We know they have the capacity to be "decent" to people whom they consider to be worthy of decency which is in itself indecent

Before AI and even Grammarly, not just ESL writers but all writers at the beginning of their academic careers would ask more senior academics to give their work a read through. This was a huge entryway to getting senior colleagues to read your work and champion it.

I honestly don’t get the value of this company. They hoover up energy and water. Their product constantly gets things wrong and, in extreme cases, coaches people into suicide. And it’s all built on what seems to be malicious and vast intellectual property theft. What does OpenAI offer the world?

Recently chatted with people @americancancersoc.bsky.social about this. People are born scientists but often get socialized out of being curious by the time they reach adulthood. But everytime I manage to communicate my research well, I see that scientist inside their eyes peeking out delightedly

I sometimes teach a critical thinking class to graduate students and this comes up a lot, the way popular and social media have both-sided their way into making it impossible to evaluate the legitimacy of a debate unless you're already a domain expert or have oodles of time to do in-depth research

AI being forced on us by money grabbing tech powers is like if we all said we need to be asking Grammarly to come up with ideas because it's so good at grammar. Let's hire faculty with Grammarly expertise and write grant apps about how Grammarly can be used to make scientific breakthroughs. Say wut.

Wow! The President's Postdoctoral Fellowship was a tremendous opportunity for recruiting the brightest minds into the UC system and keeping them there. When do these shortsighted decisions end? And why are so many people telling on themselves so blatantly.

Truer words. University is an ideal and now it is apparent in all sides that faculty and staff know and live that ideal every day, while underpaid, unsupported and overworked.

I don't know much, I only run a research lab. But if I told my lab members that I didn't know any of the details relating to my job with such frequency, I don't think I'd have much of a lab left to run. And rightly so.

I struggle with this a lot. Should celebrities who have the protection of obscene amounts of money and privilege speak up against injustice? As Burke says, ""When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

There seem to be two types of academics: the ones who understand that critical review of literature & data analysis are integral to being an academic,& ones who consider these tasks to be chores to be outsourced. Understanding that makes all the AI pushing make sense www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Woot! 🧪

PROPOSAL: Lego sorting chambers that you can put a bunch of Lego bricks into and they will sort them into Lego sets you can build using only them (preferably with the option of providing manuals for selected sets)

I truly never know what to make of these arguments. Researchers in hypercompetitive fields, like cancer research, need CNS pubs to make it. This is doubly true if they're not white men. Whether it's Nature or Nat Comm, these are a means to status /1

We are in a timeline in which People Magazine is publishing legit hard-hitting news headlines while CBS and CNN publicly humiliate themselves. I don’t like this timeline. But I’m loving People Magazine right now.

The question often is Should we do this, not Can we do this. But people, equally often get the question wrong. Unfortunate

So close, Senator Tillis. You should have left out the first clause. Whether you're Rep or Dem, Congress has the power of the purse. You should all be requiring compliance from the Executive branch. For shame, with the partisanship at such a critical time in our history

My very Californian son's rendition of rangoli. Happy Deepavali to all who fight the good fight against the darkness in our own minds and in the world around us.

For goodness sake, I teach a graduate class on this to start discussions on how researchers have learnt, and should continue to learn, from the egregious arrogance of the past. This feels like a top 100 re-release of the Worst of Humanity.

I think few people realize the number of hours a peer reviewer spends writing detailed critiques prior to the actual meeting. Last cycle, because I couldn't make the rescheduled review meeting, those hours were just wasted time that I could have spent on oh, idk, mentoring, teaching, writing 🤷🏾‍♀️

I also saw groups of grannies holding up F$#k T$#@p flags on the corners of an intersection in the very conservative vanilla suburban neighborhood I live in. Never did I dream I'd see an 80 year old waving a flag like that. And all the cars honking as they drive by. #NoKings

Vote!

And I'm sure removing regulations regarding waste water treatment and telling women they can't take Tylenol when pregnant will push that fertility index right up

Same here. And here's the amazing thing, I know without doubt that every single scientist serving as peer reviewer on my panel will do their absolute best to make a rescheduled meeting work even as this administration burns their livelihood, career and research dreams to the ground around them

This is where we're at: global trust in the US govt to do the right thing re: AI regulation, is on par with global trust in the Chinese govt. Only 44% of Americans trust their govt to regulate AI and a similar % are more concerned than excited about AI. Not a coincidence.

When I first started doing NIH study sections this 👇🏾 shocked me out of thinking I'm objective. Now I have an Excel sheet which quantifies the major and monitor weaknesses and strengths I find in the application as I go, and then I write my critique to match the overall score my sheet computes.

No American scientist is surprised by the enormity of this graph as we've stood here watching our colleagues leave or make plans to leave over the last six months, and witnessed our postdocs and early career researchers struggle to move up the ladder as the rungs disappear under their feet 😔

Communication is also aligned with feminine attributes. Real men don't talk, they grunt. Anything more is a waste of energy.

Nothing makes sense other than the burning it all down narrative. Look at the science and research enterprise burning around us; cutting off the pipeline of new scientists, pulling the rug out from under established scientists. This does not help any kind of builder, only a destroyer

Bsky has become one of my two preferred sources for book recos and has led me to books i'da never read otherwise

I do so love getting a text that my mail-in ballot was received and counted. #vote #YesOn50

If you're a California voter, please vote YES ON 50 and send that ballot back ASAP so the volunteers don't waste any time on you. And maybe volunteer if you have the time. linktr.ee/cadem

In the background, research labs across the US closing shop because of the funding landscape and PhD programs on pause. Even if this person was doing exemplary research, the obvious corruption erodes NIH reputation 🧪

I'm not seeing a lot of Prop 50 information in the wild, important to spread the word

General Mattis dropped this Statement today. Read through to completion below as it is long. And please Share.

IF ANY CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY SIGNS THIS RADICAL AGREEMENT, THEY'LL LOSE BILLIONS IN STATE FUNDING — INCLUDING CAL GRANTS — INSTANTLY. CALIFORNIA WILL NOT BANKROLL SCHOOLS THAT SELL OUT THEIR STUDENTS, PROFESSORS, RESEARCHERS, AND SURRENDER ACADEMIC FREEDOM.

"Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. President Ronald Reagan (January 5, 1967).64"

"To achieve any of those goals, we will have to become far less complacent and far less scared. We also will have to organize. Because no citizen who simply settles for being a consumer of democracy should expect to have a real democracy ever again." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/o...

Remember this? When our VP talked rationally about the need for AI regulation? And we declared unregulated AI a catastrophic danger? I miss 2023. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

It does sometimes feel like many are so overwhelmed by the messages coming out of this administration that the impulse is to treat it as a joke, with disbelief. But it is not a joke and we indulge our disbelief at our own peril. Use America's cities as training grounds for our military. Not a joke.

the president of the united states wants to use the american military to kill american citizens on american soil. that's the whole story!

"This is a good way to lead students astray,” said Jonathan S. Masur,.. professor at the University of Chicago Law School.... “So I think that everyone needs to take a little bit of a deep breath and slow down.” Educators, think long and hard before going the AI route. Early signs suggest harm>good

👇🎯 What we have learned these last six months is that a great many of our colleagues, leaders, & institutions are not in the business of education.

It is funny for sure. The reason for the difference is that the closer analogy here is between Columbia's board and ABC's executives, who responded similarly. Kimmel is more like Columbia faculty who have resisted their bosses' capitulation. The recurring pattern is: management cowers, labor fights.

NCI's 2027 annual plan includes a proposed budget increase that would let them fund the same number of awards as FY24 while transitioning to MYF. They emphasize clinical trials, cancer prevention and basic cancer research and training as funding priorities. The proof is in the pudding I suppose. 🧪

"Of the 557 drug approvals in our sample, 331 (59.4%) have a patent that cites a research publication acknowledging NIH support. Indeed, more than half of approved drugs (286, or 51.4%) are linked to at-risk research—research funded by grants that would have been cut under a 40% budget reduction." 🧪

I missed World Dense Breast Day. I have a family history of breast/ovarian cancer & extremely dense tissue. I am lucky to have insurance that covers supplemental screening with no copay/deductible. Though we recently switched to self insured which exempts us from state law, so 🤞 that remains true.

Yes, please, this, talk to people who are doing the work. We've been dealing with ever-increasing enrollment of students in parallel with significant loss of state funding in the context of the turmoil of federal funding chaos. A culture of victimhood doesn't even make the top 100

Oh look, scientists making the world better. Again.