Çağlar Akçay
@caglarakcay.bsky.social
1.4K followers 1.4K following 34 posts
Animal social behaviour and cognition. https://caglarakcay.wordpress.com/ https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=sZ4qvtwAAAAJ&hl=en
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
sheldonbirds.bsky.social
Honouring the life of Sir John Gurdon, who died earlier this week: awarded the Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine for seminal work carried out in Oxford Zoology (now @biology.ox.ac.uk) showing that mature cells could be reprogrammed to become pluripotent.

www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medic...
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2012
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2012 was awarded jointly to Sir John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka "for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent"
www.nobelprize.org
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
wascherclaudia.bsky.social
Job alert: want to be my boss? 😁 The School of Life Sciences @ARU is looking for a new Head of School. It’s a great place to work with brilliant colleagues, students, and partners. Please share widely! #AcademicJobs #Leadership #LifeSciences #HigherEducation jobs.aru.ac.uk/vacancy/head...
Head of School of Life Sciences - ARU
jobs.aru.ac.uk
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
sarabssethi.bsky.social
Bugg is now available through GroupGets! groupgets.com/products/bug...

Real-time acoustic monitoring devices, tested from the Arctic to the tropics over long (1y+) deployments - with no maintenance!

Say goodbye to fiddly SD card retrievals and hello to instant ecological insights
Bugg v4 - Pre-Order
Bugg is the world’s first real-time bioacoustic monitoring device. Once set up, sit back and watch as live audio data streams in over months and years with almost no maintenance required.
groupgets.com
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
cassandrazieyang.bsky.social
Reading group alert!🔔 This term, our History and Philosophy of Biology reading group will be reading 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘖𝘯𝘵𝘰𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘐𝘯𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 (2000) by Susan Oyama. Online participants welcome! More details here: www.hps.cam.ac.uk/news-events/...
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
marcgilles.bsky.social
Want to know everything about bird smell?
I wrote an "Ornithological masterclass" on Avian Olfaction for BTO News @btobirds.bsky.social #ornithology
Link to the article 👉 www.researchgate.net/publication/...
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
catieivy.bsky.social
Do you like songbirds? Are you concerned about how wildfire smoke may impact their physiology?

I'm searching for graduate students who are interested in looking at the effect of wildfire smoke on songbird physiology! Come join my lab @usaskartsci.bsky.social!

research-groups.usask.ca/ivy-lab/
The Ivy Lab! - Welcome to the Ivy Lab!
research-groups.usask.ca
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
thomasmacgillavry.bsky.social
#bowerbirds are the only birds that build structures used specifically for courtship. But why and how did this remarkable ability evolve?

We discuss some possibilities in our new review in Emu - Austral Ornithology!

@fusanilab.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1080/0158...
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
enourani.bsky.social
🦅PhD position 🦅 in my new group at @fbm-unil.bsky.social in Switzerland, studying how the social and resource landscapes shape the learning process for soaring flight. Deadline: Oct 30. Pls repost! career5.successfactors.eu/career?caree...
Golden eagle on the nest in Finland (by O. Karlin)
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
pauldufour80.bsky.social
🚨 Master’s project!
Curious how birds find their way? 🧭🐦
Analyze decades of ringing data to study abnormal migratory routes and uncover what these deviations can reveal about the mechanisms guiding birds on their journeys. Drop me an email for details! #ornithology

www.vogelwarte.ch/de/wir/mitar...
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
disabilitystor1.bsky.social
Reminder that @theguardian.com has a partnership with OpenAI, and has of late published a spate of asinine articles that are uncritical in framing, and just read as press releases for the company and for "AI" in general.
The headline/implicit framing of this article seems consistent with its biases.
waitmanwbeorn.com
Oh, man. After reading the article, what it actually says is that an historian did a lot of archival work and spatial research to determine the site of a killing and then the family of the likely perpetrator stepped forward with photographs to confirm identity.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...
Historian uses AI to help identify Nazi in notorious Holocaust murder image
Jürgen Matthäus has for years been investigating the killer – and is confident he has finally solved the mystery
www.theguardian.com
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
🩷💛 Check out @olivia.science ‘s CAIL website, with beautiful posters, video/podcast, papers and more! 🤩 olivia.science/ai
Colorful poster with text “Have you considered NOT using AI”, and a QR code going to our preprint “Against the Uncritical Adoption of ‘AI’ technologies”
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
hatoonrehab.bsky.social
Another important one, I'm tired of how many times I had to explainbthis to peer researchers who claim they are equiped with what it needs to use these tools "responsibily".
olivia.science
Third, the peculiar idea that somehow we don't need to read, write, or perform literature reviews anymore; popping up like a satanic mushroom in almost all so-called OK uses of LLMs.

Companies writing our papers via their chatbots is not scientific at all. See section 5: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

7/
table 1 extract from Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1 5 Ghostwriter in the Machine
A unique selling point of these systems is conversing and writing in a human-like way. This is imminently understandable, although wrong-headed, when one realises these are systems that
essentially function as lossy2
content-addressable memory: when
input is given, the output generated by the model is text that
stochastically matches the input text. The reason text at the output looks novel is because by design the AI product performs
an automated version of what is known as mosaic or patchwork
plagiarism (Baždarić, 2013) — due to the nature of input masking and next token prediction, the output essentially uses similar words in similar orders to what it has been exposed to. This
makes the automated flagging of plagiarism unlikely, which is
also true when students or colleagues perform this type of copypaste and then thesaurus trick, and true when so-called AI plagiarism detectors falsely claim to detect AI-produced text (Edwards, 2023a). This aspect of LLM-based AI products can be
seen as an automation of plagiarism and especially of the research paper mill (Guest, 2025; Guest, Suarez, et al., 2025; van
Rooij, 2022): the “churn[ing] out [of] fake or poor-quality journal papers” (Sanderson, 2024; Committee on Publication Ethics, In addition, who is held accountable if nobody with intent
authored the text? Because while the original data fed into the
system is certainly written with goals, messages, and audiences in
mind jumbling this into ad-libbed word salad removes authorial
intent (Bender et al., 2021). So do the companies who own the
chatbot own the text or do the original authors? These questions
denote legal battles, which are being currently fought in the public eye and which affect all of us in all roles, not just as academics
(Creamer, 2025; Knibbs, 2024; Reuters, 2025). Either way, even if
the courts decide in the favour of companies, we should not allow
these companies with vested interests to write our papers (Fisher
et al., 2025), or to filter what we include in our papers. Because
it is not the case that we only operate based on legal precedents,
but also on our own ethical values and scientific integrity codes
(ALLEA, 2023; KNAW et al., 2018), and we have a direct duty to
protect, as with previous crises and in general, the literature from
pollution. In other words, the same issues as in previous sections
play out here, where essentially now every paper produced using
chatbot output must declare a conflict of interest, since the output text can be biased in subtle or direct ways by the company
who owns the bot (see Table 2).
Seen in the right light — AI products understood as contentaddressable systems — we see that framing the user, the academic
in this case, as the creator of the bot’s output is misplaced. The
input does not cause the output in an authorial sense, much like
input to a library search engine does not cause relevant articles
and books to be written (Guest, 2025). The respective authors
wrote those, not the search query!
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
olivia.science
New preprint 🌟 Psychology is core to cognitive science, and so it is vital we preserve it from harmful frames. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social & I use our psych and computer science expertise to analyse and craft:

Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🧵 1/
Cover page of Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1 Table 1 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1 Table 2 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
arispeshkin.bsky.social
⭐PhD position available!⭐
Come join us @imprs-qbee.bsky.social to study communication and collective behavior in animal groups! We're looking for someone excited to use computational approaches to tackle biological questions, using our full-group tracking datasets
imprs-qbee.mpg.de/121465/analy...
Analysis of communication and collective behavior in animal groups
imprs-qbee.mpg.de
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
behavecobie.bsky.social
MSc internship / Field Assistant position available in our group!
Impact of urbanisation on avian reproduction 🐦🏙️ 🌳
Deadline: 7 Nov 2025
All details 👉 www.uni-bielefeld.de/fakultaeten/...
Please share it around!
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
jexpbiol.bsky.social
In her review, Laura Stidsholt @bioacousticsau.bsky.social discusses how bat-borne acoustic devices are changing echolocation research in wild #bats by recording sensory & foraging behaviour across different species, habitats & levels of disturbance

journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...
A screen shot of the PDF of the Review, Unlocking the mysteries of biosonar use and foraging behaviour in wild bats with on-board acoustic recording tags, but Laura Stidsholt. The publishing information states: © 2025. Published by The Company of Biologists | Journal of Experimental Biology (2025) 228, jeb250777. doi:10.1242/jeb.250777. The first sentence of the Abstract states: Since the discovery of biosonar by Griffin in the 1940s, laboratories have conducted detailed experiments on how bats produce and modify their biosonar calls, as well as on how they detect and process self-generated echoes when orienting and hunting in flight rooms
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
twigtechnology.bsky.social
Jane Goodall was also the first to bring attention to wild tool-using vultures, which she spotted randomly one day while out driving. These birds use stones to break into ostrich eggs.

Be observant like Jane and who knows what you’ll see! 🧪🥚
A two page spread of national geographic magazine with a story by Jane Goodall and her husband reporting on egg-breaking, tool-using Egyptian vultures.
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
rdbinns.bsky.social
For any colleagues who are, like me, concerned about the threats Gen AI poses to the integrity of academic research, learning, and stewardship of knowledge, a counterpoint:

"AGAINST THE UNCRITICAL ADOPTION OF ‘AI’
TECHNOLOGIES IN ACADEMIA" - @olivia.science et al philarchive.org/archive/GUEATU
Reposted by Çağlar Akçay
telescoper.bsky.social
A meme for the modern university...
Meme showing a worker labelled "academic staff" digging a hole in the ground while 10 others look labelled with management titles such as "Director of Human Resources" look on. The caption underneath reads "The only way we can cut costs is to reduce the number of academic staff..."