This entire thread highlights that our "science leaders" are either delusional or more interested in not ruffling feathers than actually reflecting on the current state of the scientific enterprise in the US.

Calling all Scientists! Research Administrators! Deans! Fans of Science! No one is coming to save us. Here is your assignment. I have written a step by step, easy to understand "how-to" document to help you comment on the proposed OMB rule. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/what-we-ne...

1/ 🧵 OMB is advancing a proposed rule that would destroy the American scientific enterprise. Randos keep disagreeing with my 'here's how to fight it' I do this for a living. So before the "how," here's the "who" --- and why you should listen to me on this one.

Hello fellow scientists, I see a lot of conversation about this document, encourage you to read it, and would like to reinforce that it is open for Public Comment until July 13. www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

This is bad. Bad for researchers. Bad for science. Bad for universities. Bad for professional associations. For example: 1. Every award would be vetted by political appointees, who could overrule peer reviewers and deny the award if it doesn't advance the president's priorities. 1/🧵

This is bonkers and just so counterproductive.

What makes the Rockies rocky? A recent CIRES-led study found that the distribution of bedrock and thin, patchy soils in the Rampart Range in Colorado is controlled by topography, erosion, and forest structure. Read the story: cires.colorado.edu/news/topogra...

Sure, why not! Introduce yourself with 10 bands/musicians you've seen live! 1. Radiohead 2. The Flaming Lips 3. The National 4. Modest Mouse 5. Wilco 6. Menomena 7. Dismemberment Plan 8. The Helio Sequence 9. Phoenix 10. Sparklehorse

Real talk, were graduation regalia designed to be completely unbreathable hellish garments? Nothing says fun like layering up in thick, darkly colored polyester in mid May in southern Louisiana, but worth it I suppose to take part in hooding a former student.

Reuters making a play for renaming the new york times pitchbot to the reuters pitchbot.

So NSF is taking a large chunk of its already meager budget and using it to fund tech startups instead of researchers at universities and national labs? Am I reading this right? Am I having a stroke? I'm having a stroke and this is some weird nightmare that my brain is inventing, right? JFC.

Probably the only time I've legitimately been happy we use Moodle, good luck to the folks wading through Canvas being down/compromised during finals.

"The GOP is slashing NSF & NEH grants; imposing bans on books, courses and lecture topics; punishing student protesters; blocking foreign students; waging endless lawsuits on colleges and venerating the grifter who created the Professor Watchlist. I wonder why more professors aren't voting GOP?"

We'll publish soon our first Field Guide paper, now accepted for publication. Stay tuned. ⚒️ Send yours if it's in our scope, i.e. #tectonics. It will be carefully peer reviewed, and, if accepted, published without cost and #open-access. Support free to publish / free to read #DOAJ !

So infrastructure week is finally here, but it's war crimes.

Pretty much my reaction to the unending litany of efforts to completely undercut pretty much all science in the US, be that moves to close NCAR, dismantling of the Forest Service, proposed cuts to NSF/NIH/NASA/etc., impoundment of funds to those same orgs, and just so many other things.

Are you a geoscience faculty member in the US who has recently started their position? Apply for (or encourage your relevant colleagues to apply for) the @nagtgeo.bsky.social Workshop for Early Career Geoscience Faculty that is happening this summer! Deadline has been extended to April 7:

Our colleague Matt Jungers is heading off to 3 years in the Provost's Office, so we are hiring a Visiting Asst. Professor in Earth & Env Sci with specialty in geomorphology/GIS. Do you want to experience teaching at a great small liberal arts college? Apply soon! apply.interfolio.com/183740

Always happy to see new ways for people doing good science to be recognized, but I do wish we could move away from age based awards for defining career stage.

Grom and Forte explore methods for quantifying spatial and temporal variation in modelled landscape evolution in this recent Geomorphica publication! journals.psu.edu/geomorphica/...

The (not so) gradual creep in terms related to "AI" is kind of driving me nuts. A bunch of things that use to just be called multivariate statistics got rebranded as machine learning (along with some things that actually warrant being called ML) and now it seems like everything ML is called AI.

"The AI Grad Student": A Harvard professor describes working with Claude. Early on, he describes misconduct that would cause any student to be terminated: "It faked results, hoping I wouldn't notice." But he ends the essay with "Now I'm doing 100% of my research with LLMs". Am I losing my mind?

This does not sounds like a description of "good people." It sounds like a description of craven, cowardly opportunists with no actual opinions that are not provided to them and it's not a good look to remain collegial with them.

I realize this is effectively blasphemy in the US, especially in a place like Louisiana, but you'll never convince that college athletics as they exist are a good idea. "Every college athletic program in Louisiana runs at a deficit except for LSU" What's the point of a university again...

It doesn't seem like it's too much to ask to have consistent and comfortable temperature in my office, but apparently it is. After months of it being uncomfortably warm (usually around 81-84 F) it suddenly switched over the course of a day to being uncomfortably cold (now hovering around 60 F).

When the latest budgets for NSF, NIH, etc. were finalized rejecting the proposed cuts by the administration, all of my academic friends were calling me a debbie-downer for basically being like, "Cool, doesn't matter of OMB doesn't release the money." Well...

First paper from my recently defended PhD student, Vivian Grom, is out in @geomorphica.bsky.social! This work was an outgrowth of the month that Vivian spent at @csdms.bsky.social and if you're interested in landscape evolution modelling, I encourage you to take a look!

Really strong motivation to just not bother working on proposals anymore if I'm being honest.

I would really like it if it stopped raining.

My whole life, fascism was defined as being stopped by armed, masked agents of the national government who demand your papers, on pain of arrest, injury, or death. That’s now here, and the group of people who warned about that the most are either silent or in favor of it,

I appreciate this from @us.theconversation.com by Jonathan Paul. However, I think it’s making a mistake I commonly hear geologists make with regards to current events. I have a hunch that this mistake is one of the reasons geology programs are struggling 🧵🛠️🪨🧪 theconversation.com/greenland-is...

As talk of the US annexing Greenland ramps up again, I remain struck by the extra dimension of ridiculousness that most of the reasons that the current admin float for why we "need" Greenland ultimately relate to the impact of climate change on the Arctic, something that this admin says is a hoax.

The longer you've been teaching, the more your syllabi accumulate the academic equivalents of tidbits from instructional manuals like, "do not stop chainsaw blade with your genitals", i.e., seemingly ridiculous statements that reflect insane things at least one student has done in the past.

The AGU automated suggestions for people I should meet continues its trend from last year of being hilarious. It suggested I try to meet three people, two of which were my postdoc advisors and the other is someone I also have known for years, lol.

I'm sick of being told by grifters and people who can't code their way out of a wet paper bag that soon LLMs will replace programmers. Repeatedly prodding the plagiarism machine until it spits out something that looks right doesn't produce quality and it doesn't produce results we can trust.

If he's really looking for a font that fits with the current level of decorum and professionalism exhibited by his office (or the government writ large), might I suggest Wingdings?

Louisiana elected official using money donated for a totally different purpose to throw themselves a giant party in DC: No ethics violation. Me as a professor at a Louisiana public university accepting a pencil from a former student: Ethics violation. Cool.

It really does feel like either many of our elected leaders are idiots or they think we're idiots. Maybe both.

Assuming for a moment that there are actually "notebooks full of ideas", how many do we think start with the equivalent of "Let the poors die"?

Given the prevalence of work on Tibet and adjoining regions with Chinese collaborators, this would lock out huge swaths of the tectonics community from federal funding.

If you are interested in grain size variation across landscapes, please check out this paper by my wonderful collaborator Dr. Tingan Li. The talk I gave a few weeks ago also highlights his work, if you prefer listening rather than reading 😉

We're all busy, I know, but if you don't have time or don't want to review a paper, just decline the review, please don't ghost the AE scouring the barren wastelands for people willing to review a paper.

Lol, can I start sucking at my job and then get paid an exorbitant amount of money to stop doing my job too?

Given the diversity of ways author order is chosen between fields, they should modify this so that your credit for a paper is a random number chosen from the number of authors on the paper and it changes every time you reload google scholar, that would be a more valid metric than this horseshit.

ER doc here! This is a lie. Wait times are up because the American healthcare system is an unsustainable business model and a for-profit national healthcare system just doesn’t work. These problems will continue to get worse until we change that system. It literally has nothing to do with immigrants

It's probably annoying to complain about home ownership given that's out of reach for so many in the US, but every time some new random thing breaks in my house, I kind of pine for the days of being a renter and being able to email my landlord like, "Pipe broke in ceiling, you want to fix?"

Perhaps not 100% across the board, but quite often any time someone starts a statement with "in my humble opinion...", it should actually be phrased, "in my completely uninformed and totally uneducated opinion..."

All sorts of other comments aside, surely this should be named, "The Concrete Slab That Was Formerly The Rose Garden Club" instead.

It's amazing just how often I can't access my email because Outlook has some random error or just doesn't respond and yet organizations, like my employer, just keep on choosing it as their email service.

This is hilarious and vindicating, but it also suggests that most universities should really force all of their admin within the educational side of the university without any prior teaching experience to teach at least one, preferably large enrollment, class early on in their time.