For my upper division classes, there is a research project due at the end of the term. 3 weeks before they have a literature review due so I can make sure the students are going generally in the right direction. For the literature review, they have to list their sources (some peer-reviewed) and describe how they will use said sources. I green light the sources. The new thing is not to use those sources I approved but some crap sources. 🤦♂️ What gives?! #academia#academicchatter
We have an exciting main event at #HCXAI at #chi2024 today!
We have @janethaven from @datasociety and
Kush Varshney from @ibmresearch for an invigorating discussion on AI governance and policymaking to take Explainable AI beyond academia.
All my students now were born after 9/11. I tell them I’m a being from another century. And I often feel that in my bones. I look around and am baffled by the world we have built. #academia#academicchatter
There is a level of discomfort and cognitive dissonance that keeps growing in me working in HE while scholasticide and ecocide (yes, they are part of the genocide or ethnic cleansing) committed in Gaza for more than half a year, and the deafening silence of Western universities completely ignoring it.
I truly believed that if there is any place in the world when dialogue should and must always be a priority, is in academic fora. Dialogue is the foundation of #academia
1/
I once peer-reviewed a journal paper and asked for minor revisions, only to find that they had printed the manuscript completely unchanged except for the title. When I told the editors that they had wasted my time, they explained that this author, a woman of about 40, was extremely scary and would get super angry if they made any demands on her.
Friends in #academia, my week: The last day of classes was yesterday, the first day of finals is tomorrow. Of course, there's a school all-hands meeting and a dept faculty meeting today, thus proving that administration absolutely doesn't teach or think about teaching. (I skipped the former, it's always creative numbers and affirmations, but the latter has some important stuff in it, so I'm zooming in while I finish up a final.)
Relieved! I opted out of a conference dinner for the first time in almost 30 years of conferences. They are expensive, service is slow, I never make any useful extra contacts during the meal, and I always leave first of all. I look forward to a really good kebab instead. (I am also massively bored at parties and mostly spend them collecting dishes for washup.)
Isn't it weird that acceptance rate is a thing we look for in a conference/journal?
Publishing a paper should not be competitive like "we take the top 20% paper", it should be "we take all papers that are good enough according to our standards". Sometimes it can be a very low or very high number depending on the quality of the paper submitted.
Just learned that a very promising early career scientist in my discipline has left academia, not seeing a desired career future for herself here. That company is lucky to get her. Yet, it saddens me enormously that it is often the most dynamic, brilliant, curious once, who are challenging status quo, committed to diversity and making our world a better place, who are leaving #academia.
What are we doing wrong to make academic careers so unattractive for the best young minds?
Gotta love the Danes. Last year there was an archaeological conference in Korsør titled: "If you let me see yours, I'll let you see mine… 1st Millennium Weapons and Riding Gear". Somehow I can't really see this happening in the US.
When I was young I had a lot of disagreements with slightly older colleagues about what archaeological research should be like. I don't know who was right, but I do know that almost all of them have long since stopped publishing any research. 😁