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I had the temerity to comment (negatively) online about Jean Jacques Rousseau. But you can breathe safe that the dude bros are trying to put me back in my box while also stating that Mary Wollstonecraft just wasn't able to fully understand his work. Clearly our tiny female brains can't understand the depth of his wisdom /sarcasm. #Misogyny #education #academia
(I studied him in my undergrad and MA so I think I'm allowed call a dick a dick)
Quality of scientific papers questioned
Yes, we have a quality control assessment problem and the system is under enormous strain due to publishing volume increases and predatory practices…
1/4
#Science #AcademicPublishing #Academia #HigherEd
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jul/13/quality-of-scientific-papers-questioned-as-academics-overwhelmed-by-the-millions-published
The Guardian · Quality of scientific papers questioned as academics ‘overwhelmed’ by the millions published
"The originality of this research lies in testing a model that combines socio-emotional skills, digital literacy, and ethical reasoning within the context of history education in Indonesia, providing new insights into their impact on students' critical thinking abilities."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590291125005145
Replied in thread
@alex_p_roe Speaking of fruit fly research, you'd be amused or surprised to learn that the original U-net architecture (which today powers stable diffusion, among many other machine learning techniques) introduced in a paper by Ronneberger et al. (2015; https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.04597 ) was developed to perform image segmentation of fly neural tissue as imaged with electron microscopy, to reconstruct neurons and therefore map the brain connectome.
So all those "wasteful" research funding grants to fruit fly research motivated and led to the biggest discovery fueling the whole of the modern "AI" boom. One never knows where basic research will lead, it's impossible to predict. Hence basic research is not at all wasteful, on the contrary, it's essential, it's the foundation of a rich, wealthy, creative society. And also very cheap, comparatively: https://albert.rierol.net/tell/20160601_Unintended_consequences_of_untimely_research.html
Search also for the returns on the human genome project, or on the humble origins of DNA sequencing, to name just two among many.
arXiv.orgU-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image SegmentationThere is large consent that successful training of deep networks requires many thousand annotated training samples. In this paper, we present a network and training strategy that relies on the strong use of data augmentation to use the available annotated samples more efficiently. The architecture consists of a contracting path to capture context and a symmetric expanding path that enables precise localization. We show that such a network can be trained end-to-end from very few images and outperforms the prior best method (a sliding-window convolutional network) on the ISBI challenge for segmentation of neuronal structures in electron microscopic stacks. Using the same network trained on transmitted light microscopy images (phase contrast and DIC) we won the ISBI cell tracking challenge 2015 in these categories by a large margin. Moreover, the network is fast. Segmentation of a 512x512 image takes less than a second on a recent GPU. The full implementation (based on Caffe) and the trained networks are available at http://lmb.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/people/ronneber/u-net .
"In a move that activists are saying is an attempt to quell the passionate student and worker movement for Palestinian liberation within the City University of New York (CUNY), student organizer Hadeeqa Arzoo Malik has been suspended for a year.
"Along with CCNY’s academic sanction case against Malik, CUNY has also fired four faculty members."
@palestine #Palestine #Israel #Gaza #CUNY #NYC #NewYork #education #academia
Mondoweiss · CUNY suspends student activist leader, fires four faculty members in escalation of repression against
Dear #academia, as a woman in a male dominated field (compt. biology) I don't need more mentors. When I don't know what to do or want opinions, I have a list of wonderful women and men that I contact for advice.
What I need is champions that will put my name forward when someone ask for an expert, a collaborator on that grant that will get funded for sure or for a conference invite.
That's what privilege gives, and I have some*, but would do with a bit more.
*I promise to give it forward
‘It’s a nightmare.’ U.S. funding cuts threaten academic science jobs at all levels | Science | AAAS
Please explain to me as a post doc academic or service specialist why Id want to use this. Is it talking about GenAI summaries? If it is, why isnt it saying so? Why do I want work simplified? Why am I looking for papers if I havent got the time to read them? Have they heard of science communication? Those people are there to create content for laypeople, or school age etc. What the hell is this about? Maybe Im missing it. Or is it just about GenAI?
Visiting Scientist program at the Sars Center in Bergen, Norway:
https://www.uib.no/en/michaelsarscentre/176606/michael-sars-visitors-program
University of BergenMichael Sars Visitors Program
Academics can be viciously funny.
I recently published a journal article. One of the reviewers didn't much care for it. Alongside the obvious critique that I clearly hadn't read enough of my own work, Reviewer 2 didn't like me quoting a certain text, having misread what I thought was an obvious reference to a classic text as insulting one of the people at the center of my article. The editor agreed with me enough to put an illustration of the classic text on the issue's cover.
I'm editing parts of my dissertation to add content and simplify the language in the hopes of widening my audience beyond #academia. I knew this would be hard, but it’s turned out to be grueling. Adding content is interesting and fun. But stripping out all the academic jargon without tying myself in knots explaining linguistic concepts is proving quite difficult. I've been marinating in jargon for years and now I'm having to sweat it all out like toxins.
A media studies colleague for @ststitlebot ?
https://www.parapsychologypress.org/
Earlier this year, I filtered the important / interesting information from here... as there are not many sites about #parapsychology online with spiritually acceptable licences. However, I still found something else, too: currently I'm reading "The Roots of Consciousness" by
Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD. Otherwise, there is #WikiPedia at least. #science #philosophy #press #books #mentalhealth #academia #socialsciences
ParapsychologyPressHome | ParapsychologyPress
Replied in thread
@anthrocypher Like in academic research. If you as much as believe the grant agencies when they write they want bold, risky projects, you won't get any funding. And if you were to get some and use it in such a project and fail, the whole field would think less of you, as if you are the kind of person who works on failed projects.
Rewarding risk-taking means being OK with having no outcome, or negative findings which are valuable too. And then having no problem with awarding another grant to the scientists who failed at the high-risk high-reward project. Anything short of this would be false advertising. Which is what they do.
Looking to get involved in peer review?
Check out the Fast & Fair initiative run by @BiologyOpen.
The fifth and last day of the #NextGenChemLeaders by #KNCV was all about, how to increase your circle of influence. Important insights by Liedewij Laan (Beta's in Bestuur en Beleid), Rosanne Hertzberger (NSC) and Arend Zomer (University of Twente, NWO).
#Leadership #Academia #Chemistry
Interview: How a Hearing-Loss Grant Got Cut in the Fight Over DEI
- ciundrk
https://undark.org/2025/07/11/interview-hearing-loss-grant/
#Interviews #Academia #HealthMedicine #SciencePolicy
Undark Magazine · Interview: How a Hearing-Loss Grant Got Cut in the Fight Over DEI“It felt like the floor dropped out,” researcher Uri Manor said after the sudden suspension of his lab’s award.
This morning I read another email from CC about their new certification programmes. They included a link to their blog hosted on Medium. Now I have nothing against Medium, but yet again CC fail to use open source options. Remarkable, given the choices available:
Jitsi
BigBlueButton
Cryptpad or Nextcloud
Peertube
Lemmy
Matrix
Mastodon!
Wordpress!
It's ridiculous that an org promoting open ed and content does not use any OS apps.