Truly uncanny to see universities all doing the same suicidal things: centralizing decision-making, erecting bafflingly expensive new buildings, stacking the board with money guys, hiding info about the budget, throwing money at consultants. Atriums everywhere! They all got the same memo.

Whewww www.publicbooks.org/the-misuses-...

"The AI can access articles from Elsevier’s own collection and those of its four partners: Emerald, the Institute of Physics, the New England Journal of Medicine Group, and Sage Publications". Interesting Wiley isnt on the list. Based on partnership agreements with tools like Scite, Consensus (1)

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

The news is now public: "A majority of academics in the Faculty of Science have joined the Association of McGill Professors of Science." Welcome AMPS, to the #unionuniversity ! AMPL - AMPD ♥️ mcgillscience.ca

GM: Charisma check. Mamdani: [rolls natural 20] GM: that’s a d6 how did you Mamdani: [direct to camera] Did you know you can check out board games at your local public library? 😊

❤️

#medlibs and #evidencesynthesis nerds - the next Library Evidence Synthesis Services Symposium (LESSS) is upon us and open for free registration 😊 sites.google.com/view/lesss/r...

Wikipedia is an antidote to an increasingly poisoned information ecosystem go.nature.com/4pXIv2d

Or, Heated Rivalry only exists because of CanCon requirements. Otherwise CTV/Bell/Crave would have just imported another American show. Just because it's successful doesn't mean that it isn't a product of the ecosystem it was created in.

Love having our security constantly being threatened by our security partner

Democratizing Knowledge Through Global Health Podcasts Podcasts are a great way to learn, share, exchange, and democratize global health knowledge Here is my new list of podcasts worth checking out! communities.springernature.com/posts/democr...

I met an absolutely lovely academic who asked whether my department back home is affected by ICE -- a question dramatizing how little info is getting out. For the record, the small example I chose: My dept has a carpool to pick up grad students of color who can't safely commute to campus alone.

* DANISH PENSION FUND AKADEMIKERPENSION TO EXIT US TREASURIES * AKADEMIKERPENSION CIO SAYS US `IS BASICALLY NOT A GOOD CREDIT' @bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Our colleagues in @mcgillscienceunion.bsky.social (AMPS) have put together an exhaustive fact-sheet on the stagnation of academic salaries at McGill—and the parallel rise of director/ manager salaries. 1/3

anxiety

David launched dozens of careers and mentored many more, helping Indigenous journalists find a voice in an industry that had rarely welcomed them. Story by @karynpugliese.bsky.social

We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n

#DYK our Chair, Madhu Pai, has been compiling a list of Global Health books since 2018? See what books have been added!

Oh no. Oohhhh no no.

Applications for the 2026 Evidence Synthesis Institute Canada, to be held April 7-10th, 2026, are now open. We will accept applications until February 2, 2026. More details and the link to the application form can be found at libguides.uvic.ca/ESICanada/ap... @carl-abrc.bsky.social #ESIC2026

Yes, hello? I don’t think 2026 is working properly. I’d like to cancel my free 5 day trial please.

How likely is ‘likely’? Does ‘likely’ have a higher probability than ‘probable’? I put together a quick quiz so you can see how you interpret probability phrases, then see how you compare with others: probability.kucharski.io

These are disturbed people

I have not been following this closely enough and have about 1 million questions, what do you mean it’s a completely private company? www.nytimes.com/2025/12/27/u...

One journal editor in chief called the results “concerning,” while another thought the analysis was looking for problems on purpose.

#medlibs - an interesting proposal, and seeming more necessary as the complexity of AI tool details and uses in #evidencesynthesis work increases: Transparent Reporting of AI in Systematic Literature Reviews: Development of the PRISMA-trAIce Checklist. doi.org/10.2196/80247

Another poison pill buried in Mark Carney’s budget: a repeal of a reduced postage rates for books and shipments between libraries. Libraries across the country are sounding the alarm for what it would mean for the viability of another essential public institution.

Admiral Holsey notified me/ He wouldn't blow up boats so they put him out to sea

🤔"Nunavik ends year with record number of TB cases, as officials promise funding announcement to come" www.cbc.ca/news/canada/... #tuberculosis

Dr. Mary T. Bassett is one of the bravest people I have met in my lifetime - her moral compass and commitment to justice are unmatched. Shame, shame, shame on Harvard. Her ouster is shocking yet unsurprising and on brand for the University. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

“Quebec is doing nothing, absolutely nothing," said Innu Nation caribou lead Guy Bellefleur. "The communities with knowledge of the caribou are realizing that they have to take responsibility for the species that has always been their symbol." www.aptnnews.ca/featured/inn...

If I had ONE tip for librarians testing "Ai search" products is focus on relevancy. If you had time for just one query , test with a "tricky query". There is no one defintion of tricky, but a query that can easily return dozens/hundreds of relevant articles is definitely pointless to test! (1)

As Bluesky grows in popularity, so does the industry of spam-for-hire services attempting to exploit it. Google searches for the query "buy bluesky followers" abound with numerous examples of strangely similar websites peddling bogus Bluesky followers, reposts, and likes.

How do large language models interpret words relating to probability like “unlikely,” “probably,” or “almost certain"? The below shows what happens when we compare judgements from different models to a benchmark dataset of human judgments (data from: github.com/zonination/p...).

Problems with CAQ’s Constitution www.lapresse.ca/actualites/e... and petition against it: m.assnat.qc.ca/fr/exprimez-...

New blog post! “What I Think About AI When I Hear About AI: A Slightly Unconventional View” - www.bohyunkim.net/blog/archive... (or read on Substack bohyunkima2.substack.com/p/what-i-thi...) #libraries #AI #ML

Carnegie Mellon has cancelled hosting the Code4Lib conference this year because Code4Lib has scholarships supporting diverse attendees. Some lame fuckery indeed.

A review article concluding the weed killer Roundup--aka glyphosate--“does not pose a health risk to humans” has been retracted 8 years after documents released in a court case revealed employees of Monsanto, the company that developed it, wrote the article but were not named as coauthors.

Think you're good at spotting suspicious papers? Retraction Watch have a challenging advent calendar inviting you to spot what's wrong each day: papermills.tilda.ws/advent2025 #medlibs

And its not like I know everything in retrieval either. I barely know anything about linked data/knowledge graphs and I don't fully understand videos on youtube.com/@ashleighfai... eg triple store vs Property graphs , though graphRAG looks fascinating... as I said retrieval is crazy broad

Pretty much ANY statistic you see cited to frighten you about vaccines comes from the VAERS database. (Including the recent evidence-free missive from Vinay Prasad). Here's why VAERS can NEVER be a proper source for population-level vaccine risk estimates. Thread [1/9]

This is disappointing Canada’s cuts to the Global Fund will fuel reversal of progress on HIV, TB, and Malaria www.doctorswithoutborders.ca/canadas-cuts...

If you're looking for a Sunday morning read, our website team spent a lot of time writing code to make the animations on this article work, so give it a look, will ya? www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-...

Rogue Scientist Has Own Scientific Method https://theonion.com/rogue-scientist-has-own-scientific-method-1819568501/

🚨 Misusing antibiotics can affect everyone. #AntimicrobialResistance (#AMR) occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites no longer respond to medicines. Drug-resistant bacteria can spread and make infections harder to treat. Let’s handle antibiotics with care. Learn more 👉bit.ly/AMRweek2025

Over the past months (and at least 11 versions!), I was lucky to work with 11 amazing colleagues on a call to action to reform academic publishing. Not another declaration, but an appeal to our powerful friends, research funders & institutions, to Stop the Drain of Scientific Publishing. 1/n

Very cool post, thanks for finding our initial paper on this issue interesting. Turns out we had another one just out, where we extend the idea of critical ignoring and relate it to the detrimental consequences of information overload: doi.org/10.1016/j.co... 1/n

Interesting new Google Scholar PDF button feature scholar.googleblog.com/2025/11/mark...

Not only that, but so much AI tech extracts the metadata and open info created/enabled *by* library and data workers. The labor of our field is being consumed and then resold to us in the hopes that we’ll decide our own jobs are obsolete @404media.co