James A Campbell
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rtbecard.bsky.social
James A Campbell
@rtbecard.bsky.social
(he/him) Former bird dude, current fish guy; currently based in Berlin. I'm into ecology, stats, bioacoustics, and artificial light.

Currently working as part of this ETN: https://www.msca-ribes.eu/
Pinned
New #FishSci #AcousticTelemetry positioning paper: PMC-TOA positioning.

I used adaptive importance sampling & mixture distributions to position fish in environments prone to tag reflections. Mixed with post-processing, this gives great tracks!

doi.org/10.1111/2041...
Reposted by James A Campbell
Bluetorial-Jim Watson

I met Jim Watson a few times but did not know him well. However, I was greatly influenced by his book “The Double Helix”. He was a complicated human being with some very, very bad features, but some good contributions.

What follows is my personal perspective.

1/41
a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on
ALT: a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on
media.tenor.com
November 8, 2025 at 1:58 PM
Does anyone have a gift link to this Atlantic article?

(And yes, i'm aware of the irony of asking for a gift link so I can read an article about bypassing article paywalls)
The Company Quietly Funneling Paywalled Articles to AI Developers
“You shouldn’t have put your content on the internet if you didn’t want it to be on the internet,” Common Crawl’s executive director says.
www.theatlantic.com
November 5, 2025 at 5:31 PM
Want to give a shout-out to Pollock et al. (2014) 👇.

I'm learning JSDMs right now, and this is an absolute gold-tier introductory article: Concise, inclusively written (wrt non-stats readers), and covers all the fundamental math. #rstats #sdm

What an absolute joy to read!
Understanding co‐occurrence by modelling species simultaneously with a Joint Species Distribution Model (JSDM)
A primary goal of ecology is to understand the fundamental processes underlying the geographic distributions of species. Two major strands of ecology – habitat modelling and community ecology – ap...
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
October 9, 2025 at 1:30 PM
Is anyone old enough to remember how videogame piracy protection worked in like 1994? On my Amiga, to play "Indiana jones", I had to open the instruction manual to the stated page and read off a code.

This is basically how the "new" 2-factor authentication works at Freie University (Berlin) now...
September 29, 2025 at 9:23 AM
Reposted by James A Campbell
Congrats CD on your well-earned achievement!

(This is _actually_ on the "journal" website)

\(〇_o)/
September 27, 2025 at 1:12 PM
Has anyone heard of "The Egyptian Journal of Remote Sensing and Space Sciences"... reviewing job applications and this journal came up at least twice...

Is this a sketchy predatory journal? Or is it a legit remote sensing journal with a weirdly specific name?

#GIS
September 25, 2025 at 10:39 AM
Reposted by James A Campbell
Elon Musk has damaged science in the U.S., and here he is this weekend undermining democracy in the U.K.

Yet @royalsociety.org still has him as a Fellow.

If "a Fellowship of the world's most eminent scientists" doesn't stand up to fascism, something is very, very wrong.
Elon Musk, "There's got to be a change of government in Britain"

"We don't have another four years or whenever your next election is, it's too long, something has got to be done"

"There has got to be a dissolution of parliament and a new vote held"
September 15, 2025 at 10:30 AM
Just discovered the subreddit r/AdamDriverCats
September 9, 2025 at 12:24 PM
Reposted by James A Campbell
This should be the lead story in all major national news outlets. Public health people prefer to stay out of the limelight unless there is no other choice. I can’t overstate how bad things have to be for 9 former CDC directors to band together and pen an op-ed in the NYT warning the entire country.
9 CDC Directors going back to 1977 speak out. What RFK Jr has done to our nation’s public health system "should alarm every American."

It "is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
Opinion | We Ran the C.D.C.: Kennedy Is Endangering Every American’s Health
www.nytimes.com
September 1, 2025 at 11:51 AM
Reposted by James A Campbell
RFK Jr: We need to stop trusting the experts... Trusting the experts is not a feature of science or democracy, it's a feature of religion and totalitarianism.
August 29, 2025 at 7:57 PM
My google newsfeed was already like 90% grocery store tabloids... But now it's AI boosted grocery store tabloid trash 😮‍💨
August 25, 2025 at 3:27 PM
Reposted by James A Campbell
My lab's been attacked by an anti-wind group and their lawyers. They threatened the science funding of my whole university, to shut me and my undergraduate research assistants up.

NYT just covered it. 1/n

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...
Law Firm Pressures Brown University to Erase Research on Anti-Wind Groups
www.nytimes.com
August 25, 2025 at 11:32 AM
Didn't read the article... But this plot seems to validate my negative opinion of Elsevier.

*Note the sample sizes are quite small here
Huge variability documented in how publishers respond when informed about a problematic body of work by a research group. www.jclinepi.com/article/S089...
#publishers #retractions
August 24, 2025 at 4:01 PM
Reposted by James A Campbell
New York Times story with profiles of researchers whose grants were terminated.

[Gift Link]

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/24/o...
Opinion | America First? Not When It Comes to Your Health.
www.nytimes.com
August 24, 2025 at 1:08 PM
Reposted by James A Campbell
Great analysis of Macedo and Lee's "In Covid's Wake," revealing it to be cherry-picked storytelling that is often disconnected from evidence. Their institutional affiliation doesn’t make any of their arguments more true 🎁

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
COVID Revisionism Has Gone Too Far
If the center and left succumb to the view that “nothing worked,” no one will remain to defend sensible public-health measures the next time a pandemic comes around.
www.theatlantic.com
August 23, 2025 at 9:34 PM
Theres a new multi-disciplinary journal launching: stacks.

It aims for more streamlined, transparent and generally better peer review.

You can register to be a reviewer below 👇

Can we give this a shot and support ppl trying to improve our awful publishing systems?

#academiclife #fishsci #fishsky
Our Unique Peer Review | Stacks Journal
Learn and grow as a researcher, advance your reputation, and contribute to your field through our unique collaborative peer review.
stacksjournal.org
August 23, 2025 at 7:08 PM
"And while some thinkpieces argue that Bluesky is bad because many of the users there are politically liberal, I don’t care about this, because I don’t use social media to argue with strangers about politics. I use social media to talk about fish"
“Twitter sucks now and all the cool kids are moving to Bluesky:” Our new survey shows that scientists no longer find Twitter professionally useful or pleasant
My colleague Dr. Julia Wester and I have a new paper out in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology reporting on the results of a survey distributed to over 800 scientists, science educator…
www.southernfriedscience.com
August 22, 2025 at 8:22 PM
Reposted by James A Campbell
Turn off AI in search results. I just did this in Chrome and it works.
tenbluelinks.org#chrome-windows
How to Turn Off Google AI Overview and Set "Web" as Default
tenbluelinks.org
August 17, 2025 at 11:45 PM
I just learned about nightshade: A filter for images that "poisons" AI training by passing misleading feature information.

#rstats does anyone know if this also works on plots?

I'd be very happy to put this on figures in papers if it means AI has a harder time scraping my work.
Nightshade: Protecting Copyright
Since their arrival, generative AI models and their trainers have demonstrated their ability to download any online content for model training. For content owners and creators, few tools can prevent their content from being fed into a generative AI model against their will. Opt-out lists have been disregarded by model trainers in the past, and can be easily ignored with zero consequences. They are unverifiable and unenforceable, and those who violate opt-out lists and do-not-scrape directives can not be identified with high confidence.
nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu
August 10, 2025 at 8:43 PM
Reposted by James A Campbell
Just got a 🧪pitch from a PR claiming to work with Colossal (de-extinction chancers). It was a pre-written article claiming the science sector is carrying out "coordinated attacks" on the co. Spy the headline. They asked if I'd publish it on my Forbes column.

Not enough eye rolls on Earth for this 🙄
August 10, 2025 at 7:55 AM
Reposted by James A Campbell
If a scholar of petro-masculinity said that men lust for coal, it would be seen as an exaggeration. But here we are...
August 1, 2025 at 1:12 AM
Reposted by James A Campbell
🧪🦣🏺 Who wants to hear a story about biotech billions, unscientific claims, and shoddy smear tactics attacking women in science*?

Thread 🧵

*which, for legal clarity, are totally denied as being connected
Academics who have questioned the validity of efforts to “de-extinct” animals like the woolly mammoth and the dire wolf have complained of an apparent campaign to discredit them.
Critics of de-extinction research hit by mystery smear campaign
Several researchers who have been critical of Colossal Biosciences’ plans to revive extinct animals say they have been targeted by online articles trying to discredit them
www.newscientist.com
August 1, 2025 at 2:01 PM
Reposted by James A Campbell
4,000 NASA workers are leaving through deferred resignation. "The cuts amount to an estimated 20% of NASA's workforce" www.npr.org/2025/07/26/n...
Nearly 4,000 NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program
The employees who have chosen to leave the agency amount to about 20% of NASA's workforce.
www.npr.org
July 28, 2025 at 8:15 PM
Reposted by James A Campbell
Why I didn't retract this paper when I was Editor-in-Chief at Science (THREAD 🧵)
Science is retracting the December 2010 Research Article, “A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus.” (THREAD 🧵) scim.ag/4lGQ9g7
July 27, 2025 at 11:48 AM
Does anybody have a podcast recommendation for a technical overview of convolutional neural networks and transformer models?

Something to serve as a primer before jumping into the primary literature, aimed at scientists?

#deeplearning
July 27, 2025 at 10:52 AM