James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 21/09/2026Its obviously AI, as both pre-prints are on ridiculously niche topics that I struggle to get others in my field interested in 🤣 and I got this messages within a day after the pre-prints went up. Also, there is an AI company called Primary that seems to deal in AI generated news 🙄. 010
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 21/09/2026Any 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 111
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 27/08/2026(2/2) In the peer review history here, there was just a single anonymous reviewer, who opened by saying "I cannot review the main academic portion of this manuscript". The bar for "peer review" in this journal is really unacceptable... this is really shameful. 000
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 27/08/2026The authors used a fucking web article from pethelpful.com in their "literature review of national animal welfare regulations". 000
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 27/08/2026This fucking paper even made it to the journals cover!? Please stop allowing anonymous peer review... There needs to be some level of accountability on how absolute shit gets through the peer review system. 100
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 27/08/2026Here's what I wrote when I peer reviewed it in an earlier submission... My jaw is on the floor as to how this got accepted... 101
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 13/07/2026I 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 150
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 13/07/2026Following up on this... I tried this in my own package, and it works wonderfully. Here, `last` is substituted for the length of the vector, and `fs` is the sample rate of the time series. Seems to work great, and its not clear to me if there is any problems that it might cause down the line. 000
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 27/06/2026I 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 142
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 15/06/2026One 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... 100
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 23/05/2026Clicked on the article... Was definitely not expecting to discover that the time magazine website also has an integrated AI chatbot?! Do we really have to put a chatbot in literally everything? 010
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 03/05/2026Simultaneously adorable and sad. I hope you find your little ewok 🥲. 010
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 04/03/2026This 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. 100
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 27/02/2026as if wine weren't confusing enough... half the time when I google an issue, I just end up with search results relating to wine *tasting* 😔 120
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 27/02/2026Here'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 252
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 12/02/2026#linux users rejoice! OnlyOffice is FINALLY adding support for multi-page layouts. It's currently the #opensource office suite that has the best compatibility with MSOFFICE docx... but has never allowed you to view more than one page of a doc at a time (which was frankly, insane). 020
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 03/02/2026I'm surprised R doesn't already have ternary operators... especially since they added anonymous functions somewhat recently. Here's my prettier --- but probably an awful idea --- take on the user-implemented ternary operator. 010
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 28/01/2026Also, this panel is titled "top 15 AI methods" and includes PCA, logistic regression, and nearest neighbours!? I'm so confused... 010
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 30/12/2025They calculated the AI CO2 training cost by dividing by the number of monthly queries. So the more total chatGPT queries, the "lower" the carbon foot print for AI writing. Pretty dumb metric in the context of climate change. 010
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 23/12/2025"...we occasionally have to mention specific concepts before properly introducing and/or defining them---we ask the reader to bear with us in these cases." It's always a pleasure to read papers where the author explicitly empathizes with the reader. 010
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 22/12/2025For the underwater noise folk. Oceannoise2026 conferende dates. Once again in Barcelona (pretty happy about that). 2026.oceanoise.com 000
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 21/12/2025I've been patiently waiting for the right moment to try out the legal cannabis i grew over the summer... This is perfect👌 031
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 21/12/2025Their AI toolset comes with an AI detector... And also an AI detector bypasser!? The intended use-case of this platform is pretty transparent. 000
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 30/11/2025The Christmas season has officially started in Berlin. Tis the season. 010
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 29/09/2025Is anyone old enough to remember how videogame piracy protection worked in like 1994? On my Amiga, to play "Indiana jones", I had to open the instruction manual to the stated page and read off a code. This is basically how the "new" 2-factor authentication works at Freie University (Berlin) now... 110
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 25/09/2025Has anyone heard of "The Egyptian Journal of Remote Sensing and Space Sciences"... reviewing job applications and this journal came up at least twice... Is this a sketchy predatory journal? Or is it a legit remote sensing journal with a weirdly specific name? #GIS 000
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 09/09/2025Just discovered the subreddit r/AdamDriverCats 000
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 25/08/2025My google newsfeed was already like 90% grocery store tabloids... But now it's AI boosted grocery store tabloid trash 😮💨 000
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 04/07/2025Last Aquatic Noise conf. post... Slide from John Potter's keynote. Like 9/10 ppl see only squares in this image... But in cultures where they live in round huts surrounded by round livestock fences, most of them can only see circles. Yes, I promise there are infact circles in this image... 041
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 04/07/2025A depressing closing, aquatic noise conference (Prague). #bioacoustics #academiclife Discussion on the confrnc's past funding from US agencies and how it's gone for the foreseeable future. Next conf will need to signif cut costs and there are discussions on alternate funding models. 110
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 02/07/2025Best poster at #AN2025. Tillman Spellauge used lasers to measure the resonance frequency of superficial sensory hair cells on snapping shrimp. He showed the hairs are sensitive to sounds around 2kHz. This supports previous observations that they can hear *without* their statocysts (i.e. ears). 262
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 30/06/2025#AN2025 conference, Prague: William Wu just presented some underwater measures we made in the river Spree, Berlin. The spectrogram shows what a passing ubahn sounds like from the perspective of a fish in the Spree. #bioacoustics (Repost as i wrote the wrong last name for William the first time...🤦) 040
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 30/06/2025(1/3) Johannes Baltzer (i believe?) presents the most beautiful example of modal dispersion i have ever seen. A seimsic airgun recorded at a far distance. (See thread) #bioacoustics #AN2025 210
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 24/06/2025I know I'm out of touch from most of society with my hatred for all things AI... ...but if there is 1 place on the internet I expect to read/listen to human beings, it would be the fucking github documentation page for open source bioacoustic analysis software. 110
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 21/06/2025If I wanted to reproduce this excellent figure (Bucker 1964) in my own paper, what would be the proper etiquette? Can I just remake a high-res version, then mention in the caption its a remake of Bucker 1964, or are there more complex copy-right issues here? 220
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 18/06/2025I want to give a shout-out to modern CSV. It reads and edits csv files... and *NOTHING* else. This means no stupid errors in your csv files due to formatting you never asked for --- yes, you can go to straight to hell excel auto date formatting! #rstats #academiclife www.moderncsv.com 2201
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 17/03/2025New #FishSci #AcousticTelemetry positioning paper: PMC-TOA positioning. I used adaptive importance sampling & mixture distributions to position fish in environments prone to tag reflections. Mixed with post-processing, this gives great tracks! doi.org/10.1111/2041... 1154
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 16/03/2025Just discovered r/aww. Amazing. www.reddit.com/r/aww/s/St3k... 010
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 12/03/2025On behalf of Canada, I'd like to apologize to all Dutch ppl... I had no idea we culturally appropriated your beloved stroop waffles. In typical fashion, it seems like we just added maple syrup and called it Canadian (which honestly sounds like an upgrade). 010
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 13/01/2025Very happy to read my institute newsletter this morning and see IGB Berlin [@leibnizigb.bsky.social] has stopped posting on twitter. 011
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 23/12/2024Bavarian festive junk food i spotted in a small town grocery store. Pretzel shaped salami, with very... traditional male targeted advertising. 020
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 17/12/2024I've been using jetbrains mono, and absolutely fell in love with it. Wonderful ligatures, and I can squeeze so much code on my screen while remaining easily readable. I'm also aware of fira code. Curious to know if anyone knows of other code-friendly mono fonts out there? #R #Rstats 062
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 09/12/2024Does anybody else use makefiles in their #R / #RStats analysis workflows? I'm obsessed with them... huge time saver when you have large collections of dependent scripts. Modify your your code, press build, and all outputs are automatically updated. I wish I figured this out years ago... 492
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 20/11/2024I feel like dark times are ahead for academic writing... I have never once googled chatgpt... But google autocomplete is assuming i want to write my thesis with it!? How many students had to ask this for it to show up in my autocorrect list? 130
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 23/10/2024For biologists wondering why understanding the physics is relevant: Here is a spectrogram recording of a seismic air gun (see alt txt). The "J" shape is a result of modal dispersion, a consequence of normal mode propagation. 000
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 17/10/2024#Innovasea president on why they don't sell open protocol receivers to north america: it would be too confusing for customers... 🤔 The panel discussion at #ETN2024 was transcribed and should be available at some point. #fishsci #fishsky #acoustictelemetry 122
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 16/10/2024Jelger Elings presents the "good intentions" of the upcoming Swiss telemetry network at the #ETN2024 conference in Spain. #RIBES #FishSci #Fishsky 000
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 29/09/2024For the sake of my home-office mental health, i take occasional r/chonkers breaks through the workday. This is peak internet. 010
James A Campbell @rtbecard.bsky.social · 22/08/2024Do you work with large #acoustictelemetry networks? Ed Lavender just put out a new model for tracking the paths of aquatic animals through these networks. You can: - Try the new R package here: buff.ly/4dDzcPW - Check out the preprint here: buff.ly/3AA0ibR #fishsci #fishsky 0138