iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Daniel Padfield

Tatiana Dimitriu @tatianadimitriu.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

PhD opportunity! Join us in St Andrews to study the consequences of defence against conjugative plasmids (preprint coming soon on this!). Funded by EASTBIO, co-supervised by @mfwhite2.bsky.social. Please share & pass on to anyone interested! 🦠🧫 Deadline 16th November www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

findaphd.com

Eastbio: Mechanism and consequences of lethal zygosis in bacteria restricting AMR plasmids. at University of St Andrews on FindAPhD.com

PhD Project - Eastbio: Mechanism and consequences of lethal zygosis in bacteria restricting AMR plasmids. at University of St Andrews, listed on FindAPhD.com

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

True, but never has such information and capability been available so easily to everyone, and any advice can just be ignored. For example, it is now incredibly easy to create AI-generated child sexual abuse videos. The Internet Watch Foundation found 3443 in 2025, compared to 13 in 2024.

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Do we have good reporting for incidents where they have done terrible things like helped users take their own lives, planned crimes, done scams, hacks though? And whose responsibility would it be to collate those reports?

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"The aim of this paper is to increase awareness of the journal citation distributions underlying Journal Impact Factors..." It is plainly ridiculous that the journal impact factor uses the mean as the measure of central tendency. Stop using them.

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Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Good piece from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com & @sarahoconnorft.ft.com on AI in science. It’s making some bits faster, but there is a new ‘verification tax’ taking up time. And there are heightened bottlenecks in physical experiments & data collection. AI is a workflow problem www.ft.com/content/4508...

ft.com

The AI Shift: Is AI supercharging science?

Productivity gains in analysis are getting stuck in physical-world bottlenecks

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Tessa Munt MP 🔶 @tessamunt.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Thanks @thereforme.bsky.social! There must be serious review of the government’s inadequate response to #ME, with its cost to us all. Still considering best options to call for including @georgemonbiot.bsky.social proposed public inquiry, Select Committee Inquiry, a Czar or even referral to HSSIB.

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Graph crimes are ok as long as the reinforce our belief systems right. Beyond correlation != causation, and the weird x axis scale that I dont understand (maybe scaled to 0-100), what is wrong with it?

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Technological advances making us regress back to ways we did things years ago was definitely not on my bingo card.

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

You know your life is going well when it's covered by @georgemonbiot.bsky.social. Severe ME takes everything and yet we don't know how to treat it. The NHS regularly just ignores sufferers as a result.

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Great thread Alex. Thanks for the summary.

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

This trip, some of the ways Soph and I connect became harder for her and rarer as a result. She also skipped half of the lunches so I saw her less. Everything gets taken from us eventully. #severeME #MECFS #pwME 21/09/2026 Losing connection padpadpadpad.netlify.app/posts/caring...

padpadpadpad.netlify.app

Caring for someone with severe ME – DanPadLab

A running journal of the realities of caring for someone with severe ME.

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Reposted by Daniel Padfield

Willard Foxton @willardfoxton.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I think it's absolutely mad that today there's a *national news story* about 400 oil platform workers losing their jobs, and the government being blamed. 25% of the UK TV industry lost their jobs in the last 4 years and we never hear a peep about it! Some jobs are 'real jobs' I guess.

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Ellie Jameson @elliejameson.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

MScRes bursary of £2000 available at Bangor University to study Bacteriophages as natural biocontrols for plant pathogens. Deadline is 19th October. Please contact me for more details #PhageSky #MicroSky

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Feels like we've gone backwards as I now pay most attention to those with slightly worse structure but with some individuality.

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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Intending to write another column about the treatment of #ME/CFS patients this week, pegged to new research findings on the biological basis. My question for sufferers: Are any of you still being offered inappropriate (psych/GET etc) "treatments"? Please email george at monbiot dot info. Thanks.

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The pathways to job security - let alone independence - for ECRs are becoming more strained year after year.

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Reposted by Daniel Padfield

Ran Blekhman @blekhman.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

The AI Discourse in Academia is Toxic. It Doesn’t have to be. My new post: blekhman.substack.com/p/the-ai-dis...

blekhman.substack.com

The AI Discourse in Academia is Toxic. It Doesn’t have to be.

You are allowed to have a nuanced opinion about AI

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Does the time you might be without your phone not still cause you to use a case. I have phone insurance but the fear of being phoneless on being on my old emergency phone still means I have a case. Plus then I can throw it about a bit.

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Interesting! Think that'd be different in ecology and evolution.

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Was OSF mandated to be used by those journals? Seems like a huge uptake when other ways of sharing exist.

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Christopher Wheat @chriswheat.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Blaming AI agents when they escape sandboxes is like blaming lions for escaping a zoo. The company is responsible, they should be sued for accountability. Nothing complicated about it.

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Eric Ravenscraft @lordravenscraft.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

holy shit, this is the whole ballgame in a single paragraph gAI systems require mass theft of copyrighted works, for the explicit purpose of replacing the market for the people they stole from, and the people in charge knew what they were doing ahead of time, and did it anyway

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The main plot in the write up shows no significant results, with significance only coming when they then chop up their data and do several extra analyses post hoc. It's essentially still a negative result, albeit with trending signals to follow up with larger cohorts. Am I missing something?

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Reposted by Daniel Padfield

Martin Modrák @modrakm.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I will be looking for a PhD student in Bayesian statistics (in collaboration with Paul Bürkner), located in Prague. Forward to students if you have somebody who could be interested. www.martinmodrak.cz/grammo-call/

martinmodrak.cz

Grammo - Let's Research Bayes!

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I think these ideas are cool. I like open and reproducible science. I support ECRs and PhD students do work they are passionate about. Also get to collaborate with great people @zaminiqbal.bsky.social @edfeil.bsky.social Angus Buckling and Barbara Kasprzyk-Hordern. Happy to answer Qs.

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Advert details are very slim, but you can find a longer project outline here. gw4biomed.ac.uk/wp-content/u... Essentially evolutionary ecology of warming and antibiotics on bacteria. Looking for generalities across strains, species, and different antibiotics. Will do microbiology and statistics.

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I have an MRC-funded PhD project available (gw4biomed.ac.uk/how-does-tem...) on how warming will change the problem of AMR. Join a small and friendly group (padpadpadpad.netlify.app/about) in (sometimes) sunny Cornwall. 🧪🦠 #microsky **Please share** the ad below with anyone who may be interested.

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Daniel C. Blight @danielcblight.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

***URGENT PLEASE SHARE*** University of Brighton management have announced today that they ‘give notice of termination of all collective agreements’. This is a fundamental erasure of workers' rights. Management have announced the termination of all contractual documents, which includes:

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Its not just climate change vs AI vs something else. Its patriotic US AI vs Chinese AI. www.youtube.com/shorts/wBfcS...

youtube.com

Ted Cruz on Killer AI Robots

YouTube video by R&T Media

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

@npariente.bsky.social how strict is the Results and Discussion before Methods for first submission to @plosbiology.org? We find it easier - and generally prefer - to write it up with Methods first. As Plos has progressive publishing policies I am wondering if more relaxed guidelines now exist?

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Reposted by Daniel Padfield

Tim Bale @timbale.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

This - from a psychologist who notes, btw, that "Even professors find making friends anxiety-provoking"- is great. If anyone you know is starting university this week or very soon, do flick it on. It might really help and reassure them.

theconversation.com

Why making friends at university feels harder than it really is

We overestimate how much other people notice our own behaviour and any social missteps.

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Your bugbear is on a toy plot that is not even primary data, designed to show work on phage defence systems is increasing. Ellinor's justification seems fine, its not even an error. Your efforts to "correct" the literature would come across better if they weren't mostly to get more citations.

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

We should be supporting ECRs not berating them repeatedly when they have justified their reasoning. You have >41,000 citations and a h-indices of >100. How would you respond if someone replied like this to one of your students?

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Reposted by Daniel Padfield

JL Weissman @jlw-ecoevo.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

My lab is hiring two(!) postdocs interested in (1) building trait prediction models capable of resolving complex microbial traits from genomes and metagenomes, and/or (2) building mathematical models of microbial community dynamics www.microbialgamut.com/mGAMUT_postd...

microbialgamut.com

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University and College Union (UCU) @ucu.org.uk · 09/09/2026

University of Exeter staff have delivered a huge mandate to keep fighting cuts. 91% voted for industrial action on a 74% turnout. The fight to defend jobs and education at Exeter continues.

ucu.org.uk

University of Exeter staff back industrial action in redundancy fight

Staff at the University of Exeter have overwhelmingly backed a mandate for industrial action in a battle to save jobs, the University and College Union (UCU) has announced today.

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Reposted by Daniel Padfield

Jessica Elgot @jessicaelgot.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Statement from Progressive Judaism leaders - Rabbi Josh Levy and Rabbi Charley Baginsky “Holding an Israeli government accountable for its actions does not cause antisemitism. Antisemites cause antisemitism. progressivejudaism.org.uk/rabbi-charle...

progressivejudaism.org.uk

Rabbi Charley Baginsky and Rabbi Josh Levy: No single response can speak for British Jews - The Movement for Progressive Judaism

As we approach the High Holy Days, we enter a season of teshuvah, of looking honestly at ourselves, taking responsibility and asking what must change. Yet there is a temptation, on days like these, to...

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

...The GW4 PhDs need cross-institution collabs so would love to chat about how we could collaborate at some point. Combining experiments and phenotyping with sequencing.

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

You're in Bath now! They have amassed a super impressive set of microbial evolutionary ecologists. Congrats on your Wellcome. I am a long-time listener, first time caller (if that saying works on BlueSky). You're work is super cool...

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Seems to work but my code is VERY clunky, and it gets VERY messy when there are SNPs within the up and downstream base pairs.

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Well I am glad it is not just me who struggles with identifying true SNPs in population resequencing data. I have been playing with a method that takes a short kmer of the SNP (+/- 7bp up and downstream) and searches back for it in the raw reads. If it is a true SNP it should be present etc.

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

This looks great! Are there plans to allow population sequencing to be used as input might come from experimental evolution, like breseq allows?

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Bacterial community structure seems to have a large impact on ARGs (Figure 4 and makes sense), but the only mention of it in the methods is "PSEMs were fitted... bacterial community structure..." which is not clear, and there is no code so we can't look it up. Was it using the previous papers data?

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Recently in my Intro to R workshop, I had a brief section on error messages, debugging, and how to solve your own problems. An attendee asked why LLMs were at the bottom of the list — here's a few thoughts on why benharrap.com/post/2026-09...

benharrap.com

Limited Learning Mode: Why LLMs are my last resort – Ben Harrap

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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Hey @ericlipton.nytimes.com 👋 AI is not “evolving” on its own. *People* are choosing how to build it. *People* are choosing how to train it. *People* are choosing how to run it. Maybe the problem is that they are the *wrong people* to make these choices.

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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I love flextable for the same thing.

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