A worthwhile, and depressing, read.

I’ve no idea why but I have TONS of horseshoe crab art showing up. How delightful!

I quite like this viridis one.

Rep. Delia Ramirez to DHS officials: "I have as much respect for you as I do for the last white men who put on masks to terrorize communities of color. I have no respect for the inheritors of the Klanhood and the slave patrol. Those activities were criminal and so are yours."

Enter content title

Snakes!

www.gov.mb.ca/nrnd/fish-wi...

DAVE MATTHEWS: “I don’t want my taxes to pay for masked thugs to roam our streets & terrorize our communities... She was trying to get away. He shot her 3x in the head. Murdered in cold blood. They’re trying to tell us not to believe what we see. FUCK ICE.”

(H/T @marcofoster.bsky.social )

Some hope in the world, and animals send us a message of peace and play: when the big one respects the small one, it’s a win-win situation.

Last spring, I was asked to give carreer advice to grad students. And the one thing I told them was: our best skill is our ability to learn difficult things -- it's also the first skill you will lose unless you intentionally don't let yourselves go.

There are a lot of administrative activities I’d happily delegate but the thinking and learning? If that’s the part of your job you’re willing to farm out, go do something else. You’re taking a spot from someone.

Apparently the early peak is assumed in some fields but how sad is that?

One of the best things about my job is I get to keep learning new things and get better at the things I want to improve. (I also get to choose where I invest that effort which is an amazing luxury)

Poster advertising the inaugural Gordon Research Conference on Urban Evolution and Ecology held January 31-February 5, 2027 in Ventura Beach, California

We are pleased to announce the inaugural Gordon Research Conference on Urban Evolution and Ecology which will be held from Jan. 31 - Feb. 5, 2027. Please save the dates, and we look forward to welcoming you to beautiful Ventura Beach, California!

This is one of my wife and I's favorite movies. We watch it regularly. In addition to Rickman, every performance is amazing. Rockwell's "DO I?" and Weaver's "Hold please" get repeated far more often than they probably should.

a man in a suit and tie says you gotta pump those numbers up Alt: Character from Wolf of Wall Street says you gotta pump those numbers up

Email any European colleague. Guaranteed “On holiday until 10 Jan” automatic response.

I'm working on something that requires a lot of professional puffery. Unfortunately, I default to extreme self-deprecation and my colleague on the project is, well, Dutch.

I suspect the outcome might look something along the lines of:
"Dochtermann is just okay but we would really like the money"

Screen capture from The Simpsons of a newspaper headline: “Old man yells at cloud”

Accurate news reporting from yesterday’s joint lab meeting with @batsrkul.bsky.social‘s group.

POSITIONS default description

I am looking for a postdoc to work in our long-term system of food-caching mountain chickadees in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The expected start is April 2026. Please see details here: chickadeecognition.com/positions
If interested and qualified, please contact me directly (email on the website).

Absolutely, though I think there may also need to be a decision that you’re okay with an inability to distinguish between C level understanding and LLM output. Personally, I’ve never cared much about grades for their own sake but still…

I used to not use any of the online proctoring tools, I’m no cop, because my open ended questions meant I didn’t care if people were using outside resources. If an LLM gets you an okay grade though? Now we’re necessarily back to blue books.

I had been trying to adopt universal design approaches. However, given LLMs, I now think I have to move back to in person, paper and pen, for any exams. Similarly, LLM use is forcing a move back to other, more rigid, assessment methods.

Over the last two years I’ve seen “Yet, …” surge in use in place of “However, …”.

This seems increasingly the case regardless of field, publication, or country of author.

Is this LLM driven or just an emerging norm?

(I also don’t like it so it could be biased detection but I don’t think so)

Wombat architecture critics. Two wombats see a cube-shaped house and one comments: Well that looks like shit.

For the Aussies, the zoologists and the architects out there.

💩🧊🧪

By @chazhutton.com

Check footnote 7. Personally, the formula notation has always made a lot more sense to me than the tidyverse "pipes".

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

A lot of people are quoting this post and that's good because they should, AI sucks and robs us of something special and only mediocre uncreative piss-babies rely on it to make anything at all, fuck AI, p.s. Emma Thompson is now the president, sorry, that's just how it is

Hi folks, Any recommendations of dissecting scopes with digital cameras that are sufficient for insect (cricket) morphometrics and relatively inexpensive (<2000)?

Thanks!

I cannot believe our work is finally out there and in @journal-evo.bsky.social ! This was an enormous group effort!

We provide an updated estimate of the number of buzz pollinated angiosperm species, genera, and families, look at consequences for diversification, number of transitions, and more!

At my most recent stand up gig:

Chair trying to provide cover: I don’t think you’d be here getting an award if that was true.

Me: I didn’t say I was good at meeting my goals.

No laughs but I did get exasperated sighs, which is just as rewarding.

As folks get news about promotion and tenure, first, congrats!.

Second, some unsolicited advice: Chairs & Deans don’t like the joke “My goal now is to be dead wood”.

Solid lede for promotion seminars though.

Government style ad in watercolour. Image of a burglar stealing a painting from the wall of a home. Tagline: "It's not theft... if you say you're using it to train your AI algorithm". Body text: "Theft is now legal, so we can boost the economy by eliminating jobs. If that doesn't make any sense, ask a chatbot to explain it to you." HM government logo in the corner.

Did a new one