Sarah Hird, PhD

Three book boxes set of Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark

LOOK. WHAT. I. GOT. FOR. ONE. DOLLAR.

a man in a black shirt is standing in front of a sign that says ladies and gentlemen Alt: The James Bond guy hosting snl says ladies and gentlemen the weekend

Kat. I’m concerned that you’re struggling to get through the weekend. That’s supposed to be the easy part.

Postdoc in Microbial bioinformatics

A 2-y postdoc position in my former group at University of Copenhagen is available in microbial ecology and bioinformatics.

See more: employment.ku.dk/faculty/?sho...

Feel free to contact me if you have questions about the environment.

Please share the ad.

Scene from a recent treehouse of horror where the Simpsons characters are creepily drawn and have solid black eyes.

Is “one Treehouse of Horror episode every night for the month of October” a fun family activity or is it the worst idea anyone’s ever had? Only time will tell… #spookyseason

What. A. Show off.

It’s neither here nor there BUT you just inspired me to add “PhD” to my name. So. Thanks - and I hope you’re doing well!!!

Front page of UConns daily newspaper, the daily campus, with headline “right wing media group submits FOIA requests to UConn, state colleges”

Cool. Cool cool cool.
#nutmegsky #AcademicSky

To Disney+ & Hulu: byyyeeeeeeeeee

The drowning / high five meme where the first panel of the hand of the drowning person reaching out of the water labeled “academics”, the second panel with a hand coming in labeled “admin” and the third panel with the helping hand high giving the drowning hand labeled “more work”. The fourth panel is the hand going under the water.

Looking at my inbox like

a woman is holding a yellow sticky note with help written on it Alt: a woman is holding a yellow sticky note with help written on it

Spent a little time talking w colleagues about if/how they’re having conversations w undergrads about all the current events right now. How to manage controversial topics, conflicting opinions, safety and free speech. Not an easy task, y’all.

How about you, fellow profs? What’s your strategy?

A beautiful tree with leaves ranging from red to green.

“LOOKIT THAT TREE” season feels extra soul replenishing this year.

a woman wearing glasses is waving her hand while sitting in front of a window . Alt: Liz Lemon from 30 Rock gives herself a high five while sitting in front of a window .

Some good news today: I was chosen to present at our middle school’s College and Career Readiness Day.

Everything about this makes me sick to my stomach.
The ignorance & illegality & unfairness & snowflakery & how right now some people’s hateful “religious beliefs” are triumphing over science, religious freedom, freedom of speech, academic freedom & basic empathy. Sad for USA. Mad for this prof.

SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in a college applicant's file is blatantly unconstitutional

ALSO SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in targeting whom to detain and deport is cool cool cool

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

clip.cafe/share/i-noti...

Adobe acrobat zoomed in at the top of a document to show their notification “this appears to be a long document. Save time by reading a summary.”

Adobe acrobat zoomed in to show (1) rainbow colored “Ask AI Assistant” button, (2) “View Summary” button and (3) on the right toolbar a purple document emoji with a star that leads to their ai summary.

Adobe Acrobat Reader telling me “This appears to be a long document. Save time by reading a summary.” with not 1, not 2, but 3 buttons to their AI tools. I’m…offended? Yeah, yep, that’s the right word. “Save time by reading less! Save time by learning less! Save time by thinking less!!”

Large decals on a wall showing a giant beaver, a mammoth and an elk (?).

The world needs more naturalists & science communicators. EVERY WALL COULD LOOK LIKE THIS!

a man with a beard is wrapped in a blanket with the words oh this is bad written on it Alt: A man with a beard ( maybe Thor?) is wrapped in a blanket with the words oh this is bad written on it

A long time ago, I put Royal Match on my phone so if I was bored I wouldn’t resort to doomscrolling & I just reached a level so high it is genuinely upsetting. There shouldn’t even be this many levels. Is Royal Match infinite? Is this my religion?

Front page of the Daily Campus with huge headline that reads “Research Paused at Avery Point after Federal Stop-Work Order”

Helluva front page at @uconn.bsky.social

As national medical, scientific, public health and patient organizations, we call for the resignation of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to ensure the health of the American people. Read our statement: asm.org/press-releas...

a cat is standing on a wooden floor in front of a blue chair Alt: a cat is standing on a wooden floor in front of a blue chair then a second cat flies through the air and attacks it

it is such an assault to check email after ignoring it for literally any amount of time.

a skeleton is standing in a room with the words `` why just why '' written on it . Alt: a skeleton is standing in a room then falls down with the words ‘ why just why ‘

I am very sad & very angry that a grifter with no medical or health-related knowledge got so famous saying “don’t trust the government about health” that he got appointed to the government & now we can’t trust the government about health.

Why. Why have we done this.

Picture of Lego set 40530 which is a 276 piece set honoring Jane freaking Goodall in a jungle setting with cute little chimpanzees

11:59:00am: I am 100% committed to taking my kids to that Lego place in the mall but not buying anything. 100%.

11:59:01am: I have never beheld a better use for my disposable income than this Lego set. It was made for me and I will die without it.

In my defense:

lol. I’m no economist but I’m pretty sure the federal government illegally revoking millions & millions of research dollars to universities is not part of a “free market”.

Screenshot of Sarah's screenshot with a red circle around and arrow pointing to microsoft copilot ai which *can not be turned off even on our private devices if we access uni email*.

I want to know how much they are saving by cutting (contracted) janitorial services compared to what they spent on the stochastic parrot.

Still have custodial services. In their offices and in their car service and in their lobbies. I don’t even create that much trash in my office and it’s not about me. It’s about the decline of our whole system that very differently affects people with different job titles & associated power.

To do takes that time away from the job I WAS hired to do. I can’t grade an assignment and take out the trash at the same time. And it’s also that I don’t believe everyone on campus will be taking out their own trash. The admins who made the decisions that got us into a financial crisis will likely

I’m not really complaining about having to do one more small task. It’s that this was someone’s highly valued job that they have now lost because of decisions made by administrators, politicians and Board of Trustees members. It’s that with every task I’m asked to do that I wasn’t actually hired …