Of interest for students and adults alike: “There’s a Good Reason You Can’t Concentrate” Cal Newport, professor of computer science at Georgetown University www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/o...

Vaccines are safe and effective. Again.

Iran linked hackers break into FBI’s chief’s personal email account: “A Justice Department official confirmed to Reuters that ​Patel's emails were compromised but ​did ⁠not go into detail.” Via Reuters

Keep up the good work.

In case you missed it, we are suing ICE for their unlawful practice of conducting warrantless arrests without probable cause. www.wosu.org/politics-gov...

Pfizer just announced that its Lyme disease vaccine reduced the number of tick-borne infections by over 70% in a phase 3 trial. Warning: GSK pulled a Lyme vaccine in 2002 despite studies showing it posed no serious safety risks. Any new Lyme vaccine is going to be a huge target for antivaxxers.

Grim

Today I learned that there is such a thing as a Bayesian bicep curl. No apparent relation to anything #Bayes or #statistics. Missed opportunity to create Bayesian glute bridges; after all, the whole point is to update your posterior.

Today govt sued Harvard for "antisemitism" again. Among other things, seeks declaration that US need not make any more grant payments; gets restitution for grants paid during "noncompliance"; & independent monitor to oversee it "in collaboration with US" storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Deadline 15 April: Professor (W3), Phonetics and Speech Processing, LMU Munich job-portal.lmu.de/jobposting/2...

Oh look! They are not appealing. They are disbanded. 🤡🤡🤡

The University of North Texas is closong the linguistics and languages department and phasing out dozens of other majors, monors, and master’s degree programs. www.unt.edu/budget-updat...

13% success rates for FY2025 grant awards. NIH finally releases some FY2025 success rate data drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/03/18/n...

@icpsr.bsky.social is an international consortium of 800+ academic & research bodies that collects & publishes scads of social science data for public access: www.icpsr.umich.edu/sites/icpsr/... DataLumos crowdsources deposits of valuable government data: www.icpsr.umich.edu/sites/datalu... #OpenGov

Deadline Apr 15: Postdoc, "using computational methods and EEG to study predictive processing in multilingual populations", at U Michigan w/ @jonrbrennan.bsky.social and @edithkaan.bsky.social careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

Join us at Cornell on March 24 for a screening of this wonderful new documentary about a summer math camp for high school kids that has had an amazing impact on math in the United States. #ithaca as.cornell.edu/news/hunting...

US judge upends Kennedy's overhaul of childhood vaccine policies Judge rules against CDC's revamping of childhood immunization schedule and blocks 13 of Kennedy's appointments to CDC vaccine advisory panel www.reuters.com/world/us-jud...

Anybody still read WaPo? This is called "surveillance pricing" and it ought to be illegal.

NIH is requesting comments on a new draft policy that may require human brain imaging data (and other data) from nih-funded research to only be shared via controlled access, & only with certain countries. I suggest neuroimagers read closely & submit comments by 3/18. osp.od.nih.gov/comment-form...

Check out our new preprint! We directly tested a common assumption in neuroimaging: Is resting-state the best estimate of intrinsic organization? Spoiler: Across datasets and brain systems, multi-task fMRI did better. 👇

So maybe rest isn’t a privileged window into intrinsic organization after all. Functional architecture may be revealed most clearly when the brain is actively engaged. Preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202... Curious to hear what people think! 8/8

Deadline April 1 (rolling): Open-rank, open-area cluster hire to support new cogsci department (!). Bocconi University, Milan www.unibocconi.it/en/faculty-a...

❗️Prasad is out (again) at the FDA

Hmm…The official loss of the US measles elimination status is now conveniently delayed til after the midterms.

If you are a client of a firm that folded in this fight, you should know that not only were they morally wrong, but they were also strategically dumb www.wsj.com/us-news/law/...

Deadline March 30 (rolling): Postdoc, computational linguistics and language acquisition w/ H. Dai, Linguistics, U Michigan careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

A statement from Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, on its discussions with the Department of War.

🧪 Dr. Casey Means’ confirmation as Surgeon General is today. We’ll have another wellness influencer w/o any relevant experience as the “Nation’s Doctor” Bonus: 1. She helped shape the MAHA movement 2. Says vaccines cause autism 3. Believes that raw milk is safe @drjessicaknurick.bsky.social

I guess it was only a matter of time.

Deadline Mar 26: Asst prof (teaching track), comp. soc. sci. + cogsci, UCSD Cog Sci apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04461

In 2024, about one-third of students in fourth, eighth, and 12th grades were proficient in reading. The proficiency rate has fallen from pre-pandemic levels for all grades.   @usafacts.org

Death dealer

This!!

Are you a junior faculty member interested in spending 2-4 weeks at Princeton Psych? Please apply for our Microsabbatical program! It’s a fully funded visit for professional development and creating long-term collaborations. psych.princeton.edu/diversity/mi...

📣 Our lab is recruiting a #Postdoc in #NLP & #LearningAnalytics! The role focuses on large student text + interaction data to study metacognition, motivation, & math learning in a digital environment. Please share! Rolling review begins March 15, 2026 Details: vanderbilt.box.com/s/b8vk3sksz4...

Vaccines and our immune system #Science 🧪 #Scicomm #Vaccines #VaccinesWork theconversation.com/how-vaccines...

My latest: open.substack.com/pub/dbarkhuf...

“…the deprioritization of biodefense and pandemic preparedness will weaken [US response] to pathogens that are constantly evolving …[and] to biological threats and pathogens including development of new vaccines and treatments.” www.cidrap.umn.edu/bioterrorism...

The American Medical Association is launching an effort to evaluate vaccine safety and effectiveness independently of U.S. government health agencies

Razing the NIH

A leading American research lab is slated to lose its critical supercomputing facility, according to a letter released by the National Science Foundation.https://cnn.it/3MoF7zU

NSF Update Funding curve overall. A little bit of progress in the past week, but only a little bit. Now by Directorate... 1/11

You can’t repeal science. But you sure can strangle it.

Not only is this what you would do if you were trying to kill a technology and a company developing it …. it's what you would do if you were trying to kill *people*.

Over on threads someone just use ai;dr and we all need to adopt that right quick

The UCLA Department of Linguistics invites applications for a full-time Lecturer in Linguistics, with a specialization in Phonetics and Phonology, for the 2026-2027 academic year. recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF10819