bergelsonlab

"i need AI to brainstorm" no you need a duck on your desk. get a duck

Turns out Mark Twain would've been the colleague to have a snarky backchannel text thread with during the zoom meeting, the kind where you try to keep a straight face as the zingers fly in and you dare not trust your chat skills to keep it within the zoom app.

say it again:

4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities

demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

that said, for short-term thin slices, there's kinda some important signal in 'CV(3).docx' bc not only are they bad at naming files but they've downloaded their own cv 3 times and don't care if you know it❗

'cognizant program officer' implies the existence of
'non-cognizant program officer'.
Poor schmuck, constantly caught unawares.
#AcademicSky

Senator Murray Opening Remarks at Full Committee Mark Up of Defense and Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Bills | United States Senate Committee on Appropriations United States Senate Committee on Appropriations

Public pressure works. The Senate proposed FY26 funding for the NIH that is being voted on today includes a $400 million increase. Keep up the great work everyone, call your house representatives and make sure this passes through the full Senate.

Wow. A group of top scholars at Harvard just sent a letter to its president, Alan Garber, warning against surrendering to Trump.

Signatories include Steven Levitsky, Dani Rodrik, Ryan Enos, Theda Skocpol, and Steven Walt.

Someone forwarded it to me. Read it here:

🤢+ 🥴+🫠

The first papers from our special collection on vocal communication in corvids are now live. Most are still under review, stay tuned for more updates as they’re published! link.springer.com/collections/...

Scene: restaurant. phone rings, a land line. waiter walks around looking for it but can’t find it. A young (20’s?) patron near me finds a cordless phone on a little shelf. He picks up this strange object, confused, passes it to waiter saying “someone must have left that here!”
I died of old age.

Calling all first-gen linguistics students!

The First Gen Access & Equity (FGAE) Committee is offering a $500 travel grant to support one first-generation student attending the 2026 LSA Annual Meeting in New Orleans!

Apps due July 31! www.lsadc.org/content.asp?...
#LSA2026 #FirstGen #Linguistic

A quick update re NIH and NSF terminated grant tracking:

Grant Watch has a new name!

We're now called **Grant Witness**

You can find us at grant-witness.us

Please update your bookmarks and spread the word! 🙏

(And no, this wasn't our preference, but trademarks are a thing. 🤦‍♂️🤷‍♂️)

YouTube video by Benn Jordan I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird

Holy shit. This guy saved a PNG to a bird.

(he drew a bird into a spectrogram, played that sound to a starling, and the starling reproduced it back to him with enough accuracy he got his bird drawing back in their call's spectrogram) www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQC...

2 of my nightmare social etiquette scenarios:
1) back in more common masking days (RIP), some1 at an airport who REMOVED THEIR MASK TO SNEEZE

2) a professor who shall remain nameless unless you ask me IRL who CLIPPED HIS NAILS in the back of a class while a (more jr.) co-instructor was teaching.

hear, hear (and also HERE! HERE!)

Want to publish a NIH-funded paper in Nature? Well - unless your institution has an agreement with Springer, you'll have to be mega-rich to be compliant with NIH's new no-embargo policy. Springer is insisting on gold OA - that's $12,690 and that's extortion.

Hell yeah, keep the pressure on.

If you live in one of these states, call your Senators, thank them, and remind them that there are related issues where their states and the nation needs their support and willingness to stand up.

Well good morning to you too #EatPreyJudge #BirdSky #PeregrineFalcon

Mount Holyoke College in lovely western Massachusetts is hiring a tenure-track neuroscientist. Amazing students and fantastic faculty support - please share!
mtholyoke.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

OMG p-siders, check this out

a visual illusion: what appears to be some strangely shaped pink pieces of cloth are actually the background on which several forks are laying

these are forks

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

‘It’s heartless, it’s careless, and it’s deeply damaging’ says former NIH director on cuts to medical research | CNN Dr. Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, speaks to Christiane Amanpour about his decision to leave the agency and what he says is the Trump administration’s crackdown...

Straight talk from Dr. Francis Collins on the devastating - and politically motivated - cuts to science and public health in the United States.

Anybody who cares about their health or the future or science, technology, and innovation in this country should watch this.

www.cnn.com/2025/07/25/T...

omg just had a mild panic that this was about integrating gpt with running multilevel models with lmer (lme4) and let's just say thank god it's not. we're be keeping the 'el' out of 'ellmer' over here thnx:) #Rstats

Ooh suggestive evidence!

oh my gosh convince them to flip the listing order every year for the same of EQUITABLE ENROLLMENT OPPORTUNITIES (EEO;))

hypothesis: if your last name is closer to the top of the alphabet, and your work lists emails somewhere, you get more random emails than later-alphabet friends. No clear way to poll this on @bsky.app but curious if this rings true for others... signed, someone on the b-list

Translation for non-scientists. The major funder for cancer research in the world is now only funding proposals that score in top 4 percent. They’re funding roughly 2/3 fewer proposals than they had in recent years. I suspect the funding line has actually never been this low.

Really cool how we don’t need or want this and no one asked for it. This will be the straw that turns me completely back to asking them to turn in work on printed paper which will annoy them (but has always been my wish)