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Stephen Murphy (smurph)

Stephen Murphy (smurph)

@smurph.bsky.social

7.1K followers 2K following 1.4K posts

Professor at U Waterloo - Sch Environment, Resources & Sustainability. Ecologist, EIC Restoration Ecology, Botanist, Protected Areas, Grasslands. https://uwaterloo.ca/environment-resources-and-sustainability/blog/you-break-it-we-fix-it .. more

Environmental science 40%

Agriculture 29%

more

Posts Replies Media Videos

Stephen Murphy (smurph) @smurph.bsky.social · 6h

Per Jeffrey, I occasionally get ones that simply repeat the abstract of one of our papers, my UW brief bio, my blogs on UW explaining what my students have done, my bluesky profile, & once it was 16 repeats of "smurph smurph smurph smurph..." (that last one was funny AND creepy AND terrifyingly sad)

Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra @jrossibarra.bsky.social · 15h

Best new email from someone interested in the lab: “I am very interested in the research conducted in your lab, especially your work on [mention their recent paper/project]. “

Reposted by Gavin A. Schmidt, Scott L. Greer, Esther K. Choo , and 3 more Gavin A. Schmidt, Scott L. Greer, Esther K. Choo, Stephen D. Murphy, Daniel Kuehn, Peter Jacobs

Iris Gorfinkel, M.D. @drgorfinkel.bsky.social · 7h

HORRIFYING -
Dismantling USAID & cancelling >80% of aid caused ~750,000 deaths by mid-2025

🧸Most were children
⌛️ Many died within the first year

😰 Preventable deaths were mainly from:
- HIV, TB, malaria
- Maternal & fetal deaths
- Malnutrition

news.westernu.ca/2026/01/u-s-...

Expert insight: U.S. withdrawal from WHO could affect global health - Western News

History professor Mitchell L. Hammond explains how the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization could affect global health and disease threats.

news.westernu.ca

Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy

Taniel @taniel.bsky.social · 9h

ok, I think we all need a dose of adorableness today like a NEWBORN GIRAFFE www.sltrib.com/news/2026/01...

two giraffes greet a newborn giraffe

Reposted by Marcel Cardillo, Stephen D. Murphy

Rod Page @rdmpage.bsky.social · 12h

After a few years of benign neglect I am rebuilding bionames.org, which is a database of 5.4 million taxonomomic names for animals, linked to half a million DOIs and 278K PDFs. Dream is for every species name to be linked to its original publication using a persistent identifier #PID

Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy

Colin Schultz @colinschultz.bsky.social · 14h

The Tyee Is Recruiting Our Next Editor-in-Chief thetyee.ca/Tyeenews/202...

The Tyee Is Recruiting Our Next Editor-in-Chief | The Tyee

Founding editor David Beers is passing the baton to a new leader. Is it you?

Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy

WWF-Canada @wwfcanada.org · 14h

It’s going to be a wild year on campus! 🦋

WWF-Canada is excited to announce the recipients of this year’s Go Wild campus grants. These grants will support on-the-ground projects to protect and restore nature at post-secondary institutions across the country.

Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy

Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra @jrossibarra.bsky.social · 15h

Best new email from someone interested in the lab: “I am very interested in the research conducted in your lab, especially your work on [mention their recent paper/project]. “

Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy

John Fodi @j-fodi.bsky.social · 16h

The headline says it all. 🌰🌍

www.goodnewsnetwork.org/hundreds-of-...

Hundreds of Ponds Restored Across Iowa Bring This Endangered Fish Back, Along with 100s of Species

Topeka shiners have been documented in 60% of the over 200 oxbow lakes restored across Iowa's landscape, 97% of which is privately-owned.

www.goodnewsnetwork.org

Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy

Lilly Dancyger @lillydancyger.bsky.social · 16h

"LLMs identified relevant conditions in fewer than 34.5 percent of cases."

www.404media.co/chatbots-hea...

Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds

Chatbots provided incorrect, conflicting medical advice, researchers found: “Despite all the hype, AI just isn't ready to take on the role of the physician.”

www.404media.co

Reposted by Alexander Wuttke, Stephen D. Murphy

Ed King @ed-king.bsky.social · 17h

'The geopolitical centre of gravity is shifting towards China' - worth reading this analysis of UN votes by @focaldataHQ hs-3959436.f.hubspot...

Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy

Catherine Fife @waterloompp.bsky.social · 18h

"Catherine Fife, NDP MPP for Waterloo, is calling for an immediate pause on commercial water-taking permits in Region of Waterloo. Fife warned the water shortage is already stalling housing construction & putting jobs at risk." #onpoli www.nationalobserver.com/2026/02/06/n...

Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy

Garry Peterson @resiliencesci.bsky.social · 18h

IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment
Summary for Policymakers
zenodo.org/records/1853...

is now available

Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy, Stacy D. VanDeveer, Margot C. Finn , and 4 more Stephen D. Murphy, Stacy D. VanDeveer, Margot C. Finn, Mark Rice, Andrea Iaboni, Aviel Roshwald, Colin Woodard

Jonathan Cohn @jonathancohn.bsky.social · 20h

"TikTok’s Terms of Service now explicitly include tracking of location and citizenship status (among other identity markers, such as sex)." newrepublic.com/article/2059...

How TikTok 2.0 Became a Weapon for ICE

In just one week, the company has gone from being Gen Z’s preferred social media platform to a tool for spying on Americans and the suppression of information.

newrepublic.com

Reposted by Anna O. Law, Kim L. Scheppele, Ashish Arora , and 33 more Anna O. Law, Kim L. Scheppele, Ashish Arora, Stacie B. Dusetzina, John Horgan, Steve Peers, Amir Attaran, Philip N. Cohen, Eric Goldman, Fabián Muniesa, Bruce D. Baker, Robin Celikates, Sanford F. Schram, Melanie C. Green, Janet Murray, Michael W. Kraus, Aaron Sojourner, Stephen D. Murphy, Mary L. Dudziak, Robert B. Reich, Michael D. McDonald, Brian Keegan, Jessica Vitak, Ann Bartow, Halley E. Froehlich, Niels Keijzer, Stephen A. Meserve, David S. Tanenhaus, Manisha Sinha, Peter Gratton, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Nathan P. Kalmoe, Dana Howard, Constance Bantman, Peter Bergman, David Darmofal

ProPublica @propublica.org · 20h

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken.

Hundreds of kids are still detained.

We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy

WildBirdAcoustics.bsky.social @wildbirdacoustics.bsky.social · 1d

blogbirder.blogspot.com/2026/02/fiel...
Eliminating field recording errors in the field is something I constantly work on. Here, I share my thoughts on this, running through a myriad of common errors.

Field Recording Technique; Honest Mistakes, Loud Clothes, and the Long Road to Listening Properly.

Field Recording is a wonderful discipline and there is much to learn at all levels. This is one of the things that draws me to it, there is ...

blogbirder.blogspot.com

Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy, Benjamin Wildermuth

Conservation Biology and Forest Ecology @cofeuniwue.bsky.social · 1d

📢 Job opening! We’re excited to announce six open Researcher positions. 🪲🦋

4 PhD and 2 Postdoc positions in forest biodiversity-ecosystem functioning research!

Interested in forest ecology? Get in touch! 🌲🌳

www.greenjobs.de/stellenanzei...

#forestecology #researchposition #conservationbiology

4 PhD positions and 2 Postdoc positions (respective place of work in the text) in forest [...]

Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg (JMU) and its partner Universities Georg-August-University of Göttingen (GAUG), Leipzig University (UL), University of Bayreuth (UB), Universität Bremen (UB), Un...

www.greenjobs.de

Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy

Space Witches, Esq. @popelizbet.bsky.social · 1d

you know what's cheaper and safer than a ring camera? a fake camera. I've had one since my last porch theft three years ago and it even fooled the eye of a cop trying to get me to snitch on my neighbors. you can't subpoena a recording that doesnt exist.

Stephen Murphy (smurph) @smurph.bsky.social · 1d

I once had to be flown (govt expense) to Regina to deliver a talk on a completed research project that was mainly online and had an audience that was 99% in Guelph (40 min down the road from me) - all because the project was overseen by the SK offices & I had to do it there in person. (Harper era)

Luke LeBrun @lukelebrun.ca · 2d

Two things I’m not sure is widely understood:

1. Many public servants no longer have their own desks and work in transient government co-working spaces

2. Many describe a Kafkaesque existence of going to physical offices only to spend their time on video calls with the people sitting next to them

Federal public servants called back to office 4 days a week starting this summer | CBC News

The federal government expects its employees to return to in-office work for a minimum of four days a week starting this July.

Theo Sanderson @theo.io · 1d

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!

bluesky-map.theo.io

I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.

bluesky-map.theo.io

Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy

Rethink the Wolf! (Don't believe the myth!) @rethinkthewolf.bsky.social · 1d

Do you listen to Lyle Lewis substack?
open.substack.com/pub/lylel/p/...

The Most Important Thing in Willow Was What Wasn’t There

Western Montana grassland under chronic livestock grazing, with uniform low vegetation in the foreground and remnant cottonwood gallery forest skeletons in the distance—evidence of a once wetter, more...

open.substack.com

Nick Pettigrew @nick-pettigrew.bsky.social · 1d

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

Dan Nguyen @dancow.bsky.social · 1d

VC, founder, dumbass

@Nick_Davidov
Asked Claude Cowork organize my wife's desktop, it stated doing it, asked for a permission to delete temp office files, I granted it, and then it goes "ooops"
Turns out it tried renaming and accidentally deleted a folder with all of the photos my wife made on her camera for the last 15 years. All photos of kids, their illustrations, friends' weddings, travel, everything.
It's not in trash, it was done via terminal It's not in iCloud, it already synced the new file structure.
She didn't have Time Machine.
Disc recovery tools can't see anything.
I called Apple and they pointed me to a feature in iCloud allowing to retrieve files that were saved before but are no longer on iCloud Drive (they keep them for 30 days).
I'm now watching it load tens of thousands of files. I nearly had a heart attack.

Nick Davidov • @Nick_Davidov
VC, founder, DVC.ai - backing repeat founders with a community of 200 engineers. e/acc/OSS. Perplexity, Higgsfield, Animation, Etched. Husband to @msdavidova

Reposted by Meredith Broussard, Brendan Nyhan, Stephen D. Murphy , and 1 more Meredith Broussard, Brendan Nyhan, Stephen D. Murphy, Amy W. Ando

Dan Nguyen @dancow.bsky.social · 1d

VC, founder, dumbass

@Nick_Davidov
Asked Claude Cowork organize my wife's desktop, it stated doing it, asked for a permission to delete temp office files, I granted it, and then it goes "ooops"
Turns out it tried renaming and accidentally deleted a folder with all of the photos my wife made on her camera for the last 15 years. All photos of kids, their illustrations, friends' weddings, travel, everything.
It's not in trash, it was done via terminal It's not in iCloud, it already synced the new file structure.
She didn't have Time Machine.
Disc recovery tools can't see anything.
I called Apple and they pointed me to a feature in iCloud allowing to retrieve files that were saved before but are no longer on iCloud Drive (they keep them for 30 days).
I'm now watching it load tens of thousands of files. I nearly had a heart attack.

Nick Davidov • @Nick_Davidov
VC, founder, DVC.ai - backing repeat founders with a community of 200 engineers. e/acc/OSS. Perplexity, Higgsfield, Animation, Etched. Husband to @msdavidova

Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy

Rosemary Mosco @rosemarymosco.com · 1d

Since Valentine's Day is approaching, I'm reposting some of my past Valentine's comics.

A great blue heron is standing in a marsh reading a book. The book says "They lived at opposite ends of the pond. From afar, she admired his long plumes and excellent fishing technique." The heron gets more flustered as she reads: "One day he came flying toward her. Watching him approach, she wondered: What did he want? And was he... carrying something in his beak?" The heron gets even more flustered as she reads: "Her heart skipped a beat as he landed beside her. Fluffing his neck feathers, he said those three special words:" The heron falls backwards in a swoon as she reads, "Here's a stick."

Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy

The Conversation Canada @ca.theconversation.com · 1d

Canada is losing track of its wild salmon — just when we need that knowledge most

Canada is losing track of its wild salmon — just when we need that knowledge most

Expediency with industrial development carries real environmental risks for salmon unless matched by corresponding investment in mitigation and monitoring.

theconversation.com

Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy

James Bullock @jmbecologist.bsky.social · 1d

Nature recovery in the UK is a ‘rich’ mix of reintroductions of certain species, traditional conservation management, rewilding, restoration

Done by many different people & organisations

I’m trying to work out if this is good or if it could be more effective if coordinated at, say, regional scale

Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy

Brett "Solidarity 2026" Banditelli @banditelli.org · 1d

Normal bird doing normal bird shit that they've done for over 30 million years. #birds

an american white pelican shaking its body dry, forward facing, the pouch and the break look very weird

Reposted by Joanna Bryson, Nandita Sharma, Peter Thorne , and 9 more Joanna Bryson, Nandita Sharma, Peter Thorne, Steve Peers, Rosemary A. Joyce, Rebecca Tushnet, Alan Richardson, Silvia Secchi, Stephen D. Murphy, Elisa Perego, Ann Bartow, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò

Kelly @broadwaybabyto.bsky.social · 2d

Former Washington Post journalists have launched a GoFundMe to help repatriate fired staff members who are effectively stranded in foreign countries.

One of the richest men in the world fired them from the paper and didn’t even pay to ensure they got home.

Abolish the billionaire class:

Donate to Support for Washington Post international employees, organized by Michelle Lee

Among the hundreds of journalists laid off by The Washington Post on … Michelle Lee needs your support for Support for Washington Post international employees

www.gofundme.com

Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy

Luke LeBrun @lukelebrun.ca · 2d

Two things I’m not sure is widely understood:

1. Many public servants no longer have their own desks and work in transient government co-working spaces

2. Many describe a Kafkaesque existence of going to physical offices only to spend their time on video calls with the people sitting next to them

Federal public servants called back to office 4 days a week starting this summer | CBC News

The federal government expects its employees to return to in-office work for a minimum of four days a week starting this July.

Stephen Murphy (smurph) @smurph.bsky.social · 2d

I would not have ever recommended condescending to Lynda and Catherine in real life; Catherine O'Hara, RIP

(Dave Thomas - playing the smarmy interviewer here - in his SCTV book explicates how he and Catherine devised their 'two-hander' skits; a great read)

Lynda Carter @lyndacarter.bsky.social · 2d

Catherine O’Hara… she was great. I always liked her attitude. I hadn’t seen this in years and a fan shared it with me. May her memory be a blessing.

Stephen Murphy (smurph) @smurph.bsky.social · 2d

I am *not* throwing shade at Don here, but this is another example from the WaPo showing the 'water is wet' trope for its "editorial" (mal)practices

Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 2d

WaPo editorial board when TX imposes a legislative gerrymander: don't freak out guys! Not a threat to democracy!

When VA responds to TX with *referendum* on their own gerrymander: brass-knuckled hypocrisy, anti-democratic gamesmanship.

There is hypocrisy here, all right, but not from VA.