dtpolet @dtpolet@qoto.org
Postdoc at Structure and Motion Lab, Royal Veterinary College. Biomechanics, animals, robots. Husband and Father of four. Opinions my own. (He/Him) http://dtpolet.com
Joined Nov 2022
dtpolet
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Hi folks
I’m a senior Curator of Flies and Fleas at the #naturalhistorymuseumlondon
I’ve been working & playing there for about 15 years and am slightly obsessed by flies…
If you want to know more about #flies, the #collection, #curation, #research or #fieldwork ask away….
dtpolet
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A mantis helping to keep the local brown marmorated stink bug population in check. (Mildly gruesome)
#macrophotography #macrophoto #insect #insects #mantis #bugseatingbugs
dtpolet
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So I understand that the bird site has started blocking links to common/known Mastodon instances, and that doesn't seem like free speech to me. So... I did a thing.
If you go to https://spacekaren.sucks it is now a URL shortener that blocks the twitter user agent. That means you can share that link that will redirect to your Mastodon account without the pouty baby stopping you. If you find this helpful can you boost so others can find it? #TwitterMigration #Mastodon #Musk #introduction
Hey, JEB is on Mastodon!! 🙌 I'm excited for more #ComparativeBiomechanics in this space!
Hello #ScienceMastodon. Journal of Experimental Biology #J_ExpBiol is an online #journal published by @Co_Biologists. Led by Editor-in-Chief Craig ...
You know you're at a #veterinarian college when...
dtpolet
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RT @ArthurCDent
Interesting. The AI totally fails the cognitive reflection test. It gives the intuitive but incorrect answer every time.
dtpolet
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The fallen tree here is, I am almost certain, a red oak I watched fall on a windy afternoon between 1994 and '98 in Wingra Woods, UW Madison Arboretum. I returned to it last week to get a sense of what 25 years of decomposition looks like for a red oak in an upland oak forest, north-facing slope, south-central Wisconsin.
Lake Wingra in the background, with white and red oaks and planted sugar maples.
@johnrhutchinson and his team used this exact mount from Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart for the 3D reconstruction of Batrachotomus. Our study also compared our simulations to fossil trackways of Chirotheriids, and was the first (that we know of) to identify gait transitions in an ancient pseudosuchian. It was a lot of fun, and I wish we still had "Rauisuchians" like Batrachotomus around today!
#FossilFriday: Batrachotomus, a pseudosuchian from ~240 million years ago. Although these animals were in the same clade as crocodilians, Batrachot...
This 3D printed bearing has no right to be this good. This is how it is straight off the printer (with just a little work to free the rollers), no lubricant https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2746804 #3Dprinting
#throwbackthursday to this #coolbugs I found in Bamfield BC 10 years ago. Harpaphe haydeniana, the "almond-scented millipede" (Almond scented because of the cyanide). I think they're pretty common but for an Alberta boy it was startling to see. Also #Mosstodon
When you spend hours trying to adjust the tolerances to fit a 6 mm Allen key only to realize that it's a 1/4" 😭 #3Dprinting #MetricPlease
dtpolet
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Faculty at more prestigious universities publish more bc they have funded Ph. D. students and postdocs to do the work.
In fields where advisors aren't put on Ph. D./postdoc research pubs, there is no relationship between university prestige and faculty productivity.
Mid-career faculty, matched, who move to institutions with more funded Ph. D./postdocs publish more.
Counting pubs is a poor method of judging a researchers quality.
dtpolet
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Hi! I am a CS PhD student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I am broadly interested in learning based #robotics to solve problems in #agriculture.
Currently I am working on vision-based navigation of under-canopy agricultural robots (https://ansivakumar.github.io/learned-visual-navigation/). These small robots could enable various precision agriculture applications like autonomous cover crop planting, mechanical weeding etc in an affordable way.
dtpolet
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RT @SolomonRDavid
And if you’ve never seen Paddlefish eat, here you go:
^Paddlefish use that long snout (laced with electroreceptors) to detect plankton, then filter them out of water with their gaping mouths & sieve-like gill rakers! https://twitter.com/stuart_orr/status/1597342422572630016
dtpolet
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dtpolet
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So, robots in movies are always depicted as being nimble on their feet and dextrous -- like the new trailer for M3GAN where the robot wanders around a house and dances and gently strokes a child's cheek
In reality even the best household robot we can build would trip over literally anything or accidentally shatter your ribcage while trying to open a box of cereal
My little rant on this: https://medium.com/@clivethompson/the-hilariously-bumbling-reality-of-humanoid-robots-31af6f02ef42
This is something I never considered before, but is a great use case for Dall-E and #AI generated art: as a resource for conceptual diagrams in papers.
Most of us researchers see how beautiful art can sell our research visions but lack artistic skills. These tools could help level the field somewhat.
(Figure from https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.11449)
dtpolet
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really neat academic job for a Canada Research Chair in "Technological Change for Inclusion"! https://www.sfu.ca/siat/hiring/crc.html
Postdoc at Structure and Motion Lab, Royal Veterinary College. Biomechanics, animals, robots. Husband and Father of four. Opinions my own. (He/Him) http://dtpolet.com
Joined Nov 2022
