It covers everything from the history of scicomm to press releases, #SocialMedia, #science shows, risk communication, engaging with policy makers, language, you name it... Highly recommended!
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.
I wrote an article for Unsustainable Magazine that is based around my dissertation research findings about what it means to wish for systems overhaul. The consequences of that desire are what I consider now in this article. It gets a bit personal; I am embedded within my own specific context and my observations come out of that situation.
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?
To non-faculty for sure. My first move would be to expand funding for PhD students: attract many, and with a good salary to bias the choice away from industry.
Congratulations to Kimberly A. Prather, @kprather88, of @UCSanDiego, winner of the 2024 @theNASciences Award in Chemical Sciences for her pioneering research on aerosols! Watch her accept the award at the 161st NAS Annual Meeting, @theNASciences. #NASaward#academia#chemistry
Here are some very interesting suggestions for having a good IT system in your lab (Github, Wiki, website, emails etc.). I’m sure the Mastodon crowd will love these:
A major issue is when to let go of data taking hundreds of terabytes of space, and no one in the lab remembers what exactly it is, and the associated metadata and documentation (a wiki page) was lost some time ago or no longer makes sense. One never has time to go through these.
I do not have a good solution. The solution I'd want is an annual review of data, tied with the 5-year cycle of data servers (that's how long they're expected to last).
“The moment you put people into big institutions the goal shifts from knowledge discovery to moneymaking.” —Sabine Hossenfelder, My dream died, and now I'm here
Seeing videos of #Palestine protestors in so many campuses being abused by coward pig cops #ACAB. I am so in love with all these brave college students. I am not surprised professors don't have the guts to join then. At least it is very rare that one does. Security in #academia is a powerful drug. Be careful you don't lose your integrity with your confort, @academicchatter.
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
I'm working on a term paper about Filipino heritage expression and genealogy. One of the references I'm using, "Tracing Your Philippine Ancestors" by Lee W. Vance, was published in 1980. The only copy of it I can find is in the UP Diliman Main Library, and it's only for room use.
Does anyone here have any leads where I can find a copy that I can buy or browse for long periods of time?
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?
"Predoctoral scholars will receive an approximate 4% increase in their pay level bringing it to $28,224, and postdoctoral scholars will receive an approximate increase of 8%, with pay levels beginning at $61,008 and upwardly adjusted based on years of experience. NIH aims to increase these pay levels over the next five years."
Want to see a bizarre alternative academic career? Look at mine: failed to get into the teaching precariat, got a part time job editing a research journal, learned early how to get $3000 grants, published eight books and 40 journal papers, ended up a full-time research scholar at a Polish university from age 47. And my kids didn't starve or want! I don't know the official yardstick of success in #academia. But personally I am satisfied.
University protests against Israel's war in Gaza are spreading across the U.S. After multiple Columbia University students were arrested last week for refusing to leave an encampment, arrests were made at Yale University today.
Daily Beast has a recap of what's happening, including new protests at New York University and the University of Michigan: https://flip.it/2MJY.s
For more stories on the Mideast crisis, follow @israel
"For $5m, Louisiana's flagship university will let an oil company weigh in on faculty research activities. Or, for $100,000, a corporation can participate in a research study, with 'robust' reviewing powers and access to all resulting intellectual property."
Half thinking of starting an #AcademicVenting hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse.
Won’t work of course because most of us can’t risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail. #Universities#AcademicChatter#neoliberalism
Accountability isn’t ever for them. It’s that old approach to crises from “Yes, Prime Minister”:
Bernard Woolley : What if the Prime Minister insists we help them?
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Then we follow the four-stage strategy.
Bernard Woolley : What's that?
Sir Richard Wharton : Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis.
Sir Richard Wharton : In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
Sir Richard Wharton : In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.