Fernanda Ferreira

Just finished my last class of the semester🎉Reminded of how much I love teaching this academic writing class for grad students. We focus on improving our writing but also reducing anxiety and becoming a more consistent & productive writer

Some of the students favorite writing tips/learnings below:

Years ago, when a professional organization I was part of became corrupt and pompous, I called it its Fifa-fication. Today I see how apt that description was.

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Great question!

1) First and foremost, we evaluate a candidate based on the departmental guidelines and expectations provided. We don't hold the candidate to arbitrary standards, or even to those of our own institution unless asked to do so. We assess the materials against the guidelines provided.

Gerd Gigerenzer on the legacy of Daniel Kahneman
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/12/03/g...

Discourse Processes Volume 62, Issue 10 of Discourse Processes

Volume 62, Issue 10 of Discourse Processes is now available online! Find more details here: www.tandfonline.com/toc/hdsp20/6...

And why stop at universities? A murder's been committed, and the investigator, a Christian fundamentalist, declares it was an act of God. End of investigation. If you say, uh, don't you want to look at some evidence, know that you're challenging the investigator's religious freedoms.

Good news: voters are clearly disenchanted with the current regime. Bad news: if Dems get elected, they’ll have to take measures to clean up this mess, and those will make them unpopular. Result: voters will return to electing Republicans based on absurd promises they can’t keep. Rinse, repeat.

This situation is extreme but it’s one we’re all dealing with to some extent. If a student complains about a grade or even a comment, you can’t be confident the university will back you up no matter how in the right you are. The incentive structure says give them what they want and make it go away.

Oh god, those Likert-scale questions are the worst. “On a scale from 0 to 10, rate candidate on consistent adherence to high ethical standards“ - I’m not sure I could do that for a family member, let alone someone who was one of 300 in one of my classes.

Better yet - eliminate letters of rec altogether. They’re biased, largely uninformative, and nowadays, often written by AI.

Happy to share the first version of my textbook "Quantitative Data Analysis for Linguists in R".

stefanocoretta.github.io/qdal/

Comments and suggestions welcome! (on the GitHub repo: github.com/stefanocoret...)

The textbook takes you from 0 to basic stat modelling with Bayesian regression.

This is so true, and it highlights how annoying it is that outlets like the New York Times and The Atlantic obsessively fixate on the Ivies. Most U.S. students attend public universities, and those institutions change lives at a scale the Ivies can’t touch.

Really important to stress that the Crown Jewels of the US higher education system were never the Ivies or elite SLACs (other countries have equivalents of these) but the well-funded, large, cheap, and excellently staffed public state university systems bringing high quality education to the masses.

Psych dept hiring is SO trend-based. In the 80s, connectionism was all the rage; in the early naughts, you had to do cognitive neuroscience; and today it’s all AI. Some of this is our own attraction to methods over theory, and a lot of it is a response to administration-defined financial priorities.

Linguistics departments too

psych departments post a faculty job that has nothing to do with AI challenge

Many college students in my classes don't know how to calculate the grade they’d need to get on the last of 3 exams to reach a desired final %. At first I was shocked that this level of algebra was beyond them, but I’ve since realized it’s almost the norm. This has been true for at least 15 years.

”He will continue teaching.”

This tells you all you need to know about how little universities—even ones that are considered elite—care about their teaching mission.

Something I often think about that’s related to this: in my lab, our practice for handling responses to reviewers is to create a spreadsheet with columns for criticisms, potential responses, etc. Wouldn’t that be easier for the editor and reviewers to deal with than the standard letter?

What should I do with a student who blatantly cheated on an exam, and now that I’m trying to speak with him to allow him to explain himself rejects all the meeting times I offer, then only suggests alternate times after 6pm or on weekends?

Misinformation *is* central to democratic problems today, but the solution is *not* to correct such epistemic failures directly. Instead, we must address them at their roots, in social identity.

Or so I argue in a new post for @apaphilosophy.bsky.social.

blog.apaonline.org/2025/11/12/t...

Debunking “When Prophecy Fails” In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased....

There’s growing evidence that something was going seriously wrong in the classic early work on cognitive dissonance

Latest revelation: The story in When Prophecy Fails seems to have been fabricated in the most egregious way

But this is not the only one…

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

As always, we are powered by the Janeway systems platform, hosted by
@escholarship.bsky.social

of the University of California, copyedited by our Editorial Assistant Sandy Chung, copyedited and typeset by Silicon Chips, and supported by the psycholinguistics community!

It's almost Thanksgiving time around these parts! And we're thankful and delighted to announce the publication of another article in Glossa Psycholinguistics...

Exploring the Timing of Online Processing of Locative Constructions With Spanish Copulas Ser and Estar Author(s): Aguilar, Miriam; López-Cortés, Natalia; Demestre, Josep | Abstract: This study investigates how the semantic restrictions of Spanish copulas (ser and estar) impact the online processing of ...

'Exploring the Timing of Online Processing of Locative Constructions With Spanish Copulas Ser and Estar' by Aguilar, López-Cortés & Demestre is now available on our site:

escholarship.org/uc/item/31q9...

Email from Hilary Clinton to Noori Ali: Do you recall the ten year old Yemeni girl who got herself divorced? I met her at the Glamour awards last year. There was a CNN story last few days about how unhappy she is, still living at home, not attending school and quite angry that her life is not better. Is there any way we can help her? Could we get her to the US for counseling and education?

Note how different HRC’s emails are:

Some say this is a boomer email style that arises from a lack of understanding of tech. It’s not. This style is specific to a certain type of elite who wants you to know they‘re too busy to waste time on trivial things like punctuation and capitalization, and it’s your job to decode their text.

Something absolutely perfect about Larry Summers riffing about the scourge of woke cancel culture being unfair to predatory men in a friendly email to his pal JEFFREY EPSTEIN.