The president of #Barnard College lost a faculty-wide vote of no confidence on Tuesday, as criticism mounts over the school’s response to a pro- #Palestine 🇵🇸 encampment
It is the first no confidence vote against a president in the college’s history.
Someone needs to write a science-fiction story about a future scenario in which the AI entities running the world will force humans to write their papers and reports for them. (Inspired by a modified version of a famous Isaac Asimov story.)
Suppose you were a funder wanting to design a system to fund science projects that were bottom up rather than top down. How would you do it?
I think you'd want to restrict it to non-faculty to start with, and have some sort of consensus-building rather than competitive approach. Like, maybe you could have an initial round where people proposed ideas, followed by a second round where people indicated who they'd be willing to work with and which aspects of their ideas they'd be willing to drop or modify in order to build consensus. Possibly you might need multiple rounds like this until you iterated on a solution that worked.
Would there by problematic hidden power dynamics in an approach like that? I guess so, there always are. But maybe still better than top down approach?
And is there any chance of finding a funder who would be willing to experiment with such an idea? Or any existing examples of experiments like that? Or more generally, examples of funders taking a non-competitive approach?
Timely reminder that disabilities are fluid. A person may be symptomatic one day and fine the next. A student may not need accommodations during the semester, but the end of the term rush may make accommodations very necessary. This does NOT mean the student is faking it or taking advantage of you.
Currently keeping me aural company while I work (I woke up, couldn't go back to sleep and decided to dive back into the blasted article), Noveller's Fantastic Planet (2015)
'We focus on metrics to evaluate a scientist’s career: how many articles they have published, how many times they were cited, what was the impact factor of all these articles. '
So oral exam at end of PhD. Good idea or just a tradition that doesn't make any sense any more? What are the good things about them? If we didn't do them, how else could we get those good things? #academia#academicchatter
"The University administration respects all student protests, just not this one. Students have fought for many important causes over the years, and their right to protest is sacrosanct. In this case, however, we must arrest and slander them.
“We will not look back and regret this decision. Although we were wrong about not admitting women, abolitioning racial quotas, US involvement in Vietnam, and divesting from apartheid South Africa, we are confident that this time is different."
When we teach WW1 history and show photographs of men in the trenches, and no one knows if they are real or midjourney fake then we are in deep trouble. Or teach scientific principles through research papers and don't know if the text is authentic human created or response engine output, we are in deep trouble. Imagine a hundred other contexts and you understand why gen ai is such a massive problem.
Later this week I'm giving a colloquium to my old grad school department (physics) about my experience getting out of #academia and working as a software engineer. It'd be interesting to crowd-source this: grad students and other former grad students of Mastodon, what would you want to hear in this kind of a talk?
after transcribing text in 18th century German dialect for a month, I have lost all capacity for detecting whether or not something in modern German is spelled correctly or not.
The peer review process was long, and in the mean time, my institution's read & publish agreement with the publisher expired... so now I can't publish as open access! 😞
On positioning: Every time I do sociolinguistic fieldwork or conduct interviews, people assume I am a student 🙃 I could decide to be angry, and I am, at a structural/systemic level, but I think I also use it to my advantage to minimize inherent power hierarchies... Thoughts?
Day 3 of #SocialNetworkAnalysis Duality@50 conference is coming to a close.
After 3 days of intense discussions my brain feels very exploded - (mostly) in a good way.
Reminded how hard #interdisciplinarity is - I'm the only architecture scholar in a group of sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, mathematicians and statisticians and while it's super inspiring, I also translate in my mind all the time how everything I'm hearing might be relevant for my own domain #AcademicChatter
Hey CS PhDs on the market: My dept is doing a late cycle TT asstnt prof hire! Emphasis on Ai, data science or operating systems! Well resourced mostly undergrad serving state school in Charleston, SC, small classes, chill dept, beach town. jobs.cofc.edu/postings/14587 #AcademicChatter