Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

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In utterly DELIGHTFUL news, Adwait Paliwal, the desi techbro behind the cheatbot Einstein AI which claimed it could log into Canvas and do/turn in your assignments for you has been forced to take down his website. He'll likely be back, and there are others like him in abundance, sadly.

"Your h-index will thank you" 😂 The professor's answer to students using Einstein has arrived www.professorfeynman.com

I'm a cognitive scientist with an interest in epistemic vigilance, and this essay that's been going around gave me pause. I don't think it's straightforward to apply the concept of epistemic vigilance to interactions with LLMs, as this essay does. 🧵/ sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...

No, turning over activities designed for your learning to a bot does not free you. Undermining online learning hurts access to learning, especially for the not-wealthy. Had a great discussion with @mjgault.bsky.social of @404media.co about Einstein and other online course autocomplete systems.

This is really important (via @annamillsoer.bsky.social ): the effect of AI/LLM cheating on online teaching will have real effects on the opportunity that many working-class people have to study college material. If these degrees become worthless b/c of rampant cheating we lose a real resource.

Is this bad

Out of nowhere, an overwhelming craving for chef boyardee mini ravioli, cold, straight out of the can.

Recent work has shown how vulnerable online survey research is to LLMs. Motivated by this, we examined our online Posner cueing data from Prolific. It's concerning. We now must carefully consider when (or whether?) online behavioral data can be trusted. see our comment: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

They released this like this Why would anyone ever drive a car by people who do not Look At MEASUREMENTS

The book of love is long and boring No one can lift the damn thing It's full of charts and facts and figures And instructions for dancing And I I love it when you read to me And you You can read me anything

And I could make you rue the day But I could never make you stay Not for all the tea in China Not if I could sing like a bird Not for all North Carolina Not for all my little words Not if I could write for you The sweetest song you ever heard It doesn't matter what I do Not for all my little words

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

two super bowls in a row with drake getting slammed

"As AI trans­forms academic labor, much more is at stake than the terms & conditions of our employment. At stake is the very integrity of the teaching & learning process & the notion that all humanity—not just a few individuals—should benefit from the production of knowledge at our universities."

A new Bandcamp Friday discovery: TAKER's new album, "Sons And Daughters." If you're a Ramones fan, you'll probably enjoy this one. taker-oi.bandcamp.com/album/sons-a...

If/when people recognize when their mind wanders: what do they do about it? This article outlines an integration of task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) into Winne's model of self-regulated learning. Numerous directions for future research! doi.org/10.1111%2Fco... #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky

Hey y'all, it's Bandcamp Friday. All purchases today go directly to artists and labels, so consider supporting some of your favorite musical acts. Today I'm picking up albums by Andy Shauf, Tropical F*ck Storm, Ethan Daniel Davidson, and Wild Pink.

Spent the day recording videos of the lecture material I'm scheduled to teach on Tuesday (for Belief in 'Weird' Things, on the topic of learning styles). Ten+ inches of snow in Greensboro yesterday is almost certain to keep everyone at home for at least half the week...

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took at university. Life in Western Literature I & II Poetry Writing I & II Shakespeare I & II Existentialism Intro to Western Music

I've created a Spotify playlist for our class music this semester (2025 albums), which will be built out as we go. Please feel free to check it out anytime here: open.spotify.com/playlist/0wj...

First post of the year, new paper out today: we present possibly the biggest case of systematic Measurement Schmeasurement in tech use. It seems that most studies on gaming (videogame) addiction/disorder haven't measured gaming after all. This research took years, so long 🧵 doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

@clydefrancks.bsky.social found what is potentially (likey?!) the first fully hallucinated GWAS paper, of “left handedness”… the Manhattan plot has the wrong number of chromosomes, and genes labels with one wrong chromosome placed in a second wrong chromosome… wild…

How tho?

At No Fences Review, @charleshughes2.bsky.social pays tribute to the late Bob Weir

New post: replicating Loftus and Palmer at scale. rolfzwaan.substack.com/p/memory-mis...

Kai's write up and @cailinmeister.bsky.social's thread do a great job of summarizing our results. Rather than cover them a third time, I thought I'd clarify some misconceptions over our piece and COIS more broadly that keep cropping up scattered across replies. 🧵🧪

NY Giants benefit yet again from “wide right”

Want to get the data out of a PDF figure? As in, the actual data – not a rough trace-along-the-lines version? I made an app you might like: adamkucharski.github.io/pdf2plot/ It all started a few years ago... 🧵

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

I arrive 20 min b4 class to play music from my personal collection; class begins when I stop music & talk about it. Each semester has a theme/constraint. This semester I'm playing "Albums Released In 2025." Always brutal narrowing it down w/diversity in genres/artists; some greats don't make it.

Sad day. Probably not my favorite Bob song, but sneaky good.

If you teach critical thinking in higher ed and want to go to Fresno, consider submitting a proposal for LiliCon 2026. I attended last summer and it’s a superb conference for people who actually teach skepticism to uni students. www.lilienfeldalliance.org/lilicon

Martin Peterson's creative response to being banned from teaching Plato (shared with his permission).

Just to clarify: once again, this study has only an observational design and reverse causality or third variables are perfectly possible. We simply don't know if social media "harmed" any participant

Re-upping, as we're still accepting applications. Please consider!

A brutal and fitting take-down of the hometown football team I've loved (and hated) for 45 years... www.nytimes.com/athletic/694...

My students struggled w/in-class exams last semester (much more than pre-pandemic students did). Trying optional re-takes this semester, where very similar exam given the following class mtg (Thur->Tue). Outcome = whichever higher: Add 10% of retake score to take 1, OR use 80% of retake score. 1/2:

Can confirm, Reddit is a good source of research fuel -- "attention span" is the rabbit hole of the year for me

Did you know that the Internet Archive has a huge collection of FM radio broadcasts of live show recordings? Freely & legitimately stream or download some of the fantastic performances here (I've picked up some Garcia-Saunders, Smashing Pumpkins, Randy Newman, & more) : archive.org/details/fmra...

How experience shapes extraordinary beliefs Review by Eli Stark-Elster (@eselster.bsky.social) & Manvir Singh (@manvir.bsky.social) tinyurl.com/y9dbwaa5

@xphilosopher.bsky.social and I tried to study what beliefs do (or at least, what people think they do). Across hundreds of participant generated beliefs and first/third party ratings, we found they express identity and/or represent facts, in the pattern described in this post. 1/

🎧 2025 gave us plenty of great music… and plenty of hype. Not all of it earned. 🔥 Time for some hot takes with our pick of 2025’s most overrated albums👇 nofrillsreviews.com/2025/11/30/2...

Here’s a thread on this article for those without access. The malevolent creators of this stuff want you to be impressed how human it is? Treat it like a human being for the purposes of liability, then. bsky.app/profile/bren...

It is unethical to do a randomized controlled trial in which you withhold a proven, life-saving vaccine from newborn babies.

my AI hot take is that the entire development process for LLMs has been a Turing Test Cargo Cult. They internalized the idea that true AI=chatbot that cant be easily distinguished from a human and went all in on *language*. Passing the test is substituted for the thing you are meant to test for