I am grateful that I published 2 important works this year: 1) a co-edited volume on the complex relationships between language and prejudice: shorturl.at/4l7if 2) a book on how international teaching assistants conceptualize and perform accents for their academic labour: shorturl.at/7aOYN

I recently watched a keynote in which an eminent scientist replayed this word to, I suppose, spice up his talk and let you know he’s a cool guy. The audience was totally unresponsive, you could hear a pin drop while he waited for a laugh.

They use ads to convince people that this flashy new change will improve their lives, and people's lives are miserable so they buy the thing in the hope that it might fill the hole in their heart caused by capitalism in the first place. It does not and will not, but the Line Goes Up

During the Charlottesville protests a person ran over and killed a protester, Heather Heyer, and GOP legislators responded by trying to pass regulations to make it legal for people to do this.

Once you decide there's nothing bad enough the president can do to warrant impeachment you're kind of done. You're relegated to holding a bunch of hearings which is a PR battle for the subsequent election, but in the meantime you're stuck with a criminal president

What folks don’t want to admit is that what we’re experiencing is a pretty deliberate campaign to disqualify anyone left of center as “unserious” with frankly terrible results for what’s running up on four years now at least.

We know why these tech billionaires are constantly making empty threats to leave California. Carly Fiorina ran this playbook in her failed 2016 presidential campaign. We also know why they keep coming slinking back to California. Why do major publications keep running the same articles every year?

California is the world's 5th largest economy and its public university system is (despite these guy's repeated attempts to destroy it) STILL among the best in the world. In short, how can we miss them if they never fucking leave in the first place?

"They found the coats on Thursday morning. Fifteen winter coats. Good ones, not garbage. Hanging on the chain-link fence outside Lincoln Elementary.No note. No explanation. Just coats zipped up like ghosts waiting for bodies. Principal Morris freaked out. Called the police. "Could be stolen"

Can mosquitos fly in the rain? Can wheat grow against the grain? Can an eagle forget how to fly? Can a hedgehog defy to be shy?

Merry Christmas!

someone once told me “you invite candor” and my sister’s lesbian ceramicist friends liked it so much (“that’s the nicest thing you can say about someone!!!!”) that they made me a cup with “I INVITE CANDOR” stamped on it

Much of the opposition was about tourism; as a sometimes visitor to NYC, the place is so much nicer with less traffic. I am more prone to visit (and to linger and buy stuff) when I don't have to constantly risk a painful death from gridlocked cars in crosswalks jockeying for position.

look at how little effort it takes for someone on the conservative grievance circuit to destroy a life millions of college kids have half assed an assignment at the last minute, you eat the F and move on but the effort to push trans people out of public life will use whatever it can get

it works the same way in the US: things i like and am comfortable with are just normal, things i don’t like and make me uncomfortable are political

i, myself, hate getting political (talking about things that make me uncomfortable) and hate how political everything has become (seeing things that make me uncomfortable)

The same people supporting this shit think that letting trans women use public restrooms is too dangerous to consider. It's almost like it's about fascist control of others rather than anyone's "safety".

Good post on this idea here!

"Help help! I'm being silenced!"

a sample of what commonly happens with coordinated spam networks. we see that these accounts are all starting up with similar bios and all posting some sort of political/news content

Here's another way the intentional PR conflation of the term AI with all ML is undermining academic work: I'm collab'ing on an archive management project that involves developing an ML tool to analyze texts. The answer to asks for funding/resources has often been, "Just use chatgpt/copilot/etc.!"

people who are new to academia tend to find its obsession with sources and citations a brake on their "i'm just trying to be CREATIVE, man" mindset. but it turns out the relentless obsession with accuracy, citation, and *provenance* is a load-bearing pillar of the whole enterprise

I see we're going with "LLMs say wrong stuff because you're not using them right" today. Sure.

Happy Solstice my friends! The days are getting longer from here! (At least for those in the northern hemisphere--sorry for the folks whose days are just beginning to get shorter down south...)

Strong 2nd to this, and I would just add that the modern world is much more dependent on extremely accurate and precise timekeeping then most people realize (all cell networks require it, most using gps disciplined oscillators)

What I am saying is this. I am very happy to explain to everyone that "Intifada" means revolution and it's absurd to ban it. I am far less willing to reassure Diaspora Jews that "Globalise the Intifada" is not meant against them, as it's not impossible that some would take it in that direction.

Have you had a paper rejected from arXiv for being a "review" or "position" paper? ("insufficient original or substantive scholarly research and not of interest to arXiv") Can you think of papers whose classification as a "review" or "position" paper is ambiguous? Please share with me!

Journal article: “the data are available on request” The data:

Horrifying. This didn’t have to happen. History books should be filled with the names of the enablers. We should construct plaques with them in the cemeteries.

Are there any pieces on peer review in CS that you like? If so, I'd love it if you'd share them with me :) In particular I'm interested in stuff covering AI/ML/NLP/CV, which does any mix of diagnosing problems with peer review and publication or proposes fixes.

*freedom of speech dot jpg* boomers tell such bad jokes and expect laughs because they were acculturated on laugh tracks. later generations have no such guarantee of validation, and indeed, laughing at a joke becomes a way to signal in-group knowledge instead

unsolicited advice: 1. post about your book 2. put the TITLE of the book in the post 3. put a LINK TO BUY THE BOOK in the post 4. consider a cute graphic or just put the cover of your book (with alt text!) in the post 5. post about it as if this is the first time someone's learning about it/you

In light of the Levy Review potentially giving transphobes oversight of medical research on trans healthcare, Trans Safety Network recommend English trans people OPT OUT of their healthcare data being used in research. Information on how to do this can be found in the quoted post and thread.

👇🏿👇🏿👇🏿

“A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress - though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known" - Bertrand Russell, 1976. Time-lapse video of Vampyrella lateritia eating Spirogyra algae from Science Source/Oliver Skibbe. 🦠

Nope. Sex Matters have long been banging the drum of "you can't change sex therefore transition can't work as a treatment and we should stop offering it to trans people" it's what Helen Joyce's whole "huge problem to a sane world" shit was about. They are 100% going for banning all transitions.

This details the costs of buying AI subscriptions at universities. Co-pilot, which my university subscribes to, is around $30 per month per user. No wonder budgets are tightening. Imagine if we took that money back from the slop peddlers and their boosters… www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

one thing that is important to know is that BIRTH OF A NATION is so racist that people at the *time*, in 1915, were like, “holy shit this is racist”

And then think about how much more Barbies cost this year.

A cross-party review of the financial sustainability of Scotland’s universities will go ahead after months of initial talks between university leaders and politicians, reports @helenpacker.bsky.social www.timeshighereducation.com/news/scottis...

They’re trying to do reparations for white people.

I've spent all day struggling to write a single page of a popular science article. I bang away at a word processor; give up; start diagramming on paper. Take some notes; draft a few sentences in pen; return to the computer...and very slowly I figure out what I was trying to say in the first place.

The Palestine Action ban is an incredible story of the criminalization of political speech, but also of solidarity in defense of that speech. As the thread points out, most of those arrested have been older and women. As John Boyce explained here, the ban is part of a broader trend across Europe.

My opinion is that there should be one big button labeled "opt out" and when you click it it should opt you out. Just in general.

Just decline the peer review invitation. What are you people even doing?

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)? Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"