Hey, Mastodon! Indiana's attorney general has created an anti-teacher snitch portal for people to report school teachers for being too woke. It allows you to upload files and everything!
There appears to be no safeguard against entering any text you want in any of the boxes, and no location/residence checking.
Today I will be posting thoughts about Aaron Swartz, who died on this day in 2013. The academic community should be much more aware of him, and challenge the massive problem of academic publishing that we are all part of. Let's make it our mission to tell people about Aaron and what he stood for.
One of my tutorial students said "Oh so big data is lots of data, I thought it was a conspiracy like Big Pharma" and I'm now completely rethinking the last 20 years of my career.
The publishing sector has a problem. Scientists are overwhelmed, editors are overworked, special issue invitations are constant, research paper mills, article retractions, journal delistings… JUST WHAT IS GOING ON!?
It was not the students' use of a #ChatBot that was the problem, but they were using material found on the internet that itself was created by a hallucinating ChatBot and published without verification!
This is a type of model collapse we will be dealing with not just at universities in the near future.
There's not enough "fuck you"s in the world to react to this shit. #LLMs should be tools used in the service of people; what in the world is this proposal to make people work for LLMs?!
Any and all changes to scientific publishing needs to be for so that other people can access them and understand them.
And the single most important change would be for Nature and other publishers not to charge 29.99 USD for a shitty 4-paragraph essay that they didn't pay for themselves.
Academics, particularly in Europe: please PLEASE tell your advisees to check with someone before they submit a CV for an academic position with a photo on it. I know Europass has a photo place, but in some countries (or some institutions) CVs with photos must be automatically rejected to reduce bias in hiring. If the advert says "no photo", tell them not to submit a photo anyway! It could lead to an automatic reject.
Also, consider having a "no photo" rule in your hiring.
“…the Fediverse’ provides tools and technologies that are ideally suited to bring scholarly societies out of their digital caves and into the 21st century.”
“The root of their names contains their essential function, as described in 1660 for one of the first such societies, the Royal Society:
“Their first purpose was no more, then onely the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet one with another, without being ingag’d in the passions, and madness of that dismal Age”.
"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."
1/16 This July, I gave an invited talk in the "Communicating Science Through Art" session at the European Astronomical Society annual meeting, organized by the amazing @theastrophoenix . And I thought it may be something that would also interest you #fediverse folks.
The aim of the talk was partly to give people insight into my why & how of my art. But mainly to encourage others to just try. In a very subjective manner.
Nothing says "Science should be free of gatekeeping and special interests" like trying to move #ScienceTwitter to #BlueSky, an invite-only proprietary service run by tech billionaires 🤷
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.
Anyone who's spent any time at conferences has met him. He's the guy in the Q&A who says "It's not really a question, more of a comment..."
I wrote a bit about why he's a problem and what we can do as academic and professional communities to fight back. #academicchatter
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.