Call for Papers! 🧵 The Public's Science–A New Social Contract for American Research Policy a Special Issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Editors: Alondra Nelson (IAS) and Jenny Reardon (UC, Santa Cruz) Abstract Deadline: Sept 19 www.ias.edu/stsv-lab/pub...

Donald Trump is *literally* Patrick Bateman’s hero in the novel American Psycho

The Jacksonville Jaguars, imo

The U.S. government has fueled decades of world-leading scientific and technical innovation by funding research efforts through grants programs & universities where researchers controlled decisions. In the USSR, no decisions were made by scientists alone. Every decision required political approval.

1. Federal funding for research promotes tech, biomedical, and scientific discovery in the US, and provides training for the sci/tech workforce that has brought immeasurable wealth to the US over the past 75 years. Today's executive order includes a provision that will obliterate both functions.

6. This makes it impossible to engage in anything other than the shortest-term, most incremental research. Far-reaching, innovative, creative, world-changing research will no longer take place in the United States.

💬 Comments count. Submit yours by 15 Sept. to oppose the EPA’s rollback of its greenhouse gas endangerment finding. Submit:https://buff.ly/gPQyo15 #AGUAdvocacy #SciencePolicy

NEW: i spoke to nine (!) scientists across several disciplines whose work was cited in the new Department of Energy report that downplays the severity of climate change. all of them say their work was misrepresented, cherry picked, and/or lacked context —

PSA: NeurIPS position track has no rebuttal period so reviews won’t be released until August. Don’t bother emailing the PCs! (Multiple people have asked me why their reviews aren’t visible. PCs should send a mass email and change the CFP.)

A personal update.

#ICML2025 test of time award

This is an insane time in the tech industry. Superintelligence is fictional! This is so much an egregious waste of money, Meta's Chief AI scientist said generative AI won't lead to it either! AhhhhhHhhhh

When AI is allowed, developers spend less time actively coding and searching for information, and instead spend time prompting AI, waiting on/reviewing AI outputs, and idle. We find no single reason for the slowdown—it’s driven by a combination of factors.

One thing that's stood out to me at NREL under Trump 2.0: the contrast between the institution's instinct for self-preservation reflected in deep changes to the way the lab stories itself vs. how rural coalitions I work with have remained steadfast in their commitment to building new energy futures.

we are cooked

happy juneteenth everyone ✊🏾

Great report = comprehensive coverage of all aspects related to the integration of DC/AI loads. gridlab.org/portfolio-it...

Reminder: Nobel-prize winning PCR (1983), used in basically all genetic tech today, was only possible because of extremophile bacterium discovered in 1964 in Yellowstone funded by a small ~$80k NSF grant with no obvious application at the time. #science 🧪 www.richmondscientific.com/how-a-discov...

incredible that, looking back to 2019, every large firm working on LLMs had the attitude that this was an enormously disruptive technology and that the rollout needed to be careful and stage-managed in order to avoid catastrophic legal and consumer backlash and then in 2022 went "lol nevermind"

URGENT! Contact your senators today to advocate to fund science agencies and programs! The Senate Appropriations Committee & its subcommittees are writing appropriation bills for the federal FY26 budget now. Here's how you can help: esa.org/esablog/2025...

DOE budget is out -- the summary table at least. Here are a few energy research lowlights: EERE -74.3% Science -13.9% Nuclear -20.7% Fossil -31.2% Electricity -31.1% Cybersecurity -25% Technology Commercialization -50% (moved to admin) www.energy.gov/sites/defaul...

Recommended reading: Scientific Babel history.princeton.edu/about/public... What will be the next dominant language? 🥲

The war on science in the US is already having an effect on private sector research like AlphaFold. Bears repeating but the private sector builds on top of things created by academic research for the public good. This hurts everyone.

I wish this was hyperbole but the facts speak for themselves. danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-trump-...

🚨 Brand new postdoctoral researcher position in my group at Princeton! Please apply or share with anyone interested in computational materials science and being an electron whisperer! puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app....

International students deserve to pursue their education without harassment from the government.

You can learn more here.

A conference officially adds LLM generated reviews to "peer" (sigh)-review. What could possibly go wrong, apart from lazy or incompetent reviewers being convinced by LLM output, and authors spending their rebuttal time on answering hallucinations which are probably not read by these same reviewers?

"Women are PIs on 58% of the canceled grants, although they are PIs on only 34% of all active NSF grants. Similarly, Blacks are PIs on 17% of the terminated grants, although they make only 4% of the total pool. Hispanic PIs and those with disabilities were twice as likely to lose a grant."

This year's NeurIPS conference will initiate a position track. The position track paper deadline is May 22 AoE for all materials (abstract, full paper, supplementary, etc.). See Call for Paper for more details! neurips.cc/Conferences/...

Hard to disagree with any of my colleagues’ frustrations here. It is incredibly hard to do good research under these conditions, too.

SCOOP: 114 staff at the National Renewable Laboratory fired Monday morning. A researcher says that leadership "kept us in the dark and insisted things were better than they are."

Responsible reviewing initiatives for NeurIPS 2025 - read more about changes to reviewing that that will safeguard reviewing quality and timeline in our blog post below: blog.neurips.cc/2025/05/02/r...

Assume a spherical cat of uniform density...

The part of In Cold Blood by Capote where he first details the murder scene… whew 🔥🔥🔥 💀

Here is a link to the full @60minutes.bsky.social segment! 👀 a nice surprise at 5:25 AND one of our very own, Kristin Weinstein makes an appearance at 9 mins. #StandUpforScience #scienceforall #saveourscience www.cbsnews.com/news/scienti...

Headed to #ICLR25? Want to connect more with the AI x sustainability community? Check out our networking event, organized jointly with FCL (fcl.ethz.ch) and supported by @mila-quebec.bsky.social . 👇👇👇 Learn more about the event & register (for free) here: tinyurl.com/CCAIxFCL

Been waiting for a work making this clear for a while: zero-shot, LLMs do not hedge and do not ask questions to solve under-specified problems arxiv.org/abs/2503.22674

New preprint on controlled generation from LMs! I'll be presenting at NENLP tomorrow 12:50-2:00pm Longer thread coming soon :)

The multiagent LLM people are going to do me in. What do you mean you told one agent it was a manager and the other a worker and it slightly improved performance

Murderbot, the best science fiction series of the past 25 years, is now a show on Apple TV. Might be premature to say so but it feels like things are turning around

🗣️ If you still need lodging in Singapore for ICLR, I have a hotel room reserved in the ICLR block (Conrad Singapore Orchard, April 24-29) that is now available. Willing to be ~flexible on cost if traveling on a budget. Send me a message if interested!

I helped build a government AI system. DOGE fired me, rolled the AI out to the whole agency, and implied the AI can do my job and the jobs of the others they've fired. It can't. But, what DOGE accidentally revealed about themselves in the process is fascinating. 🧵

today I heard someone say that they intentionally built something to be difficult to use for non ~advanced programmers… to avoid having to maintain it for general users (a lot of work)… lawful evil

12.5% of DOE employees could be impacted #EnergySky💡🔌 www.politico.com/news/2025/02...

This is a comprehensive (and very bleak) summary of the current state of US science

The post-Second World War federally supported research infrastructure that propelled American universities to global prominence is collapsing before our eyes.