Luc Boutsen

Columbia. Harvard. UPenn. George Mason. UVA. UCLA.

One by one, universities are being attacked—financially, politically, ideologically.

Faculty & staff: don’t wait for it to hit your campus. Join the national movement defending higher ed.

standtogetherhighered.org (sign up on homepage)

In The Guardian, #AstronomerRoyal Prof Michele Dougherty agreed with the @royalsociety.org ‘s decision not to revoke the FRS from Elon Musk, as the reason he got it hasn’t changed, while remaining silent on his conduct as FRS. A role model cannot be silent: it damages trust in scientists’ ethics.

All famines are man-made, all famines are political. Historians of empire and humanitarianism have known this forever. Gaza is not starving, Gaza is being starved, by Israel, and this starvation is enabled by our government and by every other government that does not step in to force food and aid.

In Dutch / Flemish we say Only the sun rises for free (“Voor niks gaat de zon op”)

Given how intensely pressured academic careers are it is not surprising peer review systems and research outputs are at risk of becoming less thorough than expected. #slowscience

• Resist the introduction of AI in our own software systems, from Microsoft to OpenAI to Apple. It is not in our interests to let our processes be corrupted and give away our data to be used to train models that are not only useless to us, but also harmful. • Ban AI use in the classroom for student assignments, in the same way we ban essay mills and other forms of plagiarism. Students must be protected from de-skilling and allowed space and time to perform their assignments themselves. • Cease normalising the AI hype and the lies which are prevalent in the technology industry's framing of these technologies. The technologies do not have the advertised capacities and their adoption puts students and academics at risk of violating ethical, legal, scholarly, and scientific standards of reliability, sustainability, and safety. • Fortify our academic freedom as university staff to enforce these principles and standards in our classrooms and our research as well as on the computer systems we are obliged to use as part of our work. We as academics have the right to our own spaces. • Sustain critical thinking on AI and promote critical engagement with technology on a firm academic footing. Scholarly discussion must be free from the conflicts of interest caused by industry funding, and reasoned resistance must always be an option.

If you agree with our 5 requests to our universities, please sign 🖊️ the open letter and don’t forget to confirm your email! ☺️🙏

openletter.earth/open-letter-...

“Even the term 'Artificial Intelligence' … is widely misused, with conceptual unclarity coopted to advance industry agendas and undermine scholarly discussions. It is our task to demystify and to challenge 'AI' in our teaching, research & engagement with society.” openletter.earth/open-letter-...

The President's disastrous decision to bomb Iran without authorization is a grave violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers. He has impulsively risked launching a war that may ensnare us for generations. It is absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment.

AOC: “It is absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment.”

Excited to announce a call for papers for a new virtual special issue in Cortex on Concept Knowledge.

Our opening editorial, plus further information and guidance for authors can be found here:

www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

This is shocking behaviour by Wiley; the stated justification does not stand up.
I will not be doing any peer review for Wiley journals in future.

Well done, get better soon and enjoy your sabbatical!

The proportion of p-values between .01 and .05 declined in psychology over the last decade, a strengthening of credibility.

Papers with fewer fragile p-values are cited more. Higher ranked journals assoc. with > improvement, but not higher ranked universities.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

NSF, NASA and NIH budgets per year, inflation adjusted from 2000-2025 along with the proposed cuts. NSF includes research component only. Massive cuts across all sectors, well below support spanning 25 years.

How bad will it be? Catastrophic.

Proposed cuts to #NSF, #NIH, and #NASA will set the US R&D landscape back 25 yrs+, cause economic and job loss now, and undermine innovations to come.

But, this is the WH's *proposed* budget.

Speak up now before it is too late.

(inflation adjusted $-s below)

Well, it's a while since I gave these talks, but i'm pleased that UKRN has now got them up online with a DOI:
Productivity and reproducibility: conflicting pressures on scientists? 10.52843/cassyni.504m8k
How current research practices are damaging science: 10.52843/cassyni.dwp8lw
Enjoy!

If only a handful of Republicans in the Senate had the decency to caucus with Democrats and end this madness, not because they agree with capital D Democrats but because they valued lower case d democracy. The fact that this is so implausible is capital D Depressing.

A group of researchers standing outside a building. At first glance they look like different people because they have distinctive hairstyles and are wearing different clothes. But their faces are in fact identical and were generated by averaging many faces. This image illustrates how some people with face blindness (prosopagnosia) find it very difficult to tell faces apart despite seeing them clearly.

New paper out. We asked 29 people with developmental #prosopagnosia (face blindness) what it was like living with the condition and also analysed their objective scores on lab tests of face recognition dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Against Language Barriers: A Call to Protect International Education in Dutch Academia

An open letter supporting the international bachelor’s psychology programs threatened for cuts. Proceeding with these cuts would damage some of the most important and impactful psychology departments globally. #supportdutchpsychology

openletter.earth/against-lang...

Congratulations and best of luck! Keep that enthusiasm for working in academia, it can be tough but is worth it.

Harvard sued the Trump admin today 💪🏽🥳💯

www.harvard.edu/research-fun...

From random walk to guided search

The dog of “relax! it’s spring”

I wonder what the cost benefit analysis of having an ID card looks like - if ever there was one.

Come back to B’ham Kim!

A hand drawn graph showing the rise in global land temperatures published in 1938.

87 years ago.

In April 1938, Guy Callendar published the first evidence from thermometer observations that the world’s land areas were warming.

He also linked the observed warming to the increase in atmospheric CO₂ from burning coal.

87 years ago.

rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

😊🌟✒️ Trotse aankondiging! ✒️🌟😊 Het afgelopen jaar heb ik gewerkt aan het boek "Een wereld vol denkers". In dit boek ga ik op onderzoek naar de gedachten, de #gevoelens en het #bewustzijn van #mensen, #dieren, #planten en kunstmatige intelligentie (#AI). #psychologie #wetenschap 1/5

PhD position opening in Padova. It is a multidisciplinary project in Experimental Aesthetics and Psychology of Art.
www.bertamini.org/lab/MIRACLE....

I guess Kiki can be edgy

Congratulations!

The virtual hand paradigm: A new method for studying prediction and language-vision interactions We introduce a new method for measuring prediction and language-vision interactions: tracking the trajectories of hand-reaching movements in Virtual R…

In the journal Brain Research we introduce
The virtual hand paradigm: A new method for studying prediction and language-vision interactions.
Joint work with O. Jubran and T. Lachmann. Open access at www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...