Despite the gutting of the National Center for Educational Statistics, the dept of Ed *did* manage to release 2024 college major counts in the usual format, so I can run it through the same code I do every year. First off, the change since peak of the largest fields -- another year of drops.

Talking loss functions at the FOSS luncheon

I shared some thoughts with @insidehighered.com about the first IPEDS data release since the Department of Education got DOGE-d. It's good to see the data coming out, but there are some concerns now and plenty more going forward. www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

Headed to Brazil for the first time next month. I've got a pretty meager frame of reference. Any reading recommendations (fiction or non-fiction)?

Including a requirement that hires and students be reported to the federal government by “color” - not ethnicity, “color” - is really bringing the race science all the way back to the nadir.

They’re cleaning up at the Herald Square station and briefly scraped the place back into December 1979. Hard for me to imagine living in such a two-tone world.

I'll admit, I was skeptical when they said Gemini was just like a bunch of PhDs. But I gotta admit they nailed it.

Really excited to learn from ‪@scaldararu.bsky.social‬ about this new pixel-based, over-time embedding model DeepMind -- has anyone started to poke at it? There are a lot of interesting uses I can imagine, quoted in my reply-guy answer below… medium.com/google-earth...

... Then they came for the Goldman Sachs economist and I did not speak out because the WSJ article was paywalled and so I wasn't sure if they were a real economist with a PhD or just some MBA faking credentials

I always look at college major data, but this article (with star turn from @robertkelchen.com) confirms that the layoffs at the National Center for Education Statistics included all 7 employees who work on IPEDS. (Which the Times calls only "the college dataset")… www.nytimes.com/2025/08/09/u...

It's fun that the Fortune article saying historians are the #2 job affected by AI includes what's clearly an AI-generated stock image of a creepily female robot "teaching" (i.e., looking at a computer) while the real teacher gets fired.

Wow.

People always ask me : “Cristi, how do you manage parenting a baby while going up for tenure?” It’s easy. The secret is *flow-based-scheduling*. Here are its three core strategies for new academic parents: Sleep when the baby sleeps Cry when the baby cries Publish when the baby publishes

C'mon everybody why did we even make a social network exclusively for leftists with graduate degrees if we're not going to make #facultybratsummer a thing.

Hearsay, but would be best case at a place with lots of layoffs ongoing, & more coming.

Has there been news/unreported activity at the Library of Congress in June? Is it a weird stalemate? I haven't seen any news since a federal judge upheld the Register of Copyright's firing: seems as though the professionals have kept the politicos out? www.politico.com/news/2025/05...

Explore Wikipedia through a data map. Pages are grouped by semantic similarity, for topic clusters. Hover to see details, zoom to explore more fine-grained topics, click to go to a page. Search by page name to find interesting starting points for exploration. lmcinnes.github.io/datamapplot_...

There’s something even deeper going on here; the NYer is drawing the line separating Modernity from Olden Traditional times to fall somewhere between the dot coms and the iPhone. Fees like this is becoming the new starting line for History, like the 1945 was when I was growing up.

Just checked the Internet and indeed "Nomar Catholic" is not a phrase anyone has written, so to define it: a person whose formative identity moments were: 1. Saying "Bernard our Bishop" at mass for a decade 2. Pedro's 6-inning relief against the Indians in the 99 ALDS 3. Spotlight 4. The Steal

For my sins (working with 20-yo start-up engineers who ask questions), I ended up feeling like I had to read a bunch of Curtis Yarvin yesterday. My general takeaway is that the appeal seems to be for people who haven't ever encountered a real critique of modernity before…

#ThanksBrett for your central role in building up the most exciting and generous academic field of the last 25 years! The office of digital humanities was been a tremendously positive force. @brettbobley.bsky.social

Who I did *not* realize that Zohran Mamdani was Mahmood Mamdani's kid. If he and Ras Baraka both win their races, you know what that makes 2025, right? Faculty-brat summer

Who I did *not* realize that Zohran Mamdani was Mahmood Mamdani's kid. If he and Ras Baraka both win their races, you know what that makes 2025, right? Faculty-brat summer

i am looking for academic (or similarly "serious") courses or textbook-y texts on LLMs with a major component (lets say >66%) that is NOT about the technicalities of Transformers, optimization, RL, tokenization, etc, but instead focus more on data, eval, interpretability, etc. pointers?

I just learned that the Comptroller General of the United States is one of the longer serving admin positions in the US government: there have been 8 in the last 100 years, same as chief justice of the supreme court. There have only been 7 librarians of congress, though. Is that the record? What is?

This is the first article I've read about the library of congress firings that actually makes sense to me. Speculating: 1. Musk/Thiel/DOGE wing wanted to eviscerate copyright to train AI 2. To this end they convinced Trump that LOC was disloyal and pushed to get Hayden + Perlmutter fired…

the weirdness at the Copyright Office intensifies, with both Dems and MAGA pointing fingers at Elon Musk for the firing of Shira Perlmutter, and identifying the AI report as the reason www.theverge.com/politics/666...

There is other reporting going on, including: * Wired: www.wired.com/story/us-cop... * CBS: www.cbsnews.com/news/todd-bl... * NYT: www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/u...

So if I am getting this right: Thursday the librarian of Congress was fired. Friday the copyright office rushed out a draft report suggesting genAI training on copyrighted works shouldn’t be legal. Saturday the head of the copyright office is fired.

This short piece about Worcester is a really great piece of writing -- incredibly specific and local, but also a microcosm of 2025. I've been turning it over in my head all day. www.welcometohellworld.com/they-dont-ne...

Bad news -- I had really been hoping that the Library of Congress's status as, you know, CONGRESS, not the executive branch, might mean it could do its work relatively intact even as NEH/NEA/IMLS/NARA were pillaged. But not catastrophic yet; I hope a few reps will walk across 1st st today.

Just on the basis of @driven-by-data.net ‘s blog post a few months back sketching the idea here, I’m pretty sure this is now my favorite data visualization framework

A report from the scene of a horrifying kidnapping on the streets of Worcester, MA today by @billshaner.bsky.social www.welcometohellworld.com/they-dont-ne...

For #TidyTuesday this week, we're looking at data on terminations of NSF grants 📊 🎨 Using colour to highlight one category 📈 Transparency to highlight the important data ✍️ Annotations instead of a legend for transparency #RStats #ggplot2 #DataViz

If jet travel were invented today, it would be rightly viewed as completely unacceptable to fly. Nomic sometimes trains AI models, but when I dig into the numbers, I'm convinced that our primary carbon impact is flying human beings between SF and NYC. www.founderspledge.com/research/cli...

Just noticed the typo here: I meant to say that the list is NOT super-partisan! That's one of the weirdest parts! (Other weirdest parts include Kobe Bryant, Alex Trebek, and the guy who invented fracking.)

OK, so, in review: most grants at the National Endowment for the Humanities have been cancelled, and most of the staff put on leave; now the agency is supposed to spend millions sourcing statues for a sculpture garden, using a list of people that is super-partisan but is just… weird.

Updating my CV to include MacArthur Genius Grant (disappeared) Nobel Prize in Economics (shadowbanned) Who's who in American Academics (declined)

This was reported a while ago, but still insane to see that this is what’s replacing federal humanities funding. Two logistical points. 1. Is $34m is enough for this? WwII memorial was $200m. 2. July 4 2026 is really soon. How have they not even picked a site?

My secret ambition is to be on the kind of official government committee that gets decide that ping-pong doesn't count as a "sport"

This practice is basically spells the end of web archiving as we know it, right? There's no way a project like SUCHO could have worked against this stuff. Or imagine if federal govt websites turned this on before their purges.

OK so, yes, evidently even as he's part of the clown show fucking up the Harvard negotiations, Gruenbaum has been simultaneously trying to gin up massive government contracts for Thiel-backed companies. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/rampi...