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shaaznerd.bsky.social
Dr Trash Panda
@shaaznerd.bsky.social
180 followers 380 following 110 posts
Queer scientist
Invertebrates bring joy
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schooley.bsky.social
Writing about Elon Musk’s pay package without leading with this is like profiling John Wayne Gacy’s booming party clown career.
newyorker.com The New Yorker @newyorker.com · 11d
One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc
The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands
The short documentary “Rovina’s Choice” tells the story of what goes when aid goes.
newyorkermag.visitlink.me
November 7, 2025 at 2:44 AM
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olivia.science
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
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM
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jonbois.bsky.social
i see you're doing something online that you have effortlessly done 100,000 times. would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? w
October 20, 2025 at 2:38 PM
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moiradonegan.bsky.social
Political parties must shift immediately and dramatically to the left to avoid alienating these frustrated and abandoned young women. Am I doing this right?
19thnews.org 19thnews @19thnews.org · Oct 18
Our recent poll found that women 28 and younger skew substantially more left than the national average. Nearly 80 percent of Gen Z women want abortion to be legal and seven in 10 want gender-affirming care to be accessible for trans adults.
Gen Z women are the most liberal group in the country
On issues like abortion and gender-affirming care, women 28 and younger skew substantially more left than the national average.
19thnews.org
October 18, 2025 at 11:07 PM
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erinbiba.bsky.social
All you have to do is look at the first post of all of these accounts to see THEY ARE HERE TO TROLL. Don’t take the bait.

bsky.app/profile/did:...
October 17, 2025 at 11:49 PM
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wolvendamien.bsky.social
We. Told. You. So. But also, that "May Rely" in the significance section ( 👇🏾 ) is *way* too… let's go with "generous;" lexical associations and statistical priors are what these systems are literally made of, and all that they do. Literally. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Screenshot of text reading: Significance Large Language Models (LLMs) are used in evaluative tasks across domains. Yet, what appears as alignment with human or expert judgments may conceal a deeper shift in how “judgment” itself is operationalized. Using news outlets as a controlled benchmark, we compare six LLMs to expert ratings and human evaluations under an identical, structured framework. While models often match expert outputs, our results suggest that they may rely on lexical associations and statistical priors rather than contextual reasoning or normative criteria. We term this divergence epistemia: the illusion of knowledge emerging when surface plausibility replaces verification. Our findings suggest not only performance asymmetries but also a shift in the heuristics underlying evaluative processes, raising fundamental questions about delegating judgment to LLMs.
October 17, 2025 at 7:23 PM
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brucemackay.bsky.social
Hi #PortfolioDay

Im Bruce, an illustrator, creative director & printmaker based in Cape Town, RSA. Big fan of old goofy SFF covers & forced perspective and experimentation. Nice to meet you :)

ILLO: www.instagram.com/bad_manifesto
FA: www.instagram.com/oombruce
Digital illustration of an old village lane. Choppy shapes and overlapping oranges and blues. Digital illustration of a guy in a "modern apartment full of art and plans. he's liking out the floor-to-ceiling window at the sunrise and eating cake off a plate. This was an old style test for MUTI. Choppy shapes of overlapping yellow, blue and pink. Digital illustration of a hazy sepia toned kitchen with a silhouetted being sitting at the table next to some dead flowers. This was an old style test for MUTI. Digital illustration of a The Lord OF The Rings cover. A Nazgûl sits astride its horse between 2 red trees that make a circle. Int he background is Weathertop, the Misty Mountains and Orodruin. Overlapping risk colours - red, teal and yellow. Some mushrooms in the foreground.
October 14, 2025 at 11:21 AM
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shannonrosa.bsky.social
I went on CNN's One Thing podcast last week, talking about how absurd & ass-backwards last week's White House Big Autism Announcement was. But as not everyone listens to podcasts, here's a thread of the conversation:

www.cnn.com/audio/podcas...

#autism #TylenolDoesNotCauseAutism #neurodiversity 1/
Are You a Bad Mom for Taking Tylenol? - CNN One Thing - Podcast on CNN Podcasts
Major medical groups are speaking out against claims made by President Donald Trump linking Tylenol use to autism. So where should pregnant people and parents of autistic children turn for guidance? W...
www.cnn.com
September 29, 2025 at 9:39 PM
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scarleteen.com
Adam England is back to talk about bi erasure, what it looks like outside of the celebrity world, and how to cope with it in your own life if you're someone who identifies as bi.
www.scarleteen.com/read/ident...
Text: "It's another installment of Adam England's series for bisexual guys! Hi, Bi Guy: Dealing with Bi Erasure at Scarleteen," with a number 2 pencil eraser's debris atop the text.
October 1, 2025 at 7:10 PM
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bookishdi.bsky.social
anyway, reminder that Brando Sando is a mormon in good standing aka he tithes 10% of his income to a church that just announced they filed a brief saying that protecting trans rights infringes on their religious freedom ✌️
reactorsff.bsky.social Reactor Magazine @reactorsff.bsky.social · Sep 30
We are THRILLED to reveal the gorgeous cover for Isles of the Emberdark, a new Cosmere novel from none other than Brandon Sanderson, arriving February 3, 2026 from Tor Books

reactormag.com/cover-reveal...
Revealing Isles of the Emberdark, a New Standalone in the Cosmere Universe by Brandon Sanderson - Reactor
Sanderson's new novel navigates the seas and the stars of a far-future Cosmere...
reactormag.com
September 30, 2025 at 8:59 PM
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saimihanma.bsky.social
We have one writer unable to participate in this, is there a writer out there who would like to take their place and partner with an artist to create something for our InverteFest invertebrate anthology?

Please reply here if you're interested.

Details below.
#InverteFest is a periodic event where we invite you to celebrate the overlooked invertebrate fauna around you and share the joys of discovery online. Enter your details to be paired with an artist or writer to work on a collaborative piece for the InverteFest Anthology. Each partner group will have one artist and one writer. It's up to each pair to decide what to create We need one artwork and one written piece no longer than 3,000 words The art and writing can complement each other, or be combined, like in a comic for example The finished work can be fiction, nonfiction, poetry and any type of visual art that can be reproduced in a PDF ebook Invertebrates can be fictional Once everyone has a partner, you'll have 3 months to submit your collaboration (probably by the end of 2025)
September 28, 2025 at 4:36 PM
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wohyeahwohyeah.bsky.social
Timeline cleanser 🐈
September 26, 2025 at 5:37 PM
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aledthompson.bsky.social
Praying Mantis
Praying mantis side profile looking forward striking a pose
September 26, 2025 at 6:26 PM
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franzanth.bsky.social
We present: The Art of #InverteFest - August 2025 Edition
A digital art book showcasing the work of 100 artists from around the world, in celebration of overlooked invertebrate fauna.

Thank you to the artists who contributed to our book!

Download here drive.google.com/file/d/19wfG...

#Art #SciArt
a promo image showing various pages from the book, each page showcasing different animals like an orchid mantis, opabinia, a butterfly. the art featured shows a range of different medium, including digital, plushie, papercraft, 3D render, comic, and so on.
August 28, 2025 at 5:32 PM
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spoontaneous.bsky.social
Repost...

'Roundabout' ~ Wooden spoon carved in Sapele wood.

My intent was to have 'swirls' that would alternate around each circle but I wasn't clever enough to figure out how... so this came about instead.

#spoon #spoontaneous #art #craft #woodworking #wood #carving #woodenspoon #design 🥄
August 26, 2025 at 10:08 AM
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alisonfisk.bsky.social
Happy weekend!

Here’s a 3,500 year-old Minoan clay flask decorated with a spectacular wide-eyed octopus! 🐙😍

From Palaikastro, a Bronze Age settlement site on the island of Crete.

Heraklion Archaeological Museum. 📷 by me

#Archaeology
My photo shows the front of a warm-yellow coloured Minoan clay flask, hand painted in black with a frontally depicted octopus. The flask is 27 cm in height (about 10.5 inches). There’s a spout at the top with a small handle at either side. The octopus is swimming diagonally with writhing tentacles covering the whole surface of the flask. It stares out at the viewer with wide, almost cartoon-like eyes. Each of the eight writhing arms are lined with suckers. Between the tentacles are motifs representing the seabed, such as sea urchins, tritons and small rocks with seaweed. Minoan decoration depicting sea motifs is known by scholars as the ‘Marine Style’. The flask was excavated in 1903 at a Bronze Age settlement site at Palaikastro. The Palaikastro excavations, carried out between 1902 and 1906, were run by R. Bosanquet and R.M. Dawkins from the British School of Athens. The flask is dated c. 1500-1450 BC, the Late Minoan IB ceramic period. On display at Heraklion Archaeological Museum. NB it is currently out on loan.
August 23, 2025 at 12:40 PM
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johnxuandou.bsky.social
This is one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed, the craft here is impeccable.
August 13, 2025 at 6:06 AM
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dieworkwear.bsky.social
You should never follow any of these color charts. They are all stupid.

I'll show you why. 🧵
Someone on Twitter posted a color chart for how to combine different shirts and pants.
July 25, 2025 at 6:09 AM
shaaznerd.bsky.social
My father worked in the research arm of the EPA his whole scientific career. He taught me that the world is a beautiful place and the importance of public service.

All of this... just...
nytimes.com The New York Times @nytimes.com · Jul 18
Breaking News: The EPA said it would eliminate its scientific research arm and begin firing hundreds of scientists, after denying that it intended to do so.
E.P.A. Says It Will Eliminate Its Scientific Research Arm
The decision comes after a Supreme Court ruling allowing the Trump administration to slash the federal work force and dismantle agencies.
trib.al
July 18, 2025 at 11:31 PM
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xkcd.com
What if the moon turned into a black hole?

Watch the latest What If? video collaboration with @minuteearth.bsky.social!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQgw...
What if the moon turned into a black hole?
YouTube video by xkcd's What If?
www.youtube.com
July 10, 2025 at 4:38 AM
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pasteur.fr
🎶 Straight from the Lab to the Mic: when a Pasteur scientist turns her thesis into a rap 🎶
#FeteDeLaMusique
June 21, 2025 at 3:24 PM
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saimihanma.bsky.social
The US is spectacularly failing virtually every single one of the 30 basic human rights. And we're not the only country.

Not familiar with them? Let's review.

1. All human beings are free and equal

2. No discrimination

3. Right to life

4. No slavery

thehaguepeace.org/site/what-ar...
What are the 30 Human Rights? | The Hague Peace Projects
thehaguepeace.org
June 18, 2025 at 6:07 PM
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luckytran.com
LAPD fired rubber bullets at Australian journalist @laurentomasi.bsky.social
June 9, 2025 at 1:39 AM
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waynemaddison.bsky.social
Mesquite 4.beta2 released! Much faster reading of files with thousands of matrices. New features since 4.beta include Trace All Changes (known from MacClade) and Import GenBank Numbers. www.mesquiteproject.org & discuss at groups.google.com/g/mesquite-p...
‪@bembidion.bsky.social ‬🧪 #evolbio
Two icons of the Mesquite program, with leaves of the mesquite tree against a black background (first icon) and against the blue sky and sun (second icon).
June 8, 2025 at 5:27 PM