Notices by Albert Cardona (albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz)

@_elena The calm and clarity of a timeline where boosts are hidden and one only reads the thoughts of those one chose to follow. How little time it takes, freeing me to move on with my day, having caught up with those with whom I decided to rely on.

@dmacphee "Preprints are preprints because they’re published on a platform for preprints: It’s not synonymous with un-peer-reviewed. And the screening at good preprint servers is better quality control than exists at the worst journals.
Authors can, and often do, upload new versions of a preprint after responses to the first version, or after journal peer review."

"The quality of so many of them is so high, and the quality of so many journal reports of research so low, that I don’t think publication status is a reliable distinction."

"... the onus for not misleading the public lies in vetting a preprint before publishing a news story about it. Cautioning that it’s a preprint doesn’t really get anyone off the hook."

#ScientificPublishing

A 110-million year old mantis [1], a ~20/5-million year old mantis [2], and a mantis from our garden [3].

[1] "An exceptionally preserved 110 million years old praying mantis provides new insights into the predatory behaviour of early mantodeans", Hörnig et al. 2017 https://peerj.com/articles/3605/
[2] "A new species of mantis (Insecta: Mantodea: Amelidae) from the Miocene Amber-Lagerstätte in Mexico", Terríquez-Beltrán et al. 2022 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08912963.2022.2134782
[3] https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/179582544

#iNaturalist #Mantodea #entomology #insects #mantis

Unfortunately the really well-preserved mantis encased in amber are stashed away in private collections where nobody can study them. I can't even track where this image is from except that the specimen was sold in an auction.

#Mantodea #mantis

@mattjhodgkinson @atthenius @williamgunn @andrewdessler

Academics are many things but united is not one of them. Hence we are easy prey to single-minded top-down-run corporations.

Fall is but a whisper away. Cambridge, UK.
#Pembroke1347

Postdoc position in #Drosophila circuit neuroscience with Prof. Dr. Ilona Grunwald Kadow in Bonn, Germany
https://www.fens.org/careers/job-market/job/119839

Deadline: 27 September 2024

#PhDJobs #academia #neuroscience

Postdoc position (3 years) on mosquito physiology and behaviour, with Lena Riabinina at Durham University.
https://www.fens.org/careers/job-market/job/120059

Deadline: 22 September 2024

#PhDJobs #academia

Postdoc position on olfaction and plasticity in mice with Elisa Galiano at Cambridge University:

Intro: https://gallianolab.org/join-us/
Full ad: https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/47775/

Deadline September 10th 2024.

#PhDJobs #academia #neuroscience

@evan Might want to read Brian Martin's take on the Olympic games:
https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/00sa2.html

The Harvard Mastodon!

Exhibit at the Museum of Natural History, Harvard University.
#mastodon #paleontology

@glitzersachen Here is a photo without glare. Quite the molars!
#mastodon #paleontology

Gaia Tavosanis' lab is hiring: open positions for PhD students and for a postdoc. Strongly recommend.

https://www.devbiol.rwth-aachen.de/we-have-open-positions/

#Drosophila #neuroscience #academia #PhDJobs #PostdocJob

@corbet

Will the webmasters run a script to dereference all the URL shorteners? They can.

@tmalsburg

If you ever find yourself in an award committee, or a grant funding panel, or a search committee, may you voice these thoughts out loud. Software development contributions are immensely valuable.

Software developed by PhD students and postdocs without any formal training has gone on to save academia many millions on software licenses, in addition to enabling research that was not possible otherwise. I wish this had been quantified. Let's not take it for granted.

#academia

@lana

For the life of me I cannot understand of what use is to delegate writing to a machine. Writing is rewriting, because writing is thinking, is the process of composing one's thoughts, of organising what one wants to say, and putting it down, with references and pointers to data sheets and figures. Delegate writing to a machine and all purpose is lost. As if writing was pointless busywork. Perhaps that's what it is to spammers in search of the small percent of readers who will become marks.

Rewilding the internet:

"Just like the crime-ridden, Corbusier-like towers Moses crammed people into when he demolished mixed-use neighborhoods and built highways through them, today’s top-down, concentrated internet is, for many, an unpleasant and harmful place. Its owners are hard to remove, and their interests do not align with ours."

"Apple and Google’s email clients manage nearly 90% of global email. Google and Cloudflare serve around 50% of global domain name system requests."

"For many people across the generations today, platforms like Facebook or TikTok are the internet. They’ve long dwelled in walled gardens they think are the world."

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

By Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon.
@mariafarrell @robin

@Daojoan

Well put. One should always perform due diligence before committing one's time and effort into a platform. If it isn't a non-profit, it won't end well.

In Europe, flying is cheaper than taking the train.

It's an embarrassment, and a major problem: we have to stop flying for silly short distances. Realise that the overheads of flying (reaching the airport, awaiting 2 hours, the flight, the unloading, reaching the destination) largely cancel out any time gains of flying. And the carbon costs are utterly untenable. Not to speak of the modern, dire conditions of the whole flying "experience".

Another embarrassment is that train connections can't be guaranteed when across countries or companies. They aren't even coordinated. As if those who commission and set the schedules didn't travel by train themselves, at least not internationally. In considering how tiny most European countries are, it's frankly bizarre.

There are so many destinations one could travel by train to, yet in practice, it's not sensible. A disgrace.

The upside is that it can be fixed.

#trains #EuroRail

@futurebird

When every Angeleno got to see the Milky Way, some called the police to report strange lights in the sky:

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/business/31essay.html

That, more than anything, emphasizes the need for black skies. We can't live with out backs to nature.

The article (disable javascript and reload to read it in full) also discusses the benefits of dark skies and the costs of not doing so (2008): "The Dark-Sky group estimates that badly designed outdoor lighting wastes $10 billion in energy a year."

#DarkSkies