David Crotty

Title: The street tom waits grew up on. Image: a shabby, broken down old timey American street. Caption: Buildings (left to right): vern's all-nite pizza 'n' tattoo, accordion players' graveyard, abandoned clown-shoe factory, divorced salesmen's polka club, tomb of the unknown cabbie, bootleg ice-cream warehouse, saint frank's hobo orphanage, illegal umbrella incinerator.

Happy 76th Birthday, Tom Waits!

Frank Gehry and the Art of Drawing Frank Gehry’s sketches stand in a long artistic lineage, reminding us that architecture often begins where drawing outruns every other tool.

Everyone knows the distinctive curves and lines of Frank Gehry’s buildings. But where do they come from? Gehry, who died this week at 96, described drawing as his way of “thinking aloud.”

#LivingArchitectures
We put cells and cytoskeleton filaments on the architecture of the musée d'Orsay.
www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/agenda/ev...
Scientists of the #CytoMorphoLab adapted their protocols to illustrate the questions that keep them awake at night.
-> Two shows on the 24th and 25th of January.

Wait till you hear about his youth in a ska band…

Incredible close-up of spider silk wins science photo prize Duelling prairie chickens, a snake-mimicking moth and a once-a-year sunrise at the South Pole feature in the best images from the Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition 2025

Wow.... Incredible close-up of spider silk wins science photo prize www.newscientist.com/article/2506...

The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine (Gift Article) A quiet policy change means the government is making fewer bets on long-term science.

The @nytimes.com breaks down how recent policy changes are reshaping the landscape in ways that extend far beyond agency budgets.

#ScholComm #AcademicPublishing #ResearchFunding #SciencePolicy

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

SocArXiv announces moratorium on AI-topic papers

It's weird to not only have lived through an information revolution but also now living through its undoing, all within less than a generation.

Instagram Create an account or log in to Instagram - Share what you're into with the people who get you.

What we did before Google www.instagram.com/reel/DRZ0j5x...

Still from the first ever MST3K Experiment Crow, Joel, and Beeper are on the bridge of the Satellite of Love

Today in 1988 Mystery Science Theater 3000 premiered on KTMA in St. Paul Minnesota. #MST3K

“Do more for less!” Plus of course “Make things more complicated but easier!”

Or pay for some service to do most of it (and increase APC/subscription prices accordingly), then as you note, a human must make the call, adding even more cost. Note that all of this is desired/required by the research community who at the same time are complaining about high prices.

Cost Transparency at AIP Publishing: Why We’re Sharing Our True Costs AIP Publishing is committed to building a more inclusive and vibrant future for the physical sciences. Open science can accelerate global progress by breaking barriers to open and fair research commun...

From @aip-publishing.bsky.social: cost of a peer reviewed article is $2700 (*before* you start giving back to the community). Would like to see a more detailed split, but it does align with estimates from eLife and EMBO #ScientificPublishing

www.stm-publishing.com/cost-transpa...

Also really interested in Signals as another group developing a broad array of, well, signals research-signals.com

Infolinx Website Bringing financial services fraud analytics to scholarly publishing

I tend to think of some of the approaches used in other industries such as banking. A bank won't give you a loan unless they're pretty sure you are who you say you are. Infolinx is one group doing this infolinx.ai

This answer gets complicated and circular once one realizes that funding decisions are often made by academics doing peer review of grant applications. To quote Pogo, "we have met the enemy and they are us."

Although perhaps the better answer is that academia follows what the funders do (follow the money always works as an answer). If money is given out based on papers, then that's what matters as many institutions are now financial firms with a sideline in education and research

All good questions. To me, the answer is that academia has largely outsourced its researcher assessment process. It is a difficult and time consuming process and in many cases, must rely on proxies (if I get 4,000 applications for a job, I can't do a deep dive into every applicant).

Guest Post – In Defense of Endogeny - The Scholarly Kitchen While higher rates of endogeny can help indexes identify journals being used for self-promotion, nepotism, or other unethical ends, endogeny itself should not be equated with them and can be the resul...

And there's also the tricky issue of endogeny. Is having the same small group of authors/reviewers/readers a sign of fraud or a sign of a new emerging field? scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2023/08/14/g...

I worked in a spermatogenesis lab that made a mouse mutant with an unexpected enteric nervous system issue. Would not being known in that field have prevented others from taking our work seriously?

...care needs to be taken not to exclude someone simply because you don't know who they are. This would prevent any new entrants into a field and enforce the old boys club. Lots of potentially great research to be done by those with less funding or in areas where attending a meeting is prohibitive.

I think it was the word "known" that triggered my response. There's a lot of good work being done to develop tools around identity -- is this person who they say they are, are they connected to the field they're writing in, or to other institutions/authors. Which is good for raising flags, but...

Image screening is going to fail. We need audit trails for data provenance.

Does that mean that really good work by someone without the “right” pedigree is cast aside?

Seems like that Gmail thing isn't true but maybe there's a lesson here about what happens when you keep turning new features on by default and you make it difficult or impossible to turn them off, and also what happens when you lump useful machine learning in with forced slop under the "AI" label

I’ve never worked for a journal that charged authors for a cover. Are those paid-for covers labeled as “advertising“?

How high are OpenAI’s compute costs? Possibly a lot higher than we thought Inference inferred, revenue reconstructed, cash burn quantified

"If the data is accurate...it would call into question the business model of OpenAI and nearly every other general-purpose LLM vendor" www.ft.com/content/fce7...

If You Use Gmail, You're Going To Want To Turn Off This 1 Automatic Setting ASAP Plus: a quick guide to the two-step process for opting out.

Plus: a quick guide to the two-step process for opting out.

Everyone teaching right now sees lots of evidence for this. Students using LLMs are, to varying degrees, incapable of independently doing the things they are supposedly learning, the same way that students copying answers from a solutions manual then struggle to do something similar on an exam.