion for species from tiny wasps to hairy plants – in pictures For his project ‘De Oförtrutna’ (The Relentless), photographer Christer Björkman pictured Swedish scientists working in the spirit of Carl Linneaus, the botanist who created the modern taxonomic syste...

This is lovely:
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

#science #biology

Interesting separation of the familial roles (man, woman, child) from the social roles (hunter etc)

Scientists left 'homeless' after government's job cuts, advocates say Cutbacks have led to the loss of about 700 roles and the withdrawal of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Scientists left 'homeless' after government's job cuts, advocates say

Not stupid. you could round to nearest int and try that. probably reduce signal but you’re already throwing away lots of that by visualising in 2d rather than in the embedding dims.

to collapse the dimensions? the embedding will be numeric vectors not categorical vectors.

congratulations @maisyhallam.bsky.social !

should be better than a wordcloud as distances between words will be proportional.

calculate embeddings and plot them using PCA or T-SNE: you'll get more contextual information.

www.rnz.co.nz/news/busines...