I submitted my comment and I hope you all will join me. www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

Folks who've used name-based gender labelers in comp. social science work, I understand that 'nomquamgender' (via this paper) ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC... squeezes the maximal signal out of name databases. Has there been any evaluation of LLM accuracies for this task? Pointers welcome!

OLIVER: "While I do get the appeal of thinking just 'one more concession, one more payoff' might safeguard your independence or let you live to fight another day, it's worth asking: At what point have you compromised so much that the thing you're supposed to be defending is gone?"

@aaronclauset.bsky.social’s work on how institution influences academic outcomes always reminds me what a catch22 department can be—at a top place, you’re doomed to wonder how much of the success you deserved; if you’re not, you‘re left wondering if your work has been overlooked. Prestige games suck

Next: Aaron Clauset with 'Manuscript Characteristics Associated With Editorial Review and Peer Review Outcomes at Science and Science Advances' Elite journals have profound influence in science discourse/careers - a lot of submissions get desk-rejected. #PRC10

New paper in PLOS Biology: as we raise the difficulty of our 3D printed puzzles, bees keep landing on combs with ever stranger hexagonal order! 🐝 Led by the brilliant Golnar Gharooni Fard, in collaboration with CK Prasanna & FL Jiménez journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

New job ad: Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science, Dartmouth College apply.interfolio.com/172357 Please share with your networks. I am the search chair and happy to answer questions!

This analysis of how ideas spread in the early scientific revolution, from person to person and place to place, lines up so nicely with @alliemorgan.bsky.social's 2018 paper on the diffusion of scientific ideas via modern faculty hiring networks epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10....

Next was a fantastic talk by @aaronclauset.bsky.social on the unequal impact of parenthood in academia at @iasliu.bsky.social. Highly recommend www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK_d... (10/13)

I'm very excited to be sabbatical this next academic year. Today, I got my inbox down to the lowest level it has ever been since I started as faculty 16 years ago. That's a positive sign for sabbatical productivity... right? 🫠 p.s. Don't ask me about my book (yet)

Are you a student in mathematics or an adjacent field? Help us understand how funding access and eligibility have affected your career. Take a short survey here tinyurl.com/MathFundingA...

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.

This is unfortunate: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u... I wrote to the president of Harvard. I hope other faculty will speak their conscience, even if it means more struggle ahead.

Applications are open for SFI's 2026 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships If you’ve recently earned a Ph.D. in any scientific field and want to pursue independent, transdisciplinary research, consider applying. Deadline: October 1, 2025 Apply here: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

Out of curiosity, aimed at other faculty: Does your university allow you to apply for Google or Amazon research awards, or are the legal terms from the funders found to be too onerous by university grants/legal/trademark?

Our team had an amazing week at @ic2s2.bsky.social in Norrköping Sweden and we will post pictures of our posters and talks soon - the big news is that we're so excited to host #IC2S2 in Burlington in 2026! youtu.be/p412S4GnPkc

In my latest blog post I lay out some things we as faculty can do to ensure that higher education remains an incubator that prepares future generations for a multiracial democracy as opposed to an incubator for Trump's fascist agenda. Check it out! educationallinguist.wordpress.com/2025/07/24/a...

That Dominique Baker can be a real downer sometimes (the entire piece is very good and a useful overview if you want to get caught up)

I've had this headline rattling around in my brain since January and I finally wrote it. Been hearing too many people in the startup world buying into the neoractionary nonsense that maybe a little light fascism is good for silicon valley. It's not. It's very, very bad.

Folks who follow LLM stuff: has anyone used LLMs to "evolve" or otherwise optimize prompts for another LLM task? Like, using an LLM to search the space of prompts for ones that make another LLM score well on some specific task.

"My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people." Written by an Ivy League professor who studies the Holocaust; who served in the IDF. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/o...

Here Vox's explainer for just what is going on at the Department of Education which includes me saying I don't have faith in financial aid disbursement next year and, oh yea, I think we're in a constitutional crisis www.vox.com/policy/40233...

So what can we do in response? A key problem: The transformation from long- to short-term funding leads researchers to flit from topic to topic, and move across fields chasing 'sexy' stories. Science is done better when you leave someone to geek out on a single topic for their whole career. 5/n

CONCLUSIONS: To promote the best science being done, we need to look at the incentives of science publishing and funding. Long-term funding produces better science. Short-term and topical agendas encourages irreproducibility. Funding model organisms generates science we can build on! 🪰🪱🦠🐠🐁🐸 6/6 🧵

What makes a country great in the 21st century is science, and it’s really insane to purposefully destroy its science enterprise.

Marcia McNutt (president of @nasonline.org) should resign. NAS needs a leader who understands what it means to forcefully defend science's unique role in seeking and speaking truth.

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

The evil that men do lives after them

📣 We're on the lookout for a creative postdoc with strong computational skills! Be the go-to person in the lab for building simple but powerful simulations that test wild ideas on biological rythems: from daily cycles of mussel groups at deep sea, to firefly flash synchronization! More info below👇

STAGGERING: This new study of 133 countries is the first to estimate the impact of all USAID’s work. In 2 decades, it has saved *92M* lives. Current cuts, if not reversed, are forecast to cost up to *14M* lives thru 2030. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

"There is still time to make your voices heard. The reason they are moving so quickly is because the more the public learns about the bill, they more they oppose it. The hour is late, but not too late."

Slides from my keynote lecture "What drives the productivity of scientific labor?" at the 2025 Oxford Summer School on Economic #Networks. Part 1 of 2: why and how do elite scientists dominate scientific discourse? aaronclauset.github.io/slides/Claus...

Is this… poetic justice?

Authoritarians want you to feel isolated and alone, to feel like their vision of the world is the only one. That’s why taking part in public protests matters. You connect with other people like you and you show those numbers off to the world. It’s a great feeling. Try it!

#NoKings today or ever ✊

Join the 22,339 people who have joined to support our NIH colleagues. Let's get this to 50,000 RT

ONE WEEK UNTIL NO KINGS DAY! At this time next Saturday, we will be taking to the streets across the country. While Trump wastes millions on a birthday parade in DC, we’re showing up everywhere else to say NO KINGS. There are nearly 2,000 events planned. Join us: www.nokings.org?SQF_SOURCE=i...

Now officially out with nice formatting and all 🥳 "Thinking clearly about age, period, and cohort effects" -- a gentle introduction to the age-period-cohort problem and how to "solve" it through various types of assumptions. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Hurray! 🎉 @arash.network (left) is the 24th recipient of the Zachary's Karate Club CLUB prize. For his talk @netsciconf.bsky.social NetSci 2025, he was entrusted with the illustrious trophy 🏆 from @nwlandry.bsky.social #networkscience networkkarate.tumblr.com

100% yes to this. Much of the "science is slowing down" discourse seems shallow and disconnected from how modern science works (not unlike a moral panic). @jdrakephd.bsky.social nails it: the scientific frontier is extraordinarily broad, and so are its many advances, much more so than in the mid-20c

We'll get started at 9am with a group discussion of best practices for sharing network data. Come share your perspective and experiences!

There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd. It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.

Here's the NIH's proposed budget - from $48 billion to $27 billion. NIAID, current ~$7 billion cut to ~$4.2 billion. The proposed 15% cap on indirect costs remains. Again, these budgets are passed, and our leadership in science, technology, and innovation is gone. www.hhs.gov/sites/defaul...

I'm sure I'll take shit for saying this, but this passage from Glenn Loury's Chronicle interview perfectly captures for me the civilizational necessity of a relatively autonomous academic sphere. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

"Under the terms of the executive order, political appointees loyal to the president can willfully find justification to label any research finding as scientific misconduct" This should terrify every single scientist in America.

There is no "science-wide replication crisis" because every word in that phrase carries unfounded assumptions. 🧵 1. There is no evidence that progress has generally stalled in the sciences. Also, no one has actually tried to estimate replicability across fields.

It's easy to see exactly how each of these principles can be adulterated to justify some completely antiscientific actions, especially given how none of these terms are defined. So now e.g. being skeptical of findings and assumptions could mean running new studies despite overwhelming evidence.

1. It's Fustilarian Friday and today's drop is the "Restoring Gold Standard Science" executive order. My read is that this is designed to (1) protect far-fringe figures such as the antvaxxers now heading our health agencies, and (2) kneecap efforts to use scientific evidence in regulatory policy.