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James A Campbell

@rtbecard.bsky.social
1.8K followers 1K following 443 posts

(he/him) Former bird dude, current fish guy; currently based in Berlin. I'm into ecology, stats, bioacoustics, and artificial light. Currently working as part of this ETN: www.msca-ribes.eu

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by James A Campbell
Zack Labe @zacklabe.com · 25/09/2026
Quick oceans update: yah, sea surface temperatures remain in new territory this year. See more at zacklabe.com/climate-chan.... This data (extrapolar ocean) is provided by @copernicusecmwf.bsky.social ERA5. 🌊
Graph showing daily global mean sea surface temperatures for 2026. This is also compared to the daily data from the 1981-2010 average and 1991-2020 average. Annotations are also shown to the current year with the other years from 1940 to 2026. There is a seasonal cycle. There is a long-term warming trend. 2023 and 2024 are also indicated, which were the warmest years on record. Data is from ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis and updated through 23 September 2026.
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Reposted by James A Campbell
Eamonn-Forde @eamonn-forde.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Oh, Viz.
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
New #citizenscience #ALAN paper out from my labmates.
nature.com
Citizen science reveals temporally structured insect attraction and mitigation efficacy under artificial light at night - Communications Biology
Communications Biology - Citizen science reveals temporally structured insect attraction and mitigation efficacy under artificial light at night
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
@pfrazee.com what's the status of editing posts on here? Is this something that's on the roadmap? My accumulation of spelling mistakes is starting to become painful on here 😬.
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Any one know what this is? For two recent pre-prints, I've gotten AI agents posing as "science journalists" emailing me for media requests. I'm wondering what the hustle is here.... Both times, the agent identified itself as "Conor Watkins" from "Primary News". #OpenScience #SciComm
Hi James, I am a science journalist writing about your new approach to tracking aquatic animal movement using acoustic telemetry arrays. I noticed you developed EK-TOA, a method combining time-of-arrival positioning with an extended Kalman filter, which offers faster and more accurate tracking than existing state-space models for long-term fish monitoring. I would appreciate the chance to ask a few brief questions by email. Would you be open to a short asynchronous interview? 

Conor Watkins
Senior Reporter
Primary News
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Here's a thread of all my paper announcements:
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Preprint: This short paper is my take on how to calculate/report absolute measures of time-difference-of-arrival positioning in #acoustictelemetry setups. Beyond reporting, these error measures can be passed to statespace models (like CTCRW) for very accurate post-processing estimates.
biorxiv.org
Absolute measures of time-difference-of-arrival positioning error in underwater acoustic telemetry setups
This brief communication presents two solutions for calculating absolute measures of error from time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) positioning in underwater acoustic telemetry arrays. First, a Monte Ca...
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
New preprint out: I use an extended Kalman filter for #acoustictelemetry positioning. It solves positions more-less instantly while applying a CTCRW movement model. It works great on datasets that don't have huge outliers (due to horizontal reflections).
biorxiv.org
An extended Kalman filter for large-volume path positioning of aquatic animals within acoustic telemetry arrays
Acoustic telemetry is a core methodology for collecting fine-scale movement data for aquatic animals. When telemetry receivers are set up in closely spaced arrays with overlapping detection ranges, th...
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Reposted by James A Campbell
Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 03/09/2026
fun fact! Musk's fossil fuelled data centres almost certainly emit more climate pollution than is saved by all Tesla vehicles ketanjoshi.co/2026/03/02/m...
Grok's fossil-fuelled data centres wipe out either a large chunk or more than all of Tesla's global avoided emissions
Fossil fuelled chatbot emissions
Avoided emissions from Tesla products
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xAI data centres
32
2024 (Tesla report)
20
2023 (Tesla report)
13
2023 (Independent estimate, high)
10
2023 (Independent estimate, low)
...from its EVs, solar panels and batteries (depending on which year and calculation you use). All numbers in megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Has anyone been getting media requests from suspected AI agents for their papers? I published an *extremely* niche preprint... and my supervisor immediately got a media request email from a "journalist" from "Primary News". #SciComm #scisky
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
"Proceeding of the Royal society" is now officially on my list of absolutely shit journals... They published the worst paper I have every peer reviewed (and the worst piece of scientific writing I have ever read, by far).
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
What is the preferred (not latex or cloud-based) document format for collaboratively writing manuscripts across linux/windows/macOS? Specifically for equation compatibility. I'm using onlyoffice to write docx right now... seems to work... but I'm not sure how much I can trust it 🤔
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Reposted by James A Campbell
All Our Yesterdays @allouryesterdays.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Vol. 2, no. 5 of the CO2 Newsletter, June-August 1981 is now downloadable. Founded by American geologist William Barbat, each was 8 pages of excerpts from recent reports, editorials and deeply researched articles. All 18 issues are heart-breakers. allouryesterdays.info/co2-newslett... 1/9
CO2 Newsletter vol. 2 no 5 page 1
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Are there examples of concise statements that people put in acknowledgments sections to make clear to readers that absolutely no AI was used in any part of their paper? #Academiclife
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
I wrote up my solution for figure scaling in rmarkdown. `fig.width` and `fig.height` set the output size and the new `scale` parameter scales the figure contents. Paste the code for the option hook in the first chunk, and the scale parameter will be available in all the following chunks. #rstats
Plots with variable scale factors and constant size.

```{r, fig.width=2, fig.height=2}
plot(pressure)
```
```{r, fig.width=2, fig.height=2, scale = 0.5}
plot(pressure)
```Image of output from rmarkdown figure scaling example```{r setup, include=FALSE}
# Set chunk hook
# This will automatically adjust the figure parameters for you
knitr::opts_hooks$set(fig_scale = function(options) {
  
  # --- Store out_width
  # HTML and latex output require different units
  out_width <- switch(knitr::opts_knit$get("rmarkdown.pandoc.to"),
    # html requires pixels
    "html" = sprintf("%ipx", options[["fig.width"]] * options[["dpi"]]),
    # Latex requires inches
    "latex" = sprintf("%.fin", options[["fig.width"]])
  )
  
  # Calculate new fig width and height values
  fig_width <- options[["fig.width"]]/options[["scale"]]
  fig_height <- options[["fig.height"]]/options[["scale"]]
  
  # Store chunk options
  options$out.width = out_width
  options$fig.height = fig_height
  options$fig.width = fig_width
  # Return the modified options
  return(options)
})

# Set figure scaling hook for following chunks
knitr::opts_chunk$set(scale = 0.8, fig_scale = TRUE)
```
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Dear #rstats, is there a repository that shows the build scripts for all the libraries bundled in RTools distributions? I had an especially awful time trying to link to RTools' libsndfile (I gave up and compiled my own). Would be helpful if I could see how these libraries are configured.
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
#rstats, is there a reason why R doesn't have a special `end` keyword for indexing? Like, `vec[(end-10):(end)]` for selecting the last 10 elements (as opposed to `n=length(vec); vec[(n-10):n]`). Or some reasonable way to refer to the last index? I feel like this is some low-hanging fruit
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
I finally found a nice solution for scaling figures in rmarkdown: Setup a chunk options hook which dynamically sets the out.width, fig.width and fig.height options. fig.width=7, scale=0.8 now returns a figure 7 in wide, but the contents will be scaled down by a factor of 0.8. #Rstats
Screenshot of codeblock:

# Set chunk hook
# This will automatically adjust the figure parameters for you
knitr::opts_hooks$set(fig_scale = function(options) {
  # Calculate out_width
  out_width <- sprintf("%.fin", options[["fig.width"]])
  fig_width <- options[["fig.width"]]/options[["scale"]]
  fig_height <- options[["fig.height"]]/options[["scale"]]
  # Store chunk options
  options$out.width = out_width
  options$fig.height = fig_height
  options$fig.width = fig_width
  return(options)
})

# Set figure scaling hook
knitr::opts_chunk$set(scale = 0.8, fig_scale = TRUE)

# Set random seed for reproducible plots
set.seed(1)Example chunk where fig.width=7 and fig.height=5The resulting figure which has a width of 7 inches and the contents are scaled by a factor 0.8, so it matches well with rest of the document's text size.
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Just got accepted for a spot at the at the ETN symposium on Oct 13-15 in Copenhagen: "Novel methods for fine-scaled positioning: Population Monte Carlo and extended Kalman filtered time-of-arrival positioning."
europeantrackingnetwork.org
ETN Symposium
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Reposted by James A Campbell
Dirk Eddelbuettel @eddelbuettel.com · 21/06/2026
BBC article about Brian Ripley of the #RStats Core team given this week's excellent news concerning 2026 Rousseeuw Price for Statistics recognition for him and the core team. www.bbc.com/news/article...
bbc.com
Prof Brian Ripley on developing R to manage the world's data
Prof Brian Ripley has spent the past three decades working on a computer software that analyses data.
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Reposted by James A Campbell
Noam Ross @noamross.net · 19/06/2026
NSF's grantmaking is miserly when compared to recent years, but when compared it to the historical record, we see it's a radical break from the long-term consensus of investing in scientific innovation. grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0... #NSF 🧪
grant-witness.us
The NSF is on Track for its Worst Year in Generations – Grant Witness
Throttling of science funding is utterly unprecedented and radical when compared to the past 50 years.
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Reposted by James A Campbell
Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
At the end of the term I asked my college creative wriing students to submit anonymous thoughts on AI. No real surprises: Mood ranges from resignation to despair, capitulation from embittered erosion of standards to total, feelings of betrayal from deep to furious. 1/
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
One of the more strange Amazon AI slop products I've found. People don't really put their chickens in hamster balls, right? ...the reviews for this are on the fence...
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
FYI, to all researchers in #underwaternoise / #bioacosutics. Our beloved UW-30 (Electro Voice) underwater speaker is no longer in production, since last year already. AFAIK, there is only one other company that makes similar speakers (Aqua 30 by DNH). RIP UW-30, you served us well 🫡
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Reposted by James A Campbell
Gregg Gonsalves @gregggonsalves.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Really awful. Write to American Diabetes Association CEO Charles "Chuck" Henderson at chenderson@diabetes.org and Chief Scientific and Medical Officer Rita Rastogi Kalyani at rkalyani@diabetes.org. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/w...
nytimes.com
Police Remove Diabetes Experts From Conference for Distributing Critique of Trump Administration
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Reposted by James A Campbell
Ocean Tracking Network @oceantracking.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
🌊 Registration is now open for the 2026 OTN Symposium! Join us November 9–12 in Halifax, Nova Scotia to connect with colleagues and explore the latest in aquatic tracking research. Register here: event.fourwaves.com/otnsymposium...
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Reposted by James A Campbell
Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
My life's choices have left me in a place where I have to bounce back and forth between writing equations in LaTeX and writing them in Word's "equation editor." What I have done to deserve this.
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Reposted by James A Campbell
alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 22/05/2026
i'm looking for interesting teaching examples where (1) random effects/multilevel models predict better than glmnet (2) glmnet predicts better than random effects #rstats #statistics
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
I finally made the time to read over (most of) this. This is a really wonderful introductory paper for those interested in learning how continuous-time HMMs work. FYI, the paper's author, Dominic Grainger, is also here on bluesky: @dpdgrainger.bsky.social #rstats
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Reposted by James A Campbell
anil oza @aniloza.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖
Twitter thread from Thomas Dietterich, reading "Attention 
@arxiv
 authors: Our Code of Conduct states that by signing your name as an author of a paper, each author takes full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated. 1/
3:03 PM · May 14, 2026
·
66.7K
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Relevant
View quotes

Thomas G. Dietterich
@tdietterich
·
1h
If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s). 2/
Thomas G. Dietterich
@tdietterich
·
1h
We have recently clarified our penalties for this. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can't trust anything in the paper. 3/
Thomas G. Dietterich
@tdietterich
·
1h
The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue. 4/
Thomas G. Dietterich
@tdietterich
·
1h
Examples of incontrovertible evidence: hallucinated references, meta-comments from the LLM ("here is a 200 word summary; would you like me to make any changes?"; "the data in this table is illustrative, fill it in with the real numbers from your experiments") end/"
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Reposted by James A Campbell
Elisabeth Bik @elisabethbik.bsky.social · 03/05/2026
Good morning from the @wcrifoundation.bsky.social in Vancouver, BC. Today, I will attend two pre-conference workshops before the grand opening tonight. We'll start with Workshop 2 - AI in Bioimaging: Challenges and Solutions to Facilitate FAIR Image Data wcri2026.org/pre-conferen... #WCRI2026
Photo of the title slide:
"Workshop 2 - AI in Bioimaging: Challenges and Solutions to Facilitate FAIR Image Data" 
with photos of the two speakers
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 03/05/2026
Simultaneously adorable and sad. I hope you find your little ewok 🥲.
Lost dog poster, featuring a photo of the cute dog alongside a photo of a very similar looking ewok (the teddy bear aliens from the planet moon endor in return of the jedi).
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
Beyond this one, are there any other good "statistical ecology"-adjacent starter packs? go.bsky.app/RJXBftm
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Science Magazine @science.org · 25/04/2026
U.S. President Donald Trump has fired all 24 members of the National Science Board, the body that oversees the National Science Foundation. scim.ag/4cxQWhl
scim.ag
Trump fires NSF's oversight board
Dismissal of the National Science Board is widely seen as latest move to erase NSF’s independence
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
Fish movement/tracking people, ICYMI: The abstract deadline for the European Tracking Network symposium (Copenhagen, Oct. 13-15) is April 30th. #AcousticTelemetry #Fishsci
europeantrackingnetwork.org
ETN Symposium
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
This is actually insanely helpful.
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Gabby Palomo, PhD @gabspalomo.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
Ecologists I need a favor! 🌎🌍🌏 I am teaching a GIS class for freshmen. I want to zoom in for like 15-20 min with other ecologists that are using drones, uav, collars, biologgers, telemetry, or any type of sensors to study wildlife. 1️⃣
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Peter Geoghegan @petergeoghegan.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
🧵 Oxford Institute for Energy Studies often cited in UK media stories on oil and gas But how independent is it? Its staff includes director of major sanctioned Russian gas firm and researcher accused of pushing Kremlin talking points New on Democracy for Sale: open.substack.com/pub/democrac...
open.substack.com
The Oxford energy institute with a Kremlin problem
The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies is cited across UK media as an independent expert on oil and gas. Now its Russian ties are under scrutiny.
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Reposted by James A Campbell
David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
I don't think people fully appreciate how apocalyptic things are for US science. I haven't had any new funding since 2024, but I'm still ok since typical grants are for three years. This means next year I will be completely out of funding and will have to fire everyone in the lab. It's not great.
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
Dear #Rstats , I know someone who studies/works in psychology, and they are interested in getting more into the statistics side of things. Is there a really good psychology-focused statistics conference that they should keep on their radar?
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Reposted by James A Campbell
James Balamuta @coatless.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
29 years of #rstats community knowledge was sitting in hard-to-search pipermail archives. So I built a more modern home for it. Introducing the R Mailing List Archives: 631,000+ messages from 32 lists, fully searchable and available as open data. r-mailing-lists.thecoatlessprofessor.com
Homepage of the R Mailing List Archives showing a search bar, three popular lists (R-help with 398,500 messages, R-devel with 63,425, and R-package-devel with 12,125), and a full directory of core lists and special interest groups.
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Olga Nesterova @onestpress.onestnetwork.com · 14/03/2026
DOGE employee, who, in his twenties, made decisions to cut aid based solely on personal judgement, according to him.
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
I know there are a lot of ecologists out there who are JDSM curious, but get scared off by how technical the primary literature is... Here's your chance to learn how they work. Strongly recommend this to anyone who is interested in species distribution modelling. #Rstats
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
This guy with a bachelor degree uploaded 120 research items back dated since Jan 2020, covering medicine, AI, engineering, physics, pop genetics ... All with the same awful AI template. Researchgate already felt stagnant... but i don't see how it can survive in the academic-AI-slop era.
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Mattan S. Ben-Shachar @mattansb.msbstats.info · 03/03/2026
Hey #stats folk, I'm looking for some great (but concise) YouTube vids about likelihood functions & estimation (MLE, properties, Fisher information, std errs). These would serve students taking my Bayesian course that didn't take the preceding likelihood course (that is taught by someone else).
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Science Magazine @science.org · 03/03/2026
Many of the scientists Jeffrey Epstein courted were already well-established and well-funded. So why didn’t they all just say no? Science talked with three who did just that. Here’s how Epstein approached them, and why they refused to have anything to do with him. ⬇️ scim.ag/40qbXnv
scim.ag
Meet three scientists who said no to Epstein
The warning signs included a web search, a mother’s doubts, and inklings of a “sexist attitude”
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Gavin Simpson @gsimpson.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
🎉 It's livestream day 🎉 Join me at 1700 (CET; 1600 UCT) today for two hours of GAM goodness 🤤 📽️ Youtube: youtube.com/live/A9U8e1K... Hit the Notify me 🔔 to get a reminder when I go live #RStats #mgcv #statistics #GAMs #DataScience 🧪
lnkd.in
LinkedIn
This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn
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Reposted by James A Campbell
Andy Tattersall @andytattersall.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
I've been really pleased with the reception of my Under Review podcast. Last week's episode with @elisabethbik.bsky.social has been viewed on YouTube almost 800 times as well as a good number on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. www.youtube.com/watch?v=l254... podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/u... 1/3
youtube.com
Under Review with Dr Elisabeth Bik - Research fraud detection, papermills and that rat.
YouTube video by Andy Tattersall
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
#Rstats Are there any workshops planned this year on the topic of applying JSDMs via the gllvm package? I see @vdveenb.bsky.social hosted an online course last year. I have some colleagues interested in using the doing JSDMs, and it would be great to point them towards a workshop.
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James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
Here's my take on a Linux wrapper for Innovasea's Fathom Connect software. Seems to work fine on Ubuntu 24.04 for converting vdat files to csv. gitlab.com/RTbecard/fat... Shout out to @obrien.page for discovering that Fathom Connect works in wine. #AcousticTelemetry
Screenshot of the linked gitlab repository readme.
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