Emily Rollinson
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ejrollinson.bsky.social
Emily Rollinson
@ejrollinson.bsky.social
1.2K followers 430 following 160 posts
Associate Prof, Biology | Pennsylvania, USA | generalist ecology, facultative rstats, obligate botanist | data coroner | Lenni-Lenape land | she/her
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Reposted by Emily Rollinson
nicrawlencenz.bsky.social
The wonderful people at the NZ Science Learning Hub have turned my talk on MythBusting de-extinction to sort fact from fiction into a freely available educational resource. You can check it out here www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/my...
Mythbusting de-extinction to sort fact from fiction
De-extinction hit the headlines recently with the ‘resurrection’ of the dire wolf and the push to bring back the moa. However, can scientists really bring back extinct animals? And more importantly, s...
www.sciencelearn.org.nz
November 18, 2025 at 9:47 PM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
milanchytry.bsky.social
Our new paper in Ecology Letters, led by Jan Divíšek, shows that non-invasive alien plant species that successfully establish within local plant communities tend to resemble the resident native species. In contrast, invasive alien species usually differ from native plants.
doi.org/10.1111/ele....
November 10, 2025 at 7:26 PM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
jbyoder.org
The concluding sentence of this paper's abstract is the absolute prototype of Big Academic Energy

"In this paper I settle the matter once and for all, by showing which elements of each side are correct."
November 11, 2025 at 12:12 AM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
isabelott.bsky.social
the year i’m having
meme of sisyphus pushing the boulder uphill and a photoshopped on green pentatomid captioned “one must imagine sisyphus finding a very cool bug under the rock”
November 5, 2025 at 6:55 PM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
astrokatie.com
When a chatbot gets something wrong, it’s not because it made an error. It’s because on that roll of the dice, it happened to string together a group of words that, when read by a human, represents something false. But it was working entirely as designed. It was supposed to make a sentence & it did.
June 19, 2025 at 11:28 AM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
astrokatie.com
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
June 19, 2025 at 11:21 AM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
ecoinvasions.bsky.social
Another island extinction likely caused by invasive species.

Quote: "Perhaps somewhere, a small furtive family of shrews are hanging on, elusive survivors, secure in the knowledge of their own existence and waiting to prove the pessimists wrong."
news.mongabay.com/short-articl...
Christmas Island shrew officially declared extinct: IUCN
The Christmas Island shrew, a tiny mammal once found only on the Australian island of the same name, has been declared officially extinct. It’s at least the fourth small mammal species to be wiped out...
news.mongabay.com
October 23, 2025 at 1:00 PM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
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
ejrollinson.bsky.social
That feeling when you teach in Pennsylvania, or possibly the ornithologist was in here today
“Go Birds!!!” Written huge on a lecture hall chalkboard
October 1, 2025 at 7:27 PM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
jamieheather.bsky.social
A nice reminder that even the most fundamental 'rules' of biology are basically just strong suggestions
September 3, 2025 at 3:50 PM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
americanbeetles.bsky.social
yeah okay I can get behind Sword Chickadee
a child's (?) hand-drawn submission for new MA state flag, depicting what I believe is a boreal chickadee holding aloft a starry sword
August 25, 2025 at 2:30 PM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
jacobtlevy.bsky.social
The fact that the thing we're calling artificial intelligence *can't do math* and yet we're jamming it into programs that successfully *have done math* for decades, then warning people against using the AI to do math, seems like an excellent summary of where we are.
ketanjoshi.co Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · Aug 19
Good thing no one uses Microsoft Excel for anything related to legal, regulatory or compliance business functions

www.theverge.com/news/761338/...
Microsoft Excel adds Copilot Al to help ... theverge.com The Verget-4.1-mini Al model | 5 successor to the LABS.GENERATIVEAI function Microsoft started experimenting with in 2023. Microsoft notes that you can combine its new Al function with other Excel functions, including IF, SWITCH, LAMBDA, or WRAPROWS. The company adds that information sent through Excel's COPILOT function is "never" used for AI training, as "the input remains confidential and is used solely to generate your requested output." The COPILOT function comes with a couple of limitations, as it can't access information outside your spreadsheet, and you can only use it to calculate 100 functions every 10 minutes. Microsoft also warns against using the AI function for numerical calculations or in “high-stakes scenarios” with legal, regulatory, and compliance implications, as COPILOT "can give incorrect responses." Copy Share Select all Web search Dictionary ...
August 19, 2025 at 6:09 PM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
mossworm.bsky.social
it took one (1) question for the amazing new agentic LLM iChatBio to start fabricating data out of nothing. I asked for a list of clam shrimp in Florida, and it skipped a whole genus. when I told it that it was missing one, it confidently replied that Cyzicus also lives in Florida (it doesn't).
I ask: "how many species of clam shrimp are in florida" ichatbio answers: "You’d like to know how many species of clam shrimp (order Diplostraca, suborder Laevicaudata, Cyclestherida, or Spinicaudata) are found in Florida. I will search occurrence record databases for the count of unique clam shrimp species reported in Florida." ichatbio: According to iDigBio, there are 47 unique scientific names under the order Diplostraca (which includes clam shrimp and related groups) recorded in Florida, based on 524 records. This count may include both clam shrimp and other related taxa (like water fleas). If you'd like, I can filter the list to show only known clam shrimp species or provide the full list for your review. me: show only clam shrimp ichatbio:Thank you for your request to see only clam shrimp species (typically families Limnadiidae, Lynceidae, and Cyzicidae). I will extract and filter the species-level names to include only recognized clam shrimp taxa recorded in Florida. ichatbio lists: eulimnadia diversa, lynceus gracilicornis, eulimnadia insularis, eulimnadia astraova, eulimnadia texana, and limnadia lenticularis. it's missing genus Paralimnetis. me: you are missing a genus ichatbio: Thank you for pointing that out. You are correct that my previous filter included only the genera Eulimnadia, Lynceus, and Limnadia. There is another clam shrimp genus known from Florida: Cyzicus. Would you like me to include Cyzicus in the filtered list and provide updated results for clam shrimp species recorded in Florida? me: cyzicus is not found in florida ichatbio: Thank you for clarifying—Cyzicus is not found in Florida, so it shouldn’t appear in a Florida clam shrimp list. If you believe another genus is missing from the clam shrimp genera known in Florida, could you specify which one? Otherwise, based on iDigBio records and typical literature, the genera Eulimnadia, Lynceus, and Limnadia are the main clam shrimp genera documented in Florida. If you’d like, I can attempt to extract any other candidate genera from the occurrence records or check for further synonymies. Please let me know how you’d like to proceed!
August 19, 2025 at 1:47 AM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
elizhargrave.bsky.social
Write-up of a college course where the final project involved making a Wingspan card!
Board Game BiologyUsing Wingspan in an Undergraduate First-Year Seminar Course
We describe the use of the popular board game Wingspan in a first-year seminar course at an undergraduate liberal arts institution. We discuss implementation of the game in the classroom, classroom ac...
online.ucpress.edu
August 16, 2025 at 9:43 PM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
thiagokrause.bsky.social
As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview.
cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...
August 14, 2025 at 1:24 AM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
drmikewiser.bsky.social
Heads up 🧪science folks. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to generate some examples of issues in how Chat-GPT 5.0 answers intro bio type things. I'll stick at least some of them here in a thread so you're free to use them, rather than having to waste resources asking it stuff we know it gets wrong
August 15, 2025 at 7:55 PM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
yair-rosenberg.bsky.social
I wrote about how AI chatbots are pumping out fake quotes, attributed to real people, at scale, and polluting our public disourse with potemkin pontification and made-up appeals to authority. And the AIs are not just misquoting famous people—it happened to me and it could happen to you. Gift link:
Don’t Believe What AI Told You I Said
The chatbots are lying about me.
www.theatlantic.com
August 15, 2025 at 5:34 PM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
carlzimmer.com
Yesterday I discovered that ChatGPT's PhD-level expertise didn't extend to bird anatomy. This morning I thought, perhaps I was being too hard on the half-trillion-dollar company. Birds are a little weird, anatomically speaking. Let's try something more familiar. A mammal. Behold.
August 14, 2025 at 2:16 PM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
vermivorax.bsky.social
Had to try this out with insects and HOO BOY is this embarrassing.
ChatGPT's response to the prompt "Create a detailed diagram of generalized insect external anatomy, labelling all the major anatomical features such as body regions, mouthparts, and leg segments." It produced a scientific-esque drawing of a wasp-like creature with various incorrect labels. "Compound eye" points to the labrum, "mandible" points to the labial palps, maxilla points to the front tarsi, palpus points to the front pretarsus, coxa and trochanter point to the same on a very deformed middle leg, femur also points to a tarsus, tibia points to the hind pretarsus, head points to the thorax, and thorax points to the wings. The only accurate label is for the abdomen, and then a "cuticle" label that points to the end of the abdomen, which is technically sort of correct but misleading, as the cuticle covers the entire body.
August 15, 2025 at 12:02 PM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
gwyllm.bsky.social
Watch Out!
August 11, 2025 at 4:38 AM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
birdhistory.bsky.social
It seems like my main problem is that ornithologists are just really lazy at counting
August 4, 2025 at 3:23 PM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
evornithology.bsky.social
Me making small talk at the function
July 15, 2025 at 5:59 PM
Reposted by Emily Rollinson
jrmorber.bsky.social
If you too got the weird promotional email from the US Social Security administration celebrating that SS would not be taxed, I am sorry to inform you that this was lies.
July 4, 2025 at 4:53 PM