Owen Forbes

Screen shot of title page of a preprint. Title: Should generative AI be used in reflexive qualitative research? Authors: Elida Izani Ibrahim, Laura K. Nelson, and Andrea Voyer

Recent publications arguing against the use of genAI in reflexive qual research inspired us (Elida Ibrahim and @andreavoyer.bsky.social) to write our own perspective. Not to convince anyone to use genAI but for those who might be interested and are looking for guidance.

osf.io/preprints/so...

Little blogpost reporting an analysis of recent (2021-2025) retractions of highly-cited papers in relation to #PubPeer comments. deevybee.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-...
#retractions #publishing

"How do class gaps compare to race and gender gaps? Strikingly, we find that the class gaps in tenure-track academia are as large as or larger than analogous race or gender gaps."

A megastudy of behavioral interventions to catalyze public, political, and financial climate advocacy Abstract. Addressing climate change depends on large-scale system changes, which require public advocacy. Here, we identified and tested 17 expert-crowdsou

New study finds that emphasizing collective efficacy (people's ability to catalyze large-scale change) is very effective in catalyzing behavioural change.

As you can see from my pinned post, I'm a big fan of simple messages that can mobilize public support for climate action!

Writing is thinking

"On the value of human-generated scientific writing in the age of large-language models."

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

How scientists can contribute to the social movements essential to protecting climate and nature - npj Climate Action Scientists have much to contribute to the growing social movements pushing for urgent and transformative change to address the climate and biodiversity crises. Depending on their skills, interests and...

There is much to be done, at all levels.

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

The 0.5.0 version of my {brms} + {tidyverse} translation of McElreath's "Statistical Rethinking" (2nd ed) is up!

solomon.quarto.pub/sr2/

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#rstats

WARN-D machine learning competition is live » Eiko Fried If you share one single thing of our team in 2026—on social media or per email with your colleagues—please let it be this machine learning competition. It was half a decade of work to get here, especi...

After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data.

If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition.

eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

Join me in congratulating @miriforbes.bsky.social for this recognition of her exceptional work!

Huge honor well deserved!

Just learned I've won the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Psychology in the area of psychopathology, and am feeling pretty delighted!! So grateful to @aidangcw.bsky.social for nominating me, and very proud of the work it's based on.

Book cover for Reproducible Code guide. The cover has a red background with a large yellow-bodied black-headed stag beetle.

Excited to launch the new improved Reproducible Code guide from @britishecologicalsociety.org @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social FREE online here! www.britishecologicalsociety.org//wp-content/... Amazing work by some very talented ECRs. We hope it’s useful!

The breeding season is in full swing! After some troubles with currawong predation, most of the groups are on their second or third nest, and all the parents are busy provisioning their young 🦗🐦 30 chicks banded so far! #superbfairywren #SFW_ANU #birds #ecology

Congratulations Ben!!! 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

Global sampling decline erodes science potential of natural history collections - Nature Communications Natural history collections hold over two billion specimens representing Earth’s biodiversity, but their scientific value depends on continued specimen collection and digitisation. This study demonstr...

“Overall, these findings suggest that the value of natural history collections as global research infrastructure is eroding due to decreased collecting of specimen data across species, locations, and time.“ doi.org/10.1038/s414... Interesting analysis based on @gbif.org data.

Global sampling decline erodes science potential of natural history collections - Nature Communications Natural history collections hold over two billion specimens representing Earth’s biodiversity, but their scientific value depends on continued specimen collection and digitisation. This study demonstr...

We need new collections but - most importantly - the future generations of scientists will need new collections. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Global sampling decline erodes science potential of natural history collections - Nature Communications Natural history collections hold over two billion specimens representing Earth’s biodiversity, but their scientific value depends on continued specimen collection and digitisation. This study demonstr...

In an era marked by rapid climate change and biodiversity loss, it is imperative that we continue to invest in the unique value of natural history collections data

"Global sampling decline erodes science potential of natural history collections" 🧪

GBIF specimen records—number of specimens, unique species and spatial extent for Chordata, Arthropoda and Plantae (1950–2019).

"Here we show substantial declines in the rates of collection of specimen data over recent decades, from analysis of over 150 million records from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) spanning more than two centuries"
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🧪 #Macroecology #EvoBio #Paleobio

I’m pretty delighted to be part of this awesome group! Can’t wait to work together in this new chapter for HiTOP

Photos of the 2026 HiTOP Society Executive Committee, including those in the post as well as Past President Bob Krueger, Executive Chair of the Workgroups Committee David Cicero, and Chair of the Research and Publication Board (ex officio) Roman Kotov

Congratulations to everyone elected to our Society's 2026 Executive Committee!

President: Miri Forbes
President-Elect: Chris Conway
Secretary: Kelsie Forbush
Treasurer: Len Simms
Trainee Engagement Chair: Caroline Balling
Membership Chair: Holly Levin-Aspenson
Conference Chair: Martin Sellbom

The default prior for the intercept in both {rstanarm} and {brms} are very wide.

Counterintuitively - being on the logit scale, this is actually translates to a **strong** prior that p(y=1) is near 1 or near 0.

Always check your priors!

#rstats

Congratulations to my student, Maggie Ma, for publishing her first #rstats package {ggincerta} on CRAN 🥳

Spatial uncertainty visualisation (bivariate, pixel, exceedance, glyph), like {Vizumap}, but fully integrated with ggplot2 -- a much simpler API with all the advantages of the ggplot2 system.

Bird migration is changing. What does this reveal about our planet? – visualised Bird migrations rank as one of nature’s greatest spectacles. Thanks to GPS tracking, scientists are uncovering extraordinary insights into ancient and mysterious journeys – and new threats that are re...

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Everyone deserves to see this beautiful piece of science communication.
🌏🧪🪶
There are many things I love about this, but I think number one is that it features the story a little known, but amazing seabird species, the Desertas Petrel.

the galaxias hex logo showing a fun-coloured illustration of a green galaxias fish. The head, gills and fin in the centre with light green on the underside, green lips and wavy shades of green on its back, with blue and orange markings by its eye and gills. The background is light orangey-salmony colour in a sunburst style

🚨Our new package {galaxias} is released in R & Python today! 🚨

📦 galaxias makes it easy to standardise data to Darwin Core, the accepted format for sharing ecological data with infrastructures like @gbif.org and the Atlas of Living Australia

galaxias.ala.org.au

#rstats #python 🧪🌏🐟

A thread 🧵👇

Plots indicating trends in sampling over time by number of specimens, number of unique species, and number of spatial grids (1 degree lat/long) represented globally Left column = Chordata; middle column = Plantae; right column = Arthropoda. Top row = number of specimens per year; middle row = number of unique species per year; bottom row = spatial extent based on the number of 1-degree grid cells with specimens observed per year. Blue, green and red lines indicate LOESS (locally estimated scatterplot smoothing) curves for specimen counts by collection year for Chordata, Plantae and Arthropoda, respectively.

Patterns of decline vary across taxa and regions - biggest declines seen for plants and vertebrates, with insects showing more recent peak and decline

This heatmap displays the change in the mean annual count of specimens collected between 2010 and 2019 compared to the reference period of 1970–2009, in 1-degree latitude-longitude grids, across all three taxonomic groups combined (Chordata, Plantae and Arthropoda). Substantial patterns of decline are seen, particularly apparent across areas with historically high levels of collecting across Australia, North America, Western Europe

We're collecting less than half as many biodiversity specimens as in the 1960s-1980s, at a time when they're more important than ever for climate & ecology science. Natural history collections provide crucial data that no other source can match. Our new paper in Nature Comms: doi.org/10.1038/s414...

📸An incredible start to #IDW2025 today with over 800 delegates joining us in Brisbane/Meanjin and online from across the globe to share knowledge and build connections.

#SciDataCon #RDAplenary
@codata-isc.bsky.social @worlddatasystem.org @researchdataall.bsky.social

w/ @science.org.au

From Cory Doctorow: "AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations" damn I wish I had written that line
pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/e...

An adapted version of the current HiTOP model, including 'psychosis' and 'emotional dysfunction' superspectra and omitting the homogeneous symptom component/maladaptive traits lists

Look no further for an *excellent* overview of HiTOP! This chapter for the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Dimensional Models in Psychopathology does a fantastic job of pulling everything together.

Tam Pham is an absolute superstar and I feel very lucky to work with her ✨

osf.io/preprints/ps...

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.
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Happy National Wattle Day! 💛💚

Did you know Australia is home to nearly 1,000 species of wattle?

From Golden Wattle, our national floral emblem (Acacia pycnantha), to the rare pink-purple blooms of Acacia purpureopetala, wattles are as diverse as the landscapes they grow in.

#NationalWattleDay