Catherine Sheard

@sheardcat.bsky.social

2001 Followers 822 Following

Lecturer & Interdisciplinary Fellow @ University of Aberdeen. Professionally: macroevolution, especially birds & languages. Personally: drinks too much coffee, plays too much D&D. she/her

A screenshot of Wiley's "ReX" editorial software. It lists me as being an editor on 42 manuscripts, but it also says "Action required: 0"
Screenshot of an online form asking for my title. The choices are "Mr.", "Mrs.", and "Divers". What I'm cranky about is having to choose "Mrs.", because, y'know, I am not a Mrs.
four photos of rodents with stripes
The Reading Museum, a reddish brick building, in the sun
Catherine, a white woman wearing a KF94 mask, leaning against a train window.
A captcha security showing AI-generated pictures of motorcycles, cars, a plane, and three baby meerkats. The challenge is "find all the animals that are really slow"
a map of the world. mostly in bluescale. Qatar is coloured yellow ( = 5 units) which is clearly screwing up the scale.
a purple rectangle, with a blob that kinda looks like Australia coloured in yellow
A completely yellow square. Still not a map of global bird richness.
a grey rectangle with a small green blob. about as far as you can get from being a map of the world.
a phylogeny, this time coloured in purple / green. it's not great -- the light colours, for example, are hard to see -- but at least it doesn't look like the 1970s called and want their hippies back
a phylogeny of ~4000 species of birds, mostly coloured lime green and a really disgusting yellow, with the occasional clade of red and two of blue
a trait that varies between -3 and +4, labelled "trait" with a perfectly clear rainbow scale. otherwise, this figure is blank, except if you look reaaaaaaaaally carefully, there's a green dot in the middle.
A list of countries and their corresponding country codes. Some are alphabetised (e.g., Estonia, Ethiopia). Some you can understand how they got there (e.g., Espana -> Spain). Some are baffling (e.g., the United Kingdom is between Gabon and Georgia).
A McDonald's sign that says "fàilte" (Gaelic for "welcome")
A snowy Ben Nevis hiding in some rain clouds, behind some forest and moors
A screenshot of the Wiley editorial dashboard, showing "Action required: 0".
An error message that claims that I need "-2" more new reviewers.
An error code, saying "value for field dim_7 = 'UA' is fixed!" and "you are not authorised for 249". Your guess is as good as mine as to what this means.
A sign on the ground that says "polling place"
A screenshot of the editorial view of a Wiley journal, where a potential reviewer is labelled as "review opt-out"
a screenshot of a citation of Dan's "What's the deal with birds?" paper
A map of the world where the lower latitudes are in red (a value around 0) and everything about 30 S or so is in blue (a value around -999). A few places (e.g., interior Greenland, interior Sahara, Antarctica) are coloured white.
A list of titles. It starts with Mr/Mrs/Ms, but then includes options such as Family, Open, Inter, and Diverse
a screenshot of an email from Wiley to Catherine Sheard that says "Dr. Editorial Office has not provided a peer review report report"
a banner showcasing Aberdeen / Aberdeenshire, including (left to right) Dunnottar Castle, Old Kings College, the snowy Cairngorm mountains, and some pretty dolphins. There really are like a gazillion dolphins in Aberdeen.
A screenshot of automatically-generated captions. It says: "Well, everyone can hear. Okay, got. He couldn't finish it because he was coming. To persuade females to propose to the mind before most of it is concrete. Concrete. And he does that by calling Muslims the only other a few years ago in South Africa. It's a very convincing impersonation. Even in emotional."
a chart showing nT activity (basically, how strong the aurora is over the UK) over time. The past 24 hours show very, very high activitiy. A bar across the top says "red alert: aurora likely"
View of the Adirondack High Peaks, aka snowy mountains, from a small prop plane
A North Country Public Radio mug next to an old school Radio Shack radio.
A screenshot from Google's AI that says: Wild Penguin Sightings (Rare but Happen) Gentoo Penguin: In April 2022, a Gentoo penguin, a species usually found in sub-Antarctic regions, made an unexpected appearance in Stonehaven harbour, causing local excitement. Police Rescue: More recently, in December 2025, there were reports of police rescuing penguins that had somehow found their way to the harbour, sparking interest in how often they visit
A screenshot of instructions that say: 9. The data from the TAS exercise will not be 100% accurate. Does this matter? 9.1. The data is collected in order to obtain an indication of how time is spent over a range of activities and seeks to capture an accurate picture to inform our research and teaching costs. 9.2. Submissions should be as accurate as possible. If staff time allocations are materially inaccurate the TRAC return and resultant research recovery rates will be compromised. 9.3. Materiality should be considered when completing the schedules, since small percentage variations at an individual level will have limited impact at an aggregate level.
a map of the global diversity of medicinal plants, at a very mysterious spatial scale that I don't understand (it's country / state, except when it's not). There is high diversity in the tropics, with particularly high diversity in East Africa and East Asia.
a screenshot of a lot of text about "competing interest". the details are deeply irrelevant. I'm just ranting.
A screenshot of a research integrity training course, which says that the five commitments of the Concordat to Support Research Integrity are: 1. Maintaining the highest standards of research integrity - the principles 2. Maintaining the highest standards of research integrity - expectations and compliance 3. Embedding a culture of research integrity 4. Questionable research practices and potential research misconduct 5. Accountability and continuous improvement in research integrity
A keel-billed toucan with a green bill, yellow throat, black body, and blue feet, side-eyeing the camera. A nectar feeder is behind.
a picture of some plants inside a greenhouse in Leipzig. photo by Catherine Sheard
a picture of the river Dee with autumnal colours, frosty bracken in the foreground, and mountains in the photo. photo taken by Catherine Sheard a few miles outside of Aberdeen city.
Opening slide of the conference, at the front of an auditorium
A graph of last night's aurora activity in the UK. Anything above a red line (200) means that the aurora is visible throughout the UK. Last night peaked at 1500 and had six continuous hours of aurora-ing.
A dark red aurora over a beach, with oil rig lights in the distance
A screenshot of an error that seems to be about deleting a file. I was not trying to delete a file. I was trying to issue an editorial decision.
an extremely gloomy photo of trees in haar (sea fog). it should be broad daylight. you, in fact, should be able to see the ocean, it's really close by
A grumpy-looking Acanthropagrus australis (yellowfin bream), lateral view with the fins clearly visible.
it looks like a large phylogeny with, say, 5% of the branches appearing
the bredding range map of Accipiter brevipes, around the Caspian Sea
A plot with an x-axis labelled "index" and a y-axis labelled "iter_read[[1]]". There are 13 equally-spaced dots along the y=x+4 line. It is not the range map of an ostrich.
A screenshot of a plot containing a single dot, at x = 1, floating in an unlabelled y-axis. It is not the range map of an ostich.
An artistic dark sunrise in the background, overlaid with the white, swirly words "Are you being haunted by the ghost of a blackberry?". At the bottom, in small all-caps, it says "Peter".
A screenshot of Wiley's new ReX editorial software, explaining how recommended reviewers are generated. It's not worth reading, but for the record, it says: How are reviewer suggestions determined? The AI-powered Reviewer Suggestion Service analyzes this manuscript's title and abstract to create multi-dimensional representations which capture the semantic meaning of words, phrases and key concepts within the text. The service then leverages our proprietary Publication Knowledge Graph of global, scholarly outputs to find reviewers with relevant expertise. Suggestions are ranked based on subject relevance and publication volume in related areas, among other variables. How do custom keywords improve the results? When you add custom keywords, our system combines them with the manuscript's title and abstract to create a more complete picture of the manuscript and the specific areas of interest. It looks for reviewers who have expertise that semantically matches as many of the concepts represented by this manuscript's title, abstract, and the custom keywords together. Tips for effective use: Include specialized methodologies, techniques, or equipment used in the research Add related subfields or interdisciplinary areas Specify geographic regions or populations relevant to the study Include technical terms that experts in the field would recognize
a Scottish moor, with the foreground shaded and some very sunny hills in the background
The Dess waterfall
Farmland and some trees
Two Highland cows
A screenshot of a 9-hour train journey from Aberdeen to Bristol. The price is 314 GBP. This is, uh, not a normal price.
the promo image for the game Blue Prince, featuring a watercolour[?]-like drawing of the front of a mansion, with the rest of the mansion sketched in behind, and mountains in the background. the image is very blue.
screenshot of Firefox's "warning: potential security risk ahead" error
A selfie of Catherine on a train. She's wearing tinted glasses and a KF94 mask.