dtpolet @dtpolet@qoto.org

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….

A mantis helping to keep the local brown marmorated stink bug population in check. (Mildly gruesome)

#macrophotography #macrophoto #insect #insects #mantis #bugseatingbugs

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

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.

#oaks #fieldnotes #arboretum #forest #decomposition

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.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq7056

#Introduction

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.

#agrobotics #fieldrobotics #robotsinthewild

Academia, where money is always a problem no matter how many titles and awards you have😅

#academia #PhD #science #xp @OpenAcademics @AcademicChatter

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

#robotics #robots #movies #popculture #AI