Lara S. Burchardt
@lsburchardt.bsky.social
500 followers 190 following 46 posts
Behavioural Biologist at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin| Rhythm and Beat Precision in Acoustic Communication and Other Systems | PhD from MfN Berlin and Free University Berlin | coding in R | she/her
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Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
aosiecka.bsky.social
🔊 This the season! Looking or two MSc students to tackle
1. vocal efficiency across pipit species
and, surpsingly,
2. vocal tract anatomy of the great cormorant (bonus: I also have the heads to model hearing!)

Drop me a line! I love people! :)

docs.google.com/document/d/1...
MSc project
MSc thesis projects in animal communication Laws of brevity across pipit (Anthus) species Across many human languages, there are several general principles in temporal patterning: most frequent word...
docs.google.com
Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
wimpouw.bsky.social
At this workshop today about where hand gestures get their rhythm from - participants can join online.

sfb1252.uni-koeln.de/veranstaltun...
Poster for this event: https://sfb1252.uni-koeln.de/veranstaltungen/internationale-tagungen-workshops/beatology
Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
zacklabe.com
I’m often asked for temperature anomaly plots using a “pre-industrial” baseline (1850–1900). I update a full set of these graphics each month, now through August 2025: zacklabe.com/climate-chan.... Always free to use and share!
Climate change indicators
All data are referenced at My visualizations: Arctic Climate Seasonality and Variability Arctic Sea Ice Extent and Concentration Arctic Sea Ice Volume and Thickness Arctic Temperatures Antarctic Se…
zacklabe.com
Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
jessicacalarco.com
Ironically, it appears that AI chatbots hallucinate for the same reason that students feel compelled to use them:

They were socialized in a high-stakes testing culture that rewards guessing and maybe getting it right over admitting when there's something you just don't know.
Why Language Models Hallucinate, by Kalai et al. 

Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when
uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such
“hallucinations” persist even in state-of-the-art systems and undermine trust. We argue that
language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over
acknowledging uncertainty, and we analyze the statistical causes of hallucinations in the modern
training pipeline. Hallucinations need not be mysterious—they originate simply as errors in binary
classification. If incorrect statements cannot be distinguished from facts, then hallucinations
in pretrained language models will arise through natural statistical pressures. We then argue
that hallucinations persist due to the way most evaluations are graded—language models are
optimized to be good test-takers, and guessing when uncertain improves test performance. This
“epidemic” of penalizing uncertain responses can only be addressed through a socio-technical
mitigation: modifying the scoring of existing benchmarks that are misaligned but dominate
leaderboards, rather than introducing additional hallucination evaluations. This change may
steer the field toward more trustworthy AI systems.
Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
aosiecka.bsky.social
Yay bioacousticians all around! <3 Come see me at the #IBAC session tomorrow - or anytime for coffee/bikes!
Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
animalbehaviour.live
⏳ Time is ticking… Only 5 days left!

Don’t miss your chance to share your work at #ABL2025, our free online conference on animal behavior research.

🎤 15-min oral talks
🎥 5-min video posters
📅 Deadline: September 7
📄 Submit your abstract now 👉 ablaoc25.sciencesconf.org
Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
sortee.bsky.social
📷 The 2025 SORTEE conference program is now online!

Visit sortee.org/upcoming/ to register and explore the exciting lineup of various sessions.

#SORTEE2025

If you know a great open science project, now is the time to nominate it for a SORTEE Award www.sortee.org/awards/
lsburchardt.bsky.social
Thanks @animal-prattle.bsky.social for reminding me to post about this project🐋🎵
Mia Davitt (+ col), musician from 🇺🇸, attempted to transcribe whale sounds in Western musical style. Turns out to work quite well, so we #preprint ed these interesting results: osf.io/preprints/os...
#OSF #bioacoustics
Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
abalkina.bsky.social
Great initiative by Wiley! The publisher has started marking retracted papers in reference lists. When you click on the retraction notice, you can also see the date and reason for the retraction.
All publishers should adopt this practice. But also screen references during submission.
Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
stephanielking.bsky.social
Excited to share that we have just been awarded a NERC Pushing the Frontiers grant to work on between-group cooperation in the Shark Bay dolphins. We will soon advertise a 3 year post-doc to join the team - drop me an email if you might be interested! Pls share widely 🙏🏻
Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
daniteixeira.bsky.social
I'm excited to share our new (in press) paper on vocal individuality and acoustic recognition. We looked at Red-tailed Black-Cockatoos, Little Penguins, Little Owls, Tree Pipits and Chiffchaffs, with promising results. #bioacoustics #vocalindividuality www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Acoustic recognition of individuals in closed and open bird populations
Passive acoustic monitoring is firmly established as an effective non-invasive technique for wildlife monitoring. The analysis of animal vocalizations…
www.sciencedirect.com
Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
daniteixeira.bsky.social
#bioacoustics community: do you know any online platforms for volunteers to join an acoustics project, validate and label acoustic data (e.g. birdnet detections, false negatives), filter for specific species etc? I asked this a few yrs ago but nothing of the sort existed...
Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
gdeejay.bsky.social
Hey #rstats,

What's your rule for splitting R scripts that form part of a wider analysis pipeline / project?

I usually write a single script which includes sections for each step from data cleaning to the final results, but it can become unwieldy when the script becomes long.
...
Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
stephanielking.bsky.social
We are looking for a Research Assistant to contribute to our ongoing analysis of dolphin acoustic data from West Wales - collaboration between @wtsww.bsky.social @bristolbiosci.bsky.social 🐬
Deadline is 29th June - please share widely!
www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...
Details | Working at Bristol | University of Bristol
www.bristol.ac.uk
lsburchardt.bsky.social
We use 9 temporal parameters of individual songs🎵, one of which is #integerratios. We use slightly adjusted calculations🧮, comparing not only adjacent intervals but all interval pairs in a sequence, making sure we report global rather than local similarities of intervals between onsets of syllables.
lsburchardt.bsky.social
This study was only possible because of the enormous efforts of Tereza Petrusková and colleagues at Charles University Prague, who made focal recordings 🎙️ of 38 known individuals of🐤🐤 🐤yellowhammers (amongst other birds) over several years 💪.
lsburchardt.bsky.social
🔊Preprint Alert: now on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social. So much interesting stuff going on in supposedly simple, consistent rhythms #bioaocustics #rhythm #birdsong #passerines
aosiecka.bsky.social
🔊🐦🎵Very happy to share our new preprint*: Yellowhammer (Emberiza citrinella) males sing using individual isochronous rhythms and maximise rhythmic dissimilarity with neighbours.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
*and my 1st post-doc paper with @humboldt-foundation.de
A very basic graphical abstract of the paper, showing three birds signing songs at a closer and larger distance: the closest birds are more dissimilar! There's also a text that reads: Yellowhammer males use individual isochronic rhythms in their songs. Close neighbours use different rhythms, and this dissimilarity decreases with distance: further neighbours sound more alike.
Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
orcid.org
ORCID @orcid.org · Jun 17
Call for ORCID Board and Research Advisory Council nominations!

⏰ Deadline 27 June

We are seeking nominations for:

ORCID Member-Director Board seats 👉 https://shorturl.at/bUpR1
+
ORCID Researcher Board Seat and ORCID Researcher Advisory Council seats 👉 https://shorturl.at/jjxXG
ORCID Board + ORAC nominations now open through 27 June
Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
eadinomahony.bsky.social
‼️ Dear MARMAM community,
We, at the DEI Committee of the Society for Marine Mammalogy, are beginning the process of establishing an Indigenous Representation Subcommittee, the idea of which came out of an ad hoc meeting held at the SMM conference in Boorloo (Perth) in the Whajuk region of WA (1/n)
Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
dzg2025berlin.bsky.social
👋 Looking forward to the 117th Annual Meeting of the German Zoological Society. Please like and share 🤩
Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
begus.bsky.social
Whale vocalizations not only resemble human vowels, but also behave like ones!

We previously discovered that sperm whales have analogues to human vowels.

In a new preprint, we analyze linguistic behavior of whale vowels.
Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
hadley.nz
Happy 18th birthday ggplot2! #rstats
Balloon wall art inspired by the ggplot2 hex sticker. The display features a hexagonal frame made of black balloons, filled with white balloons inside and surrounded by a background of light and dark blue balloons. A line graph with black balloon segments and round coloured nodes runs across the centre, and the word “ggplot2” is spelled out in black balloon letters below the chart.
Reposted by Lara S. Burchardt
pminasandra.bsky.social
🚨 Out this week in @pnas.org 🚨
The flagship paper from my PhD @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social @livingingroups.bsky.social - We show surprising statistical similarities in animal behaviour across states, individuals, and even species.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
(🧵 1/10)