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Reposted by K.D. Murray

Professor Euan Ritchie @euanritchie.bsky.social · 3d

Australia's much loved wildlife and places sorely need greater care and legal protection.

Our latest for @aunz.theconversation.com.

theconversation.com/labor-is-clo... With good friends and colleagues, @drphilmccormack.bsky.social & @yungenchee.bsky.social.

Labor is close to a deal on environmental law reforms. There are troubling signs these will fall short

Labor is close to a deal on its environmental law reforms. Will they strong enough to protect nature?

theconversation.com

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Stuart McDaniel @stuartmcdaniel.bsky.social · 3d

Lingua wanka is a hilarious moniker for scientific writing

Marc Somssich @somssich.bsky.social · 3d

Fantastic editorial on #ScientificWriting. 👇

Malick Mbengue @malick-mbengue.bsky.social · 3d

I wished I could have written something like this. Rude, fun and meaningful.
static1.squarespace.com/static/686d9...

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Malick Mbengue @malick-mbengue.bsky.social · 3d

I wished I could have written something like this. Rude, fun and meaningful.
static1.squarespace.com/static/686d9...

static1.squarespace.com

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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 12d

'In Australia we are seeing the results of running universities like businesses without adequate governance: wage theft from staff, fee theft from students, and the academic equivalent of shrinkflation.'

samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 20d

this is a very sharp piece on why it makes no sense to run universities as if they are businesses. They're not businesses.

www.afr.com/work-and-car...

The net result is the worst of both worlds. Universities invoke the rhetoric of business discipline, but they lack the governance structures that give that discipline bite. They operate without the checks that private ownership provides, yet subject staff and students to the cost-cutting and efficiency drives that profit-maximising firms pursue. The result is waste at the top and insecurity at the bottom.

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Dean Nicolle @deannicolle1.bsky.social · 12d

Less than 2 weeks until our arboretum open days! Here's a few of the eucalypts flowering at the moment.

These free open days only occur biannually. Currency Creek Arboretum is about an hour's drive south of Adelaide in SA. Open details here: www.dn.com.au/Currency_Cre...

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 16d

Left unchecked, openAI and other infotech providers will destroy any remnants of the American education system that manage to escape the Trump administration.

Read the full thread.

Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 16d

OpenAI's VP for education recently said the company wanted to become "core infrastructure" for schools and universities. Any infrastructure, though, always depends on habituating users to its technical affordances - so I've been trying to track how it's doing that 🧵 www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/t...

Welcome to Campus. Here’s Your ChatGPT.

www.nytimes.com

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Honour McCann @honour.bsky.social · 24d

There’s a leak - and a conceptual artist - at the Max Planck 👌

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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 25d

new zealand government reaching new heights of stupidity

next year our public dollars will go more to AI grants ($70 million) than all investigator-initiated basic science combined ($56 million in the Marsden fund)

Reti earmarks $70m of new agency's budget for AI commercialisation grants

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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · Sep 12

New blog post – A quick look at Roche's SBX
lh3.github.io/2025/09/11/a...

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Esther @elhopkins.bsky.social · Sep 11

www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06...
@ashleydaltonmp.bsky.social

#Longcovidkids

Kids are losing 'huge chunks' of their childhood to long COVID. Too many are being told it's 'all in their head'

They're losing their formative years to this debilitating disease. But for too many children with long COVID, finding help is a frustrating and traumatic process that leaves them feeling isolated and ...

www.abc.net.au

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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · Sep 11

Biology Department

xkcd.com/3140/

Comic. [Building with large sign in front of it[ SIGN: Welcome to the *Biology Department* It has been [changeable sign: 3] days since we discovered something existentially horrifying about bugs that makes you question your whole reality

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K.D. Murray @kdm9.bsky.social · Sep 11

If you haven't seen @shenwei356.bsky.social's other near-magical tools (csvtk, taxonkit, seqkit; all in go IIRC), absolutely check them out. Top stuff!

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M Hobart @mhobart.bsky.social · Sep 11

Must read, and not just for higher ed folks: anyone concerned about education and people’s ability to think rigorously and critically should read this manifesto.

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

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

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Ben Abraham @afterclimate.com.au · Sep 11

Absolutely fantastic piece on the interfaces between climate risk and insurance in the Polycrisis newsletter today, by @70sbachchan.bsky.social and @katemac.bsky.social

Not a doom loop, but “communities of fate” and the moral economy of the welfare state.
www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/ins...

Insurance in the Polycrisis | Kate Mackenzie & Tim Sahay

The future is triage on an uninsurable earth.

www.phenomenalworld.org

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Francis Markham @francismarkham.bsky.social · Sep 7

Australian universities are in a governance crisis. VC pay blowouts, scandals, mission drift — these aren’t random, they’re structural.

This new working paper with @marijataflaga.bsky.social & Keith Dowding digs into why the system is broken, and how to fix it.

doi.org/10.25911/MWW...

A thread:

Neither corporate nor government: Why university governance needs to be different, and better
Marija Taflaga, Francis Markham and Keith Dowding.

Preprint, 29 August 2025. https://doi.org/10.25911/MWW4-9781

Abstract
Australian universities face a governance crisis rooted in failures of accountability. Unlike parliaments and corporate boards, university councils lack effective mechanisms for principals to discipline agents. In parliaments, voters can replace elected representatives; in corporations, shareholders can vote out directors. Both systems close the delegation–accountability loop, ensuring alignment between principals and outcomes. University councils, however, are self-perpetuating bodies dominated by external appointees, and in recent decades they are typically from corporate backgrounds. As neither producers nor consumers of universities’ core product—knowledge creation and dissemination—they have minimal intrinsic stake in academic outcomes leaving councils detached from the university’s core mission. This misalignment fosters mission drift, weakens oversight, and contributes to repeated scandals. Because councils largely appoint their own successors, they remain insulated from meaningful scrutiny, unlike boards or parliaments where underperformance is sanctioned externally. Restoring accountability requires giving academic staff and students a renewed oversight role, alongside clear safeguards for the public interest. Because academics and students are both producers and consumers of knowledge, they have a direct and enduring stake in its quality. We recommend two mechanisms to do this are:
1. Academic Senates empowered to appoint and review council members, ensuring councils reflect the university’s purpose.
2. Robust Committee Systems that embed staff and student voices in decision-making, reduce information asymmetries, and align incentives with academic purposes.

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Zamin Iqbal @zaminiqbal.bsky.social · Sep 4

Ok this is mad
"...an ant that lays individuals from two distinct species. In this life cycle, females must clone males of another species because they require their sperm to produce the worker caste"

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants - Nature

In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in males from the same moth...

www.nature.com

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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · Sep 3

I LOVE that you can see pur Cocos Keeling voyage eDNA data on this figure. It's that straight line going north-west from Western Australia/Perth!

Rayan Chikhi @rayanchikhi.bsky.social · Sep 3

🌎👩‍🔬 For 15+ years biology has accumulated petabytes (million gigabytes) of🧬DNA sequencing data🧬 from the far reaches of our planet.🦠🍄🌵

Logan now democratizes efficient access to the world’s most comprehensive genetics dataset. Free and open.

doi.org/10.1101/2024...

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Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra @jrossibarra.bsky.social · Sep 3

Save the date! #PEQG26 June 9-12 2026 in Asilomar, CA. Happens only every 2yrs, but is my favorite conference. Full website coming soon, and registration and abstract submission opens November 14, but I'm allowed to tease that keynotes will be @jnovembre.bsky.social @jennytung.bsky.social and me!

Homepage - Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics Conference

Visit our website to learn more.

genetics-gsa.org

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Julie Blommaert @drjulieb.bsky.social · Sep 2

Omg nerd day made

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naturepoker @binomicalabs.org · Aug 26

I feel like there should be a "median rent in the area" based guidelines for conference registration fees. If your 3 day academic conference costs more than a median whole month's rent to live there, maybe something can be improved 🫠

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Professor Euan Ritchie @euanritchie.bsky.social · Aug 25

Be like Fran www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

Retired doctor takes on rare fungi finding 'work of a lifetime'

Fran Guard turned to fungi research after finding a species that had not yet been scientifically described while weeding her rainforest property.

www.abc.net.au

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Elisabeth Bik - Perpetrator 5, a fraudulent microbiologist @elisabethbik.bsky.social · Aug 4

Fantastic new paper by @reeserichardson.bsky.social et al.

An enormous amount of work showing the extent of coordinated scientific fraud and involvement of some editors.
The number of fraudulent publications grows at a rate far outpacing that of legitimate science.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology @biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · Aug 11

SLiM 5: Eco-evolutionary simulations across multiple chromosomes and full genomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.07.669155v1

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K.D. Murray @kdm9.bsky.social · Aug 14

Feel free to ask any q's here

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K.D. Murray @kdm9.bsky.social · Aug 14

This is obviously a colossal group effort, led by Luisa Teasdale (not on bsky) and supervised by @coevolution.bsky.social and @plantevolution.bsky.social, with very valuable contributions from @aconga.bsky.social, @hajkdrost.bsky.social and many more not on bsky

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