Researchers: are you reassured by Prolific's efforts to tamp down bot activity? Have you seen changes in data quality? We've gone from rejecting about 10% of the sample for headphone checks to more like 40%. Not confident the rest are real.

In my ongoing attempts to give you a break from *gestures widely* THE HORRORS: Let's talk about the utterly bizarre science of cats' purring. Here's a weird starting point: There are NO cats (Felidae) that can BOTH roar AND purr. Cats that roar = genus Panthera Cats that purr = genus Felis

A very funny and satisfying rant by @acollierastro.bsky.social about the impact of "AI" on education and specifically the professor who outsourced his work to ChatGPT, lost it, then told the world about it (25 min.) www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pqF...

I've been looking for an easy-to-follow explainer on how LLMs work for a class I'm teaching this term, but this series is so much more than that. Worth sharing with students (and everyone else)!

I'm looking to interview, read, and share disaster narratives. If you have a story to tell, data to share, and want to talk, I'm taking trains and bikes across the EU and want to talk to you. #academicsky #disasters #openscience www.andrewrusso.me/dnp

So... as I write syllabi for next semester, I have to ask a question that makes me feel incompetent: Does anyone have solid resources on AI policies in class? This could be how to organize assessment to minimize AI use, or any of the other Faustian bargains. #sociology #academicsky #highered

It’s the same with academic writing. The difficulty doesn’t lie in formulating grammatical sentences, but in deciding what it is you actually want to say. Writing is part of the process by which you figure that out, and isn’t something that can be outsourced to a machine.

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)? Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

Every ad now

The advice I give young people on choice of degree programme. Choose something you love. You’ve got the rest of your life to be frustrated and miserable.

Beautiful thread

An die deutsche #Linguistics #Linguistik crowd: Kann es sein, dass die Leipzig corpora gerade down sind? Wenn ja, weiß da jemand vielleicht, wann man da wieder Zugriff haben kann?

Psycholinguists and psychologists: Is there good R packages for distributing items across conditions? For example, I have 60 stimuli and some preliminary data on item-level accuracy. I'd like to create 3 lists of 20 items that are matched in accuracy without coding it myself. 👀

We have another online study on Children Helping Science for adults with a baby between 2 and 24 months old! childrenhelpingscience.com/studies/7012...

Wie wäre es mal mit #Existenzstrategie statt #Exzellenzstrategie? Auch Wissenschaftler_innen wollen verlässlich Miete zahlen können, ihre Kinder ernähren & in finanziellen Notlagen nicht vollkommen aufgeschmissen sein. Plus: Existenzängste bremsen Forschung aus. Deshalb: #ExitExzellenz! #IchBinHanna

Research from 2022 that every Democrat apologist should chew on: “We do not find any evidence that accommodative strategies reduce radical right support. If anything, our results suggest that they lead to more voters defecting to the radical right.“ www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Come join us! We (me, Jill Lany, Perrine Brusini, and Gert Westermann) are recruiting a #devpsych PhD student to Lancaster Uni to join our ongoing Levehulme funded research project on how word learning shapes visual representations in infants! Please share! More info : tinyurl.com/ynbfkhbj

We can upload 3 minute videos now. YOU KNOW THE RULE

when the teams are "imperfect woman who demanded basic safety standards for herself and the rest of the crew and cast" vs "sexual harassers, the system that protects them, and the entire right-wing media ecosystem" I hope we're all clear which side we need to be on

JOB ALERT in #language and #linguistics! Postdoc Position at the Center for Language Evolution Studies, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. Job offer here: www.umk.pl/en/jobs/?tas... We are now looking at a broader candidate pool so do consider applying! Please repost & share widely!

Es ist in Deutschland ja so: Jede Subvention der Autoindustrie gilt als Marktwirtschaft. Und jede Investition in unsere Kinder als Sozialismus. #Groko

Big brains of #KidLitUK - someone's asking for books that provide authentic disability representation. What are your top recs? Across all spectrums of disability.

At the playground with the 5yo. Daddy: You can lie on this hammock here if you want. M: I did a poo on my monkey in the night. D: What?! Really?? M: No! You said I can lie on here. #lexical #ambiguity #linguistics

München, Solingen, Magdeburg: Zu allen Anschlägen gab es einen Brennpunkt in der ARD. Zur gestrigen Amokfahrt in #Mannheim bisher nicht. Warum wohl? www.volksverpetzer.de/aktuelles/ma...

Anyone in the developmental psychology/infant research community know of any existing parent-report questionnaires on infant babbling (i.e., syllable production), specifically for English families? #DevSci

My German election ballot only arrived today, a long shot but is anyone traveling from Boston to Berlin today who could take it? Any leads @germanyinboston.bsky.social ?

Good morning. After a rough few days, this week's Blind Date was perfectly timed to fill you with joy. Couldn't wipe the smile off my face. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

I think most people are intuitively aware of this but something like the official White House account posting an “ASMR” video of shackled immigrants is not just cruel for its own sake, it’s intentional envelope-pushing to ramp up to desensitization over inhumane detention, camps, and deaths

By the way, people should understand that the admin doesn't have to shoot or gas people to kill them. If you pile people in military-run camps in Gitmo and the Panamanian jungle without adequate food or healthcare and just wait, people will die

Liebe dt. Wissenschaftsinstitutionen, wir lesen überall starke Bekenntnisse für unsere Demokratie & großes Entsetzen über Dammbruch durch Union, der Demokratie & Menschenrechte unmittelbar gefährdet. Auch Ihr solltet dazu nun laut werden: Wissenschaft hat Demokratieverantwortung! #LauteWissenschaft

I am writing psycholinguistics lectures for 1st time in many years, I only have 3 so it's a whistlestop tour but I want to ensure multilingualism & signed languages are represented. Am struggling to find sign research re: syntactic parsing models - has it been done? Any pointers appreciated!

On Darwin Day, a reminder that Charles Darwin had an inexplicable major beef with marine iguanas, writing that they were: "small and of a sooty black, which if possible, heightens their native ugliness" and "the most disgusting, clumsy lizards.... Somebody calls them 'imps of darkness'"

Was really enjoying Bluesky for a moment there. And now it's like 5% jokes, 5% wholesome content and 90% the collapse of the United States. I cannot afford going back to my doomscrolling habit, help.

I know this site only reaches a subset of neuro/ cog professors. If you know a young professor in the area who would benefit from a week of targeted learning about doing good science, good mentoring, networking etc, it would be great if you could forward them: compneurosci.com/Neuro4Pros/i...

US friends and colleagues, let me know if you are looking for European phd / postdoc positions to get out of this mess - I can explain how the systems work over here or know people who can (at least for Germany, Sweden. Spitzenkandidat, Norway and UK) and help you find possible job openings

Ein bisschen Hoffnung! www.zeit.de/gesellschaft...

Eine Rede, die Anerkennung verdient. In 1 Minute zeigt @ricardalang.bsky.social , wie man mit der AfD umgehen sollte und ja, sie spricht Friedrich Merz zurecht die Kanzlerfähigkeit ab. Hut ab vor dieser Rede!

Ok, Semester geht übernächste Woche wieder los und dann noch zwei Wochen bis zur Wahl. Würde gerne meine Student*innen zum Wählen motivieren zwecks Vermeidung von Faschismus. Frage: Wie macht ihr das so? Zeigt ihr z.B. Wahlomat?

#Crowdsourcing I'm looking for current overview book chapter(s)/articles or systematic reviews on adult and child online language processing (emphasis on sentence processing rather than lexical procesing). Target audience = 1st/2nd year grad student level. #linguistics #devpsy #cogpsyc

ngl a lot of AI pick mes in academia are just exposing how poor their teaching/writing is without realising.

Human rights advocates have warned that Palestinian children are bearing the brunt of Israel’s bombardment and siege.

Make it stop please.

Nothing like the adrenaline you get when you think you might have lost your child's favourite stuffy 😭

read the rest, it's great onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/d...

Q for fellow academic parents: when will I stop kidding myself with plans like "I'll work on this thing when I have a few uninterrupted hours"? #academicsky #parenthood

Gotta love museum bluesky

Please tell your kids, every damn day if necessary, that chatGPT is not a goddamn search engine and you shouldn’t believe a word it says. Tell the adults too, but it’s especially imperative to inoculate kids against this

Spoiler: this is a textbook. The LLM turned the professor’s teaching materials into a text book so she can do the most basic form of interactive teaching: a flipped classroom (bonus: she’s now replaceable). This is incredibly embarrassing. Claiming this as innovative teaching is just …cringe.

Today my autistic 4yo was kicked out of speech therapy because he wouldn't "follow directions" and instead wanted to "pretend he was a tiger." I don't know but like... if your job is to give speech therapy to 4 year olds maybe sometimes you have to give speech therapy to a tiger.