Just updated my collection of gen AI images in journals to include Figure 1 shown below. doi.org/10.6084/m9.f...

@pelagic.bsky.social is having an Easter 🐣 sale! You can get the Better Posters book 📖 for HALF PRICE‼️ 🏷️ Many other fine titles, too! Use the promo code “Easter 50”: pelagicpublishing.com/collections/...

Ngl I'm kind of tired of the 'your alt text makes your post searchable' or w/e other argument other than its intended purpose Alt text makes a largely inaccessible world just that much easier for disabled people to navigate And that should damn well be enough if you view us as fully human/worthy

Claims of “free energy” have been a reliable marker of cranks for generations. And that’s not even the wildest claim here.

@pelagic.bsky.social is having an Easter 🐣 sale! You can get the Better Posters book 📖 for HALF PRICE‼️ 🏷️ Many other fine titles, too! Use the promo code “Easter 50”: pelagicpublishing.com/collections/...

The furor over this is almost on par with the time Agent Scully, back in the 90’s, ran a whole Western Blot protocol from start to finish in under 30 mins.

Can we just take a second to recognize how incredibly gendered these descriptions are?

There is no wrong way to be a fan. But it is puzzling to call yourself a fan of something and then specifically say you dislike the major thing about it. "Big fan of Dungeons and Dragons, except for all the underground prisons and monsters."

Maybe I'll be able to get a new computer this year after all.

Preprint servers are more complex than people think. arXIv chief Ramin Zabih shows their workflow at the Newton Institute. 1/n

Good suggestions for anyone - not just musicians - looking to find their audience on this site.

Me, right before I explain some total bullshit.

Here's an Ivy league business school prof cheerfully touting an LLM trained on Victorian era texts as a way to "talk to the past" and how this is for some reason better than an LLM role playing a Victorian NO. YOU ARE NOT 'TALKING TO THE PAST' IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM h/t @rheinze.myatproto.social

Vaccination

ai feature implementation strategy is essentially “how annoying can we make the ui” so people accidently hit ai features so these companies can brag about how “highly used” ai features are internally

Another article that lays the blame of erosion of public trust on scientists themselves rather then the supremely well organized and supported efforts to undermine science. 😑

This particularly becomes an issue w/ Red-Green LUTs. You can easily make the switch using this FIJI Plugin: In FIJI > Color > Replace Red with Magenta. This can be applied to videos as well. You can also view how images may appear to those w/ vision impairments: > Color > Simulate Color Blindness

'A third of [Danish] women no longer work in academia eight years after having a child, according to new research that suggests extra childcare responsibilities are hindering women’s abilities to climb the career ladder.' 1/2

A new paper in Science measured the prevalence of social sycophancy across 11 leading large language models. The model’s responses were nearly 50% more sycophantic than humans’, even when users engaged in unethical, illegal, or harmful behaviors. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

“They” = “speaker at DOE Office of Science Advisory Committee meeting.” 😬

#OTD 21 years ago, Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper starred in "Rose", the debut of the first new Doctor Who series in decades. As an old fan, one of the things I loved was that this series helped make NEW fans.

Whenever someone thinks change is impossible, think of smoking. The smell of cigarettes used to be EVERYWHERE.

Pro tip: regardless of the field you want to major in or do graduate work in, favor universities with good humanities and arts. I can give you the long explanation, but you can think of them as hard to fake signals of many things that are important in unis that are hard to evaluate from the outside.

Happy birthday to the Washington Metro, which opened 50 years ago today with service on 4.6 mi of Red Line between Rhode Is. Ave & Farragut N. System now serves 130 mi. The DC Metro shows that, with good planning & enough investment, the public sector can succeed & build something extraordinary.

As political pressure mounts, U.S. medical school accreditor drops requirement to teach about health equity https://www.statnews.com/2026/03/27/medical-schools-dei-lcme-drops-structural-competency/ ↷ canadahealthwatch.ca/featured 🍁

Oh did you want 3300 words from me on today's IOC sex testing rules? An essay on the nature of evidence and why we can't seem to stop getting stuck in the same traps around sex and gender in sports? Wow lucky you!! www.coyotemedia.org/the-olympics...

The Jane Goodall Institute of Canada is deeply saddened by the passing of Dr. Biruté Galdikas — a renowned scientist and educator, an extraordinary conservationist, an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a tireless advocate for the orangutan. Photos: Daniela and Catalin Mitrache / JGI / OFI

Sperm whales have been recorded headbutting for the first time by drone! This behavior has often been hypothesized (think Moby Dick) but never captured. Exciting news for the headbutting world! 🧪 doi.org/10.1111/mms....

Shot. Chaser.

Oh, you reminded me a story about taxonomists. In 1989 a Belgian professor Alain Quintart formally described a new species of a mammal Marsupilami franquini from Palombie region of South America in the journal Les Naturalistes Belges. Zoological Record added it in to 1989-90 edition. But... 1/2

Not just political meetings- I've had meetings scraped where I'm offering free SciComm advice 🧪 and #AcademicSky: you can see if they've stolen your stuff by going to the WebinarTV and searching for your name To stop it from happening: require registrations and then check who registers

When taxonomists want to make a point in a species name Proposed subspecies names: Subspecies monstrous Subspecies massiveus Subspecies youcannotbelievehowvastlyhugelymidbogglinglybigitisii

We've known for decades that unicellular organisms can learn. But that doesn't make a good headline that implies "Scientists are baffled" / "Rewrite the textbooks" / "Everything you know is wrong". link.springer.com/article/10.3...

We have seen technology improve. (Think VHS -> DVD -> Blue-Ray -> 4K.) There are reasons to think generative AI will NOT follow this trend. One of those reasons is called "Model collapse." doi.org/10.1038/s415...

That Nature journals and Springer put the DOI near the bottom of the article web page. (Yeah, I copy a lot of DOIs while researching.)

Any graduate program that requires its students to publish peer reviewed journal articles to get their degree should also require their students to peer review at least as many journal articles. Probably more.

4) There isn’t a single major TV news media entity that openly orients itself to the many tens of millions of voters who vote for Democrats—the notion of the “liberal media” is transparent bullshit—the networks that aren’t overtly MAGA are devoted to both-sidesing & sanewashing their news coverage.

Once heard a prof tell grad students that they don't have to worry about misconduct, we have ethics now, mistakes like eugenics won't happen again (as if eugenics ever went away). Nothing more dangerous than framing it as a thing of the past and thinking we don't need to check ourselves constantly.

This is a lot of words from Joseph Marine that amounts to blaming people for dying of COVID. He’s not ignorant enough to think that people just needed to hear the words diet and exercise to save themselves. He’s saying those people failed to save themselves.

"Launch. Start up. Thrust. Reach Mars." Far too reminiscent of... "Phase 1. Collect underpants. Phase 2. ???? Phase 3. Profit!"

Counterpoint: Scraping public data sets has gotten so common (partly thanks to LLMs promoting article churn) that some journals STOPPED TAKING PAPERS using public data. www.science.org/content/arti...

“WebinarTV, a company that bills itself as ‘a search engine for the best webinars,’ is secretly scanning the internet for Zoom meeting links, recording the calls, and turning them into AI-generated podcasts for profit.” Everyone’s business model is just crime now.

👀ICYMI: "selective resistance overlooks deeper problems that are far more significant than the contested issues." #UniversityRankings #HigherEducation

What should research assessment really value? In our latest interview, Dr Mathijs Vleugel reflects on the gap between what is rewarded in evaluation and what researchers believe should count. 🔗Read the interview: shorturl.at/Ou1L3 #OpenAIRE #ResearchAssessment #OpenScience #CoARA

Heyyyyyy...you know what was 5 years ago today? It was BSBS day: Big Ship Big Stuck.

Southern Alberta to South Texas, and Southern Alberta to Southern Ontario (staying within Canada). Both ~3,450 km.

Using Canvas agentic AI to do your work for you signals that your work is worth less than it was prior to that act. The idea that this will, long term, free faculty time is belied by every single thing we know about the history of labor automation. It either puts you out of work, or you work more.