🧵 New report just dropped 🚨 "Fractured Reality: How Democracy Can Win the Global Struggle Over the Information Space" — from the EU Joint Research Centre, led by Mario Scharfbillig and I. A landmark read for anyone working on disinformation, platforms & democracy. 👇 1/10

I'm hiring! 📢 Fully funded 4-year PhD position in Language Evolution using Communication Games at @mpi-nl.bsky.social. Come work with me on how different social pressures shape the evolution of new communication systems in the lab! Deadline for application is May 18th! share.google/fGTKbFS4v4Gb...

Competent and compelling rebuttal of Labour’s most ill-advised and cruel policy on extending time to settlement. The UK government should hang their head in shame.

This is for those of us trying to retreat into the crumbling ivory tower: open.substack.com/pub/protagon...

Hard to disagree: youtu.be/DDf25rNyT1A?...

Watch out for the midterms. The Trump administration has chipped away at free and fair elections over the last year - here are some of the things they've done over the last month... All actions available on www.trumpactiontracker.info Subtitles available! youtu.be/EkgsDCtAv-E

Utter brilliance, especially the footnotes!

theonion.com/ai-chatbot-t... @dingemansemark.bsky.social 😁

Each Friday night, I write about what happened in US science & higher ed. 🧪 Year 2, Week 5: Jan 30 - shutdown w/UMN student leaders + Texas A&M protesters & AAUP/AFT advocacy - where we stand on research $$ - so many measles (21 day quarantine, oof) & so much more - buttondown.com/liminalcreat...

This mind-numbing idiocy also fails to take into account the benefits our domestic students derive from their international peers.

We recently added a list of keynote speeches and presentations by child language scholars. Check it out! www.childlanguage.org/resources-fo...

You definitely want to follow @trumpactiontracker.bsky.social

It doesn’t matter whether you call this fascism or something else - history teaches us what atrocities social systems are capable of if not stopped in time. That time is now.

The shooting of Alex Pretti was (US) state sanctioned murder and has been followed up by attempts to destroy evidence and stop local police (and even the FBI) from investigating. Minnesota police are trying to counter the lies and illegality. Terrifying open.substack.com/pub/heatherc...

Detecting parallels to the autism debate: changes in diagnostic criteria & awareness account for much of the increase yet the search for external causes persists. Also, there may be causes for mental health decline (if confirmed to be real) that attribution to social media conveniently obscures.

Yesterday it was cows using tools, today its penguins using satellite imagery.

What I find astonishing is that a handful of individuals are able to run a species of 8 billion+ into the ground and there seems so little combined agency of the rest of us.

Truly one to watch! Congrats @damianblasi.bsky.social !

I started reading up on the whole "loneliness pandemic" narrative because this seems like a literature where the age-period-cohort problem may be relevant (or maybe it isn't?). Here's data from Australia (HILDA), average agreement with the statement "I often feel very lonely" (SD of ca. 1.8).>

It would be nice to still live in times when I mainly used social media to amplify cool sciency stuff. But these times have passed. open.substack.com/pub/christin...

Language Development Research, Volume 5, Issue 3 is now available for download on the LDR website. Thank you to all of our contributors! Wishing everyone a joyous New Year! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/issue/101/in...

Superb video by @simonoxfphys.com Simon Clark on how truth on climate change is twisted and dismantled by Trump administration: www.youtube.com/watc.... 1/2 1/2

I finally got some time to flesh out my rant about these headlines... TL;DR: age differences ≠ aging jenndowd.substack.com/p/does-adole... #demography #episky #medsky #neurosky

Part 2 (10 mins) covering attacks on science, civil rights and how Trump wants to be a king. again there will be some short versions of some of it later this week... All based on www.trumpactiontracker.info youtu.be/9fudutXpn08

Columbia at least had the decency to wait until they were blackmailed before caving in. What's Cambridge's excuse?

Such a beautifully written piece about how medical hyper-specialisation makes it difficult to connect the dots as a complex systems approach would require.

Good news still exist.

Wieder eine faszinierende und lehrreiche Gelegenheit für mich, an einer deutschen Handbuchübersetzung mitzuwirken und weitere Übersetzungen zu koordinieren. Direkt zur deutschen Version geht es über diesen Link: sks.to/autocracy-de

As autocratization proceeds in the U.S. and elsewhere, it's time for a stock-take. Where are we, where are we going? What works? What might work better? Nearly 6 months after we published the Anti-Autocracy Handbook sks.to/autocracy the SciBeh team is hosting its next big event .... 1/6

What enables human language? A biocultural framework. New paper by Inbal Arnon & al. with @limorraviv.bsky.social , @profsimonfisher.bsky.social doi.org/10.1126/science.adq8303

In light of the assault on American science by its own government that launched in January this year, we published the Anti-Autocracy Handbook in June to provide some guidance to scholars about how to respond to an emerging autocracy. The handbook is available at: sks.to/autocracy. 1/n 1/4

Announcing publication of the full Special Issue of LDR on the Development of Metaphor. Thank you to Ingrid Lossius Falkum and Mary Beth Neff, PhD for organizing this volume and serving as Guest Editors! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/issue/100/in...

The US funds the bulk of biomedical research globally by far. It's not like other countries can simply take up the slack. The more likely: people leave research, new people don't become researchers. There is no happy ending. www.pbs.org/newshour/sho...

Would love to see some concrete ideas on how to start implementing community-based volunteer-driven science publishing. Maybe start by federating all existing diamond OA journals?

Congratulations to Chiara Pompei, Serena Lecce, Paola Del Sette, Elena Didoni, Luca Bischetti & Valentina Bambini on publication of The Role of Metaphor in Children's Persuasive Communication in the LDR Special Issue on Development of Metaphor Comprehension. ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/8...

New paper out today with Zhian Chen. We argue that modern intensive parenting is not only exhausting for parents, but in some cases disrupts healthy child development. What is 'overparenting'? And can evolutionary theory help us understand how we got here? academic.oup.com/emph/advance...

The latest from Trump world in under 2 minutes. youtu.be/CvwHfu0627w

New blog post! Let's say you have two measures meant to capture the same confounder. They're highly correlated. Can you still proceed with your regression analysis? (I admit, the title is a bit of a spoiler) www.the100.ci/2025/10/13/i...

No. There are no results. The paper is sloppy and laced with errors. For a rebuttal listen here: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/n...

Do these idiots really want their GPs, consultants and professors to go do volunteering work rather than focus on their jobs? Trying to picture my breast surgeon steaming clothes at the charity shop…

"Living through the rise of a dictatorship just means inhabiting a space that is gradually shrinking. There’s no point in resisting, not at first. You just make do with whatever breathing room you still have—until you lose that too." Read Gisela Salim-Peyer: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

💡 The idea that children drive language change is widely accepted — but does it hold up? New research co-authored by Dr Vera Kempe challenges this view, showing little evidence that child-led innovations spread through communities. Read more: www.mpi.nl/publications...

Super proud of this work and very grateful for all the amazing people who provided valuable feedback along the way @remivantrijp.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @cedricboeckx.bsky.social @inbalarnon.bsky.social ❤️❤️❤️🙏

So rewarding to work with these two brilliant people to check whether the existing evidence supports the persistent claim that children's simplifying errors drive language change. It doesn't. psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d... @limorraviv.bsky.social @damianblasi.bsky.social

I remember the great kindness with which Wietske welcomed us into the scientific community when a bunch of us clueless ECRs crawled out from behind the Iron Curtain in the early 90s. RIP Wietske Vonk www.mpi.nl/news/wietske...

The Item Response Warehouse is a new data resource for psychometricians interested in developing methods using bigger and more diverse sets of instruments: itemresponsewarehouse.org New paper out now at BRM: doi.org/10.3758/s134...

Staying with me after yesterday's #uklvc15 poster session is Schaeffler et al.'s point that Child-Directed Speech was different in soviet East Germany than in the West. Less influence on individualism influences CDS phonetic features! #acquisition #linguistics #sociolinguistics #contextmatters

No evidence for generational differences in the conventionalisation of face emojis. New paper by Kempe and @limorraviv.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1016/j.ch...

🤔Compared to GenX/Boomers or Millennials, do GenZ have larger online social networks and, as a result, greater agreement with their peers on what emojis mean? Find the answer in this fun little paper with @limorraviv.bsky.social ⬇️: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...