Just found the ultimate "AI scientist" prompt: “Write a highly citable AI paper about how to write highly citable AI papers.”

Hey 👋🏽 Cville peeps! If you haven't voted yet, be sure to get out on TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 4 to vote. Voting is, admittedly, a rather limited way to build political power, but it's still a really important one. Here's the sample ballot for Cville. Next up, I'll share who I'm voting for, and why

"At this time there is no evidence of an attacker." I'll just continue to run-hide-fight as usual then.

Work with us at UVA School of Data Science! @uvadatascience.bsky.social will continue to hire multiple faculty members across many areas of data science! Let me know if you're curious about our school. :) datascience.virginia.edu/pages/join-o...

Cornell Information Science is hiring a Teaching Professor! Apply this week for full consideration: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30763

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv. There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

Federal Judges— or staff, but same-same— used "AI" to summarize & draft rulings, issued them w/o checking the work, leading to basic factual errors, & thus undermining the facticity & validity of the rulings entire. Gee. Who Could Have Foreseen. *stares directly into the camera like in the office*

The system has just been turned on. This is so awesome to see! ☀️☀️☀️

It seems like mRNA COVID vaccine can synergize with immunotherapy to kill cancer. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I wouldn't have believed it unless I saw it with my own eyes, but apparently it's still possible for experienced financial journalists to write long-ish articles about exploding home insurance prices and never mention the phrase "climate change." www.wsj.com/finance/regu...

UVA says no to the compact

New letter out this morning from 40 UVA Law professors in opposition to the compact.

Whenever I cite studies showing bike lanes don’t hurt (and often boost) local business, someone says, “Yeah, but those are from the big cities so don't apply here” So here’s a quick note on why small towns can be surprisingly dense and why big-city lessons still apply. yyahn.com/wiki/article...

I'm excited to give a talk tomorrow at the Organizational Behavior Seminar series at the Stanford Graduate School of Business about modeling interconnected human beliefs. See you soon! www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-rese...

RSVP for Datapalooza 2025: Truth and Accountability in the Age of AI mailchi.mp/2162ba093dc9...

my latest investigation for @consumerreports.org is based on months of reporting and 60+ lab tests of leading protein supplements we found that most protein powders and shakes have more lead in one serving than our experts say is safe to have in a day (🧵) www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein...

2025 isn't over yet but it's unlikely that Twitter will see a resurgence of research discussions.

History faculty at Columbia & Barnard decrying the harassment of @mark-bray.bsky.social: "This is the first case in recent memory of a historian who has fled the country after receiving death threats on account of the history that they teach."

UVA school of data science is hiring this year—searches are open to folks from all disciplines. We need humanists & social scientists to teach ethics/data & society courses + do research that supports school’s mission to be holistic in the study of data science: datascience.virginia.edu/faculty-jobs

We recently welcomed nine new faculty members to the UVA School of Data Science. Read more about our faculty and their research: https://bit.ly/4pTHPMM

Good bike infrastructure will make the Charlottesville area a better and safer place to live. We are tired of waiting for it to become a reality. It’s not that hard. We need the city to deliver on its promises asap.

Immigrant Nobel Prize winners exiting the United States

Please join us on 10/22 for a new Co-Opting #AI episode on #antiquity! I am thrilled to be in conversation with Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne, Kevin Donnelly, and Elly R. Truitt to explore ancient concepts of automation, intelligent machines, gods and robots. dtdlab.virginia.edu/event/co-opt...

👋🏽 Cville area peeps! Join us at the Livable Cville drop-in social at Ix Park Brazos Tacos from 5PM to 7PM+ at Ix Park Brazos Tacos. If it's your first time, your umpteenth time, or anywhere else in between, you are welcome!

The government shutdown interrupted CDC's disease updates, so Team Force of Infection spent our Saturday going to the websites of all 50 health departments to check on Covid-19, flu and RSV. caitlinrivers.substack.com/p/cdc-data-i...

This makes me so hopeful 🥹 Does anyone know of similar comparisons that focus on task-specific evals (like medical tasks)?

According to eyewitnesses, armed ICE agents dragged kids out of their beds in the middle of the night, zip tied them and put them in rented vans while raiding an * entire apartment building* on the South Side of Chicago. www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOXO...

Jane Goodall, ethologist and conservationist, has died. She was 91

“Is 90% of code going to be written by AI? I don’t know. What I do know is, that for me, on this project, the answer is already yes.” lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/9/29/90...

It took me 2 minutes to write about how this proposed rule would eliminate all foreign PhD students, who are a critical part of US science and technology, and drive US innovation and economic growth

And new paper out: Pleias 1.0: the First Family of Language Models Trained on Fully Open Data How we train an open everything model on a new pretraining environment with releasable data (Common Corpus) with an open source framework (Nanotron from HuggingFace). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

c-ville.com/car-light-fa... A nice article by @nathanalderman.com! It's awesome to see so many people biking in Charlottesville *despite of* pretty terrible infrastructure (@cvillecityhall.bsky.social 👀) It reminds me of an old tweet that I can't agree more.

As the seasons change, you might be wondering about biking in different weather conditions. E-Bike Dad and Livable Cville member @yyahn.bsky.social wrote a very nice guide to biking in the cold weather months. Check it out! yyahn.com/wiki/Bike/Wi...

The Week Without Driving starts a week from today! For Charlottesville to have a transportation system that works for everyone, we need a collective vision that includes community members who cannot drive. #WeekWithoutDriving seeks to expand that vision. Livablecville.org/WeekWithoutDriving

Why your next car should be an electric cargo bike

This looks fun! "Archetypometrics, a Pragmateia"from @peterdodds.bsky.social @mikaelafudolig.bsky.social @chrisdanforth.bsky.social et al. You can download a 1,090 page-long 1.6GB PDF(!) here: zenodo.org/records/1712...

Hoboken cut traffic deaths to zero, thanks in part to paint & posts. So what’s the excuse? "we'd rather kill pedestrians than remove a parking spot”? “we’d rather kill pedestrians than slow traffic"? This should be the bare minimum every city does. (@cvillecityhall.bsky.social 👀)

Hey folks, have you heard about #WeekWithoutDriving? Please join me for the local Cville area experience. Here's a link for more information and to signup: livablecville.org/weekwithoutd...

The 2025-2026 #academic job market season is upon us. Here are some resources and #job postings for #faculty and #postdoc positions for those in Information/Computer/Social Sciences, and related fields. Will update the list as more #jobs are posted. 🧵(0/n) #AcademicChatter

This study not only asks human experts to score AI- and human-generated ideas, but also to *execute* those ideas (a nice setup!) AI-generated research ideas *sounded* better (high estimated effectiveness score) but their score drops below human ideas after the execution. arxiv.org/abs/2506.20803

AI may be significantly narrowing (favoring established scholars) science by affecting how scientists identify experts, key papers, reviewers, ... www.nature.com/articles/d41...

@nat4cville.bsky.social spent 10min during the discussion about demolition of a historic house on Wertland Street to talk about the urgent need for affordable housing. I clipped 6min of it. This is part 1/3.

when you learned Git for the first time, what resources did you use? Did you like them? Mostly looking for answers from folks who learned Git in the last 5 years or so. Looking for resources to potentially add to the Git website

I just (re-)started the Charlottesville area R Users (CRU) group. If you're in the Charlottesville area come out to CRU's first in-person meetup Sep 24 at 6pm at the UVA School of Data Science. #Rstats More info, and register (free) here: luma.com/9zespmac

Results so stunningly clear they inspired this classic xkcd (xkcd.com/2400/):

Q: How are resources consumed in transportation networks, and how does this shape the overall functioning of the system? We introduce the minimum-cost percolation framework and apply it to the U.S. air transportation system using publicly available data. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Cville peeps, it's time to make your voice heard! Charlottesville city council is considering an action that will, in effect, criminalize homelessness in city limits. We keep each other safe. Act now—there are simple steps in the thread below—and tell council to reject the police chief's request!

www.nature.com/articles/d41... Mentioned study: arxiv.org/abs/2507.18840 An important caveat: the comparison is with "(what's) previously reported for X" (and it's not an experimental study)