iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Thanks for having me on the podcast! I hope that my yapping will be useful to others in the future!

Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Since it's the first day of fall, the first day of libra season, and also world narcolepsy day, I think today is my day of peak power (so it is time to actually work on my R&Rs)

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

My department (Math & CS) at Holy Cross is hiring (one person in algebra + one person in math writ large). I have been officially teaching here less than a month, but everyone has been delightful so far, including the local wildlife (pictured here). apply.interfolio.com/192763

An open dumpster with trash in it sits in an alcove behind a partial fence. A squirrel is perched on the fence, holding some food in its paws.

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

A student (not one of mine) peeked into my office during office hours today and asked me whether I thought a kangaroo or a slightly above average man would win in a fight. What do you think? 1️⃣ kangaroo 2️⃣ slightly above average man 📊 Show results

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

ooh it’s so official now (my office is labeled)

The sign outside my door. It has 134 in large letters, and below it is a purple nametag that says Prof. A. Smith.

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

The weird-ass college classes that changed my life were Credit for Reddit and Network Cultures, both of which focused on understanding how people have existed in, and made sense of, the internet since its invention. This is (approximately) what I got a whole-ass PhD in almost 10 years later.

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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

“if we don’t stand up for the free speech of racists, it puts everyone’s free speech in danger.” - guy who only ever talks about free speech when it’s racism

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Rebecca R Helm @rebeccarhelm.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Today is the day the story There Will Come Soft Rain is set. An amazing and heartbreaking work of fiction for our modern age. Read it here:

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

I'm incredibly honored to be one of the inaugural winners of the Ctrl-Z award. The sequence of events preceding and following this retraction were harrowing (and are honestly still stressful), but I hope this will be an opportunity for more open dialogue about mistakes + self-retraction in science.

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Making this hackathon happen with @philchodrow.bsky.social and @nwlandry.bsky.social was an absolute delight, and I loved watching the delightful teamwork showcased by every team of hackers! Thank you so much to all our participants and speakers!! @netsciconf.bsky.social

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

very very grateful for the past 5 years I’ve spent building community and doing science with so many wonderful people ❤️

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Charles Logan @charleswlogan.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Solidarity with Emily Tucker and her open letter to students. Tucker writes, "But the great thing is, you don’t have to go along with this, and I urge you not to. You can refuse to use the chatbot. You can tell your professors that you don’t want them to use it or to require you to use it."

medium.com

An Open Letter to Georgetown Students, In Response to Recent Announcements about "Generative AI"

Image source: Bibliothèque nationale de France An Open Letter to Georgetown Students, In Response to Recent Announcements by the University about “Generative AI” Dear students, As you know, in …

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Yesterday I successfully defended my dissertation, so I am now officially (ish) Dr. Alyssa. I'm so grateful for the support of my committee -- @michaelann.bsky.social, @kennyjoseph.bsky.social, @foucaultwelles.bsky.social, & @davidlazer.bsky.social -- as well as my family, friends, and labmates.

A picture of me (a mixed Japanese & white woman with a lot of arm tattoos wearing all black) gesturing in front of a Powerpoint that says "Introduction & Motivation"

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

we were supposed to demonstrate understanding of foundational concepts in the ✨ canon of network science ✨ but unfortunately i am still not sure what that is 🤷‍♀️ i know so many centrality measures tho

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NetSci 2026 @netsciconf.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

Looking for something ✨network-y ✨ to do the Sunday before NetSci 2026 starts? How about 𝗔 𝗛𝗶𝗴𝗵𝗲𝗿-𝗢𝗿𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗛𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗻? We'll explore the Bluesky starter pack dataset from 𝘼 𝘽𝙡𝙪𝙚 𝙎𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙩 (doi.org/10.3886/ICPS...). 🚨Fill out this form by March 13🚨 tinyurl.com/26warr3n tinyurl.com/ytzfhc74

tinyurl.com

A Higher Order Hackathon – A Blue Start at Netsci 2026

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haily merritt, phd @h-merritt.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

excited that @wins-society.bsky.social once again will have a satellite at @netsciconf.bsky.social where our mentorship program is back by popular demand! you can submit at this link: forms.gle/nFivVAiE4gdE...

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

hi come join the highest-order hackathon ever! yay networks!!! www.philchodrow.prof/higher-order...

The Sue Sylvester meme, with a white lady in a pink shirt and the text "I am going to create an environment that is so toxic" below her, except it says "I am going to create a hackathon that is so higher-order" and there is a hypergraph next to Sue Sylvester.

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Julia Husar @juliahusar.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

Hi all, I'm leading a study! We're looking to understand transfem experiences searching for information related to transitioning online, setting transition-related goals, and making decisions based on the information acquired in these searches.

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Michael Ann, sociotechnical femme @michaelann.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

NEW STUDY! @juliahusar.bsky.social and I have a grant to build trans health and wellbeing tech, and we need input from other trans women and transfems to make sure it serves us all well. This is research BY transfems FOR transfems and we're inviting y'all to be part of it. Also, we're paying!

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Lee Cicuta @butchanarchy.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

Two queer women with a 6 year old in school today stopped to film ICE and for their bravery ICE agents murdered one before the other’s eyes. The grief in the survivor’s voice is a knife to the gut. Destroying people and their bonds is what ICE has always done.

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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

It appears ICE murdered someone in cold blood today and their plan is — per usual — to create a fog of lies so the killer does not face justice. We simply can't let that happen. The shooter has to be arrested and so does Bovino. They can't just kill people on the street.

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Kate Ertmann @katelovesmath.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

Reading this piece by @sesmith.lol made my (Gen X) head spin. You, too, should definitely read it. "The concern arises when algospeak also reflects a larger softening of language, one driven by the desire to pursue safety over reality, dilution over strength."

theflytrapmedia.com

Algospeak Will Be the Unaliving of Me

Maybe we want to bare our teeth.

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

never a good sign when you’re on hold trying to get your specialty medication long enough that you figure out when the hold music loops

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Terra Field @rainofterra.gay · 02/01/2026

We didn’t spend free time on ERGs because we thought it would benefit shareholders, it was because it made our lives slightly less miserable as a cog in the machine and it let us consolidate what little power we had.

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

hi i’m a tiny crumb of peanut dust

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

more cozyposting: just knit a chunky mobius strip cowl

a light blue knitted cowl in the shape of a mobius strip (seed stitch, so it looks bumpy, and the yarn is light blue with speckles of darker blue mixed in)

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

thinking about that time in college when i posted about my sleep schedule on the polyphasic sleep subreddit and someone was like “bestie that’s not polyphasic that’s a sleep disorder” and i went “haha couldn’t be me” then got diagnosed with narcolepsy like 6+ years later

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

made a practice quilt for the creature to get better at longarm quilting and quilt binding. i don’t think she’s impressed.

a white pitbull type dog with brown spots on her nose and ears is lying on a couch under a cream colored quilt that has a fish scale like quilting pattern on it. she looks deeply skeptical.

a zoomed out photo of the dog (only head and tail visible) under the quilt

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

this thread will just be me doing a puzzle because it’s nice to do something you’re bad at

A very incomplete puzzle. The edge pieces are mostly assembled, and there are a few lost edge pieces and the beginnings of some pieces being sorted into piles by color inside the outline of the puzzle. the box is also inside the puzzle with many pieces that haven’t yet been sorted, as well as a nearly empty teacup.

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

just found several interview transcripts for my undergrad thesis, along with an early draft of said thesis. past me did her qualitative coding with 3 highlighters and a lot of caffeine, near as i can tell. i need to go email my thesis advisor and thank her for putting up with me 🥺

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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 04/12/2025

A note on learning physics ⚛️ for starting PhD students: At the risk of saying something completely useless because everyone has it worked out There is no magic trick, your classmates *may* be faster than you, but they are still studying as long as they need to and you are quite capable of the same

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Lain Kaplan, Mouthy Jewess 🏳️‍🌈💗🏳️‍⚧️ @lainkaplan.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

An excellent thread on structural bullshit in academia, how to avoid mental traps, and encouragement to people from marginalized backgrounds. The system isn’t fair, but it can be gamed and it’s designed to intimidate people into failing. Don’t let them fool you.

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Alex Wild @alexwild.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

The United States welcomes human traffickers like Andrew Tate, but it defintely does not want you if you have ever worked to keep child pornography off the internet. A strong statement of what passes for American values, I guess.

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Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

We need to be able to see that the line "accommodations have gone too far" is an expression of the ableist notion that disabled students do not belong in higher ed. Its fundamentally an anxiety about the fact that disabled students get an "advantage" over abled students.

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DisabledInSTEM @disabledinstem.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

It's that time of year again... time for #DisabledInSTEM 2026 Mentorship applications! I'm so excited to be running this program for the sixth year and seeing the growth over the years! Mentee form: forms.gle/um5DvYnBi3tn... Mentor form: forms.gle/BvaxnQm8uhUR... Applications due December 5th!

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DisabledInSTEM @disabledinstem.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

The #DisabledInSTEM Mentorship Program has almost an equal number of applicants for mentees and mentors! Just sad to see interest extremely low this year. I’m not sure how I could reach people better so please share within your networks! 💜

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

dear hypergraph enthusiasts, I am thinking about applying to do a satellite hackathon at @netsciconf.bsky.social focusing on our Bluesky starter pack dataset! if you work with higher-order networks and would be interested in giving a brief methods talk at this hypothetical session, please reach out!

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

hi researcher friends! if you conduct & record interviews with people and are concerned about the privacy risks of using online transcription services, i have good news, now with a minimal, kinda bad UI! github.com/asmithh/tran...

github.com

GitHub - asmithh/transcription

Contribute to asmithh/transcription development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 07/10/2025

Of course, people don't agree on what is "safe" and "fair" and that's why moderation is hard. But you can't solve a network-level problem with individual-level tools

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Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 07/10/2025

Moderation isn't simply about taking things down, it's also about building a collectively safe space. Telling someone they can just "label" (or hide/block) something they don't like won't address their concern that their community isn't safe

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

come network about networks with your network???

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JT Scott @jtforward2.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

This morning at 11am, corner of Hathorn and Broadway in Somerville MA. 3 ICE vehicles idling on nearby corners. I was following two ICE cars that were cruising around the neighborhood. This person was just walking down the sidewalk when two ICE vehicles stopped and officers jumped out to stop him.

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Alyssa Smith @cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 14/09/2025

currently reading this and stopping every few pages to go Oh No but i just wanted to emphasize the extent to which data, especially ill-gotten data or really dubious acts of quantification, get used to build up & justify dangerous rhetoric.

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 06/09/2025

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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