Jevin D. West

Duke School of Medicine plans salary cuts for tenured faculty who do not meet grant expectations Set to go in effect in 2026, the proposed policy would apply to the School’s basic sciences units. These units rely heavily on grants from the National Institutes of Health, which have been increasing...

Research for grants rather than grants for research.

This kind of policy, especially with additional cuts to federal funding, will create perverse incentives that will have consequences on the actual science that this whole system is supposed to support.

www.dukechronicle.com/article/2025...

NIH is already feeling the effects of LLMs.

A new policy was posted yesterday that limits the number of proposals that can be submitted by any one investigator.

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

US judge blocks slashing of universities' federal funding from National Science Foundation A federal judge on Friday prevented the National Science Foundation from sharply cutting research funding provided to universities in the latest legal setback to efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration to slash government support of research at major academic institutions.

www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

Judge orders Trump admin. to restore hundreds of terminated NIH grants "I've never seen government racial discrimination like this," the judge said.

www.axios.com/local/boston...

The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist The Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” report misinterprets some studies and cites others that don’t exist, according to the listed authors.

Into the “golden age of science that is transparent, rigorous, and trustworthy”…

www.notus.org/health-scien...

h/t @shahanmemon.bsky.social

Evidence shows AI systems are already too much like humans. Will that be a problem? On the internet, nobody knows you’re a chatbot.

Evidence shows AI systems are already too much like humans. Will that be a problem?
theconversation.com/evidence-sho...

The benefits and dangers of anthropomorphic conversational agents | PNAS A growing body of research suggests that the recent generation of large language model (LLMs) excel, and in many cases outpace humans, at writing p...

Given concerns of anthropomorphic seduction, should we lean into human-like abilities of LLMs or should we look to dehumanize them?

Sandra Peter, Kai Riemer, and I write about the benefits and dangers of anthropomorphic conversational agents in @pnas.org.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

FDA plans to roll out AI agency-wide for reviews in June The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced plans to implement AI tools throughout the agency to assist in conducting scientific reviews following the successful completion of a pilot program ...

What could go wrong?

www.raps.org/news-and-art...

Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions Changes seen as a response to presidential directives on what research to fund

Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

The University of Washington has stopped processing all NSF grants on or after May 5th due to the uncertainty of the new 15% indirect rate. This is devastating, especially for junior faculty and early-career researchers.

How many other universities will follow suite?

Policy Notice: Implementation of Standard 15% Indirect Cost Rate

It's official. 15% ICR on NSF grants.

My favorite line: "Reducing administrative burdens for awardee institutions."

Say the opposite of what is true... the communication strategy of our time: www.nsf.gov/policies/doc...

AI is ‘beating’ humans at empathy and creativity. But these games are rigged | MJ Crockett Research pitting people against AI systems gives AI an edge by asking us to perform in machine-like ways

My new piece in @theguardian.com

Techno-optimism is human pessimism.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Federal Judge Extends TRO Against NIH Cap On Indirect Cost Payments Federal Judge Angel Kelly has extended her temporary hold on NIH's plan to cap its payment of indirect research grant costs to 15%.

Federal judge extends TRO against NIH cap.

www.forbes.com/sites/michae...

Elon Musk’s Business Empire Scores Benefits Under Trump Shake-Up Government investigations into Mr. Musk’s companies are stalling amid President Trump’s firings and Biden administration resignations.

Musk has received $13B in government contracts over the last 5 yrs. With all his fuss about the $9B/yr in overhead to the more than 2,500 universities conducting lifesaving research, I am curious when he is going to turn DOGE on his own contracts and ‘efficiencies’.

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/u...

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?

Looking forward to feedback.

thebullshitmachines.com

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Robert Jones to step down Robert Jones plans to step down as University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign chancellor and vice president of the University of Illinois System at the end of the current academic year, bringing what wil...

Robert Jones, former Chancellor at the University of Illinois, will be the new President here at the University of Washington. news.uillinois.edu/view/7815/71...

Disinformation Summer Institute (DSI) - Disinformation Summer Institute Disinformation Disinformation is false or misleading information created and spread to advance policy, political, economic or ideological goals. It is sometimes used by industries, governments, and ot...

Applications are open for the inaugural Disinformation Summer Institute. This 3-day, intensive summer institute is intended for graduate students, post-docs, assistant professors or early career researchers seeking to better understand and address disinformation. More info: disinfoinstitute.org

🚨 I recently came across a weird case of #AI in #preprints, with implications for burdening #SciComm with AI-mediated #PredatoryPublishing

What did I find? Issues with the article, questionable behavior by the author, indexing problems, and AI's potential for streamlining predatory publishing.

🧵

TrueMedia Fighting AI-based disinformation in political campaigns by identifying manipulated media.

TrueMedia.org: new non-partisan, non-profit effort to detect manipulated media geekwire.com/2024/new-ai-...

Introducing Gemini — Google’s newest and most capable AI model. Watch Google DeepMind Research Scientist Sebastian Nowozin and Software Engineer Taylor Apple... Gemini: Unlocking insights in scientific literature

Silicon Valley hype oozes from this video (eg, ‘understanding of science’, ‘reasoning capabilities’, ‘reads 200k papers’) but the re-graphing tool is pretty nice. If it can do that consistently and reliably, worth trying out. www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPiO...

Press Forward Will Award More Than $500 Million to Revitalize Local News

Good to see philanthropies leaning into local news. Path Forward will award more than $500 million to revitalize local news: www.macfound.org/press/press-...

CounterCloud is an experiment in autonomous (mass) social engineering using LLMs and public media. The system ran for a few days during Q2 2023.NB - please n... CounterCloud - AI powered disinformation experiment

Frightening how easy disinformation has become: youtu.be/cwGdkrc9i2Y?...

Have large language models developed analogical reasoning skills? Maybe, but our simple experiments demonstrate otherwise: arxiv.org/abs/2308.16118