somebody at UChicago is feeding preprints to LLMs without authors' consent, in a research study they have the gall to suggest to authors they've opted-in that they volunteer to evaluate the LLMs' suggestions regarding their own work. lol, lmao even. here is the invite and my reply

Rounding out the winter break with a little wintry Florida cave diving….we hit Emerald sink this weekend near Tallahassee and my dive buddy snapped this awesome pic as I was dropping into the basin

Great new paper! Many stinging wasps, bees, and ants have controlled the sex of their developing eggs for millions of year using an ancient segment of their genome- always the same segment- but what's weird is, *the exact DNA sequence of that segment doesn't seem to matter*.

Just saw this in LinkedIn for anyone interested in looking into Grok's production of CSAM and non-consensual sexualised imagery. www.linkedin.com/posts/mtechl...

Irrespective of their actual economic standing, 15% of White Americans feel they are losing ground to other Whites and competing with Black and Latinx Americans at the bottom of the hierarchy. This subjective sentiment strongly predicts voting for Trump and opposing DEI measures.

What if we could tell you how well you’ll remember your next visit to your local coffee shop? ☕️ In our new Nature Human Behaviour paper, we show that the 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 can be measured with neuroimaging – and 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗸.

Amazing, not only the mPFC encoded categorical scales, but also it did it independently of linguistic similarity, suggesting construct-sensitive integration during self-report and a neural basis for psychological assessment. #cogpsyc #cognition #perpsy #socialpsyc

So little was known 18 years ago when I started researching climate comms. I'm blown away by how much we now know. This study, led by the incomparable Jan Voelkel with his all-star band, and released today in @natclimate.nature.com confirms that many distinct message strategies can work...

Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts? Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze. Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think. 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn.... @uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

What are your favorite dumb lecture-friendly examples of reverse inference in neuroimaging (either from media coverage, or better yet perpetuated by the journal article itself)?

Some researchers have used a preprint of one of my papers, run it through an AI and got it to generate follow-up ideas. Now they would like me to rate the suggestions. Do I play? I don’t think I want to 🤔

Faculty governance is a myth. even at my CA school, admin make the final call always, but then emphasize that they listen to input and agree with faculty most of the time, which is not the same thing As true shared governance.

Sometimes it’s nice to be able to stick your head in the ground

The "Lost Science" series from the NYT is an infuriating and heartbreaking must-read. What a security disaster -- more Americans are in harms way because of the loss of programs like this one:

You guys! The original show is now on Prime!

This is absurd, but also slightly funny. Academic faculty are, in general, a pack of neurodivergent weirdos who often bristled against traditional educational processes, like the SAT, and love academia *because* it celebrates creativity and innovation and the ability to synthesize knowledge.

If we’re renaming bodies of water based on petty grievances, I propose that this be renamed the Kendrick Lamar passage.

"I don’t know why my fellowship was terminated. I suspect that it has something to do with studying a species that doesn’t fit the binary of what we expect to see in nature, with completely different males and females." @carlzimmer.com profiles my wonderful coauthor @jjinsing.bsky.social Gift link.

In my lifetime syllabi have gone from a thing professors joked about in exasperation to a bizarre form of state surveillance equally loathed by faculty and students

Can someone else figure out my syllabi and also set up my canvas shells

Anderson Cooper cannot keep it together during his dramatic reading of the lyrics to Taylor Swift's "Wood" (r @vineyarddawg.bsky.social)

A last cave dive for 2025! Ken took us to the Black Lagoon entrance at Hart Springs. Beautiful cave and beautiful way to end the year 🩵

Captive bred sunflower stars (Pycnopodia helianthoides) successfully released into Monterey Bay for the first time! This species has been more or less extirpated south of Washington since the 2014 outbreak of sea star wasting disease.🧪🦑

I used to manage wine programs for movie theaters and I am in the extremely unique position to say with professional certainty that the answer here is a crisp Albariño.

Discovery of the week: turns out there exists a literal "I hate [insert my name]" club. Haters join from pro-and anti-AI crowd, as they misunderstand my work, call me stupid & spread online hate. Misogyny is a hell of a drug Kinda assuring that the figures in my papers are giving them headaches

New paper by Jolynn Pek and colleagues criticizes the z-curve approach of detecting selection bias.

It’s a good morning for ice cream

Also, "contributed by" articles should probably be entirely done away with at PNAS. This dirty little secret is that this provides a way for NAS members to get questionable work in at a high profile outlet with less stringent peer review. It's corrupt and it's anti science.

If you see this, post a random fact about yourself: I was recruited for a show on Nickelodeon in 2012 after performing at Paper Mill Playhouse. My mom didn’t let me do it because I would have needed to be in Florida for months, and she wanted me to stay in school. Show never aired — close call!

If you see this, post a random fact about yourself: One Saturday, I was running on campus during grad school and got recruited to be an extra on Dexter.

This paper for example: people who are toxic on political subreddits are also toxic on subreddits that have nothing to do with politics

Art lives in the process, in the struggle to grow and figure out the specific needs of the work, and in the arrival at a better understanding of the artist’s limitations. The product is just the end result of the art.

The lecturer in question is our colleague in children’s literature studies. She is a brilliant scholar and from all accounts a gifted teacher. This ruling is infuriating… at the end of the day, it is our students’ education that will suffer.

Researchers recently asked Americans what income level other people need in order to live a good life. A whopping 86% of Americans reported income levels well below what others say they themselves need. Fascinating!

"When Gender Kicks In: An Experimental Study of Work from Home and Attitudes to Household Work and Childcare" www.iza.org/publications...

We talked about running these numbers at UM soc when it became so obvious that women TAs got more complaints for the same classes. Glad someone tested it formally.

This story is absolutely wild. Did you know that avocados change sex over the course of a day? And that it's controlled by a single ancient balanced polymorphism? This is flat our crazy

Just wanted to share that there are many ways to feel about the holiday season. However you spend it this year, wishing you a good one! This graph is for an upcoming piece. Sharing with credit @thesolitudelab.bsky.social is welcome. Please contact me before reusing the figure for other purposes.

Experimental evidence that students are more likely to contest grades when they are delivered by an evaluator with a female-sounding name. "These findings suggest that women in evaluative positions face disproportionate resistance when delivering negative assessments."

Giving what we can has implemented a fun game where you spin a globe to see how your starting point in life would compare if you were reborn today, randomly somewhere on earth. www.givingwhatwecan.org/birth-lottery

This is NGC 2264, also called the "Christmas Tree Cluster." It's a cluster of young stars about 2,500 light years away. They were 'born' during the Pliocene Epoch (2-5 MYA), about the same time as early hominids like Ardipithecus or Homo habilis, so they're barely older than humanity. 🎄💫🔭

Merry Christmas Eve, ya’ll 🎄

#PsychSciSky, gather ‘round: New quiz just dropped!

Treat a published work that was later divulged to be AI-generated the same way you would if you found out it was manually plagiarized from a different book. Same situation, just the plagiarism has been automated and averaged out a bit, and the plagiarist is also a scab and a cultural arsonist.

I checked in with Steve Pinker about the Bari Weiss stuff and he got right back to me "It's consistent with the worst fears that [Weiss's]...background in opinion journalism left her ill-equipped to handle news with the right standards of objectivity and integrity."

Are you leading a (mostly) happy life, a meaningful life, or a psychologically rich life? Take this fun quiz at the Washington Post and find out! www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/int...?

Cenote Chan Hol - we pull up and ask where the cenote is. Oh, it’s by the fence. Down the steps. Under the ground…

lol just add more “we”s to a paper and ChatGPT immediately thinks it’s higher quality.

Merry Christmas from under the Yucatan! 🎄Cenote Jailhouse, Tulum Photo credit to Joseph Jonathan Bosquez

Once again, great stuff from Rolling Stone on the enshittification of the science publication system www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...