Michael Maffie

Opinion | New York Democrats Have a Chance to Vote Against the A.I. Oligarchs There’s a huge political opportunity for the party that can stand up for human beings in the face of A.I.

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com

“There are several interesting candidates in the campaign for the 12th District,” our columnist Michelle Goldberg writes. “But only Bores gives voters the opportunity to defeat the tech oligarchs unleashing tsunamis of cash to buy political submission.”

A line curve showing number of awards for fiscal year 2026 compared to fiscal years 2021-2025 across NSF. The fiscal year 2026 curve lies well below curves for other fiscal years.

NSF Update

Funding curve overall. A little bit of progress in the past week, but only a little bit.

Now by Directorate...

1/11

Great new tool from @maffie.bsky.social ! Let’s make academic publishing more transparent 🙌

Coauthor update: we're now on Firefox! 🦊

Help make the academic publishing world a little more transparent by using our research lab's plugin. It's automatic: once you sign in, the software takes care of the rest. The app will even calculate your publishing stats for you!

coauthor.fly.dev

That's the competitive adv of scirev: it's platform agnostic. Coauthor has to be updated for each journal portal (and sometimes their design changes).

We’ve been taking about how to integrate those data. One challenge is that scirev is self-entered, whereas Coauthor calculates all the relevant information automatically. But they also have interesting data on the RR process which would be useful.

Very interesting! It would be fantastic if we started aggregating such information across scholars and time periods to get a better sense of processing times. The information asymmetries are real. Some tools like @maffie.bsky.social's plugin can be of use if people start submitting data there.

LLMs have robbed so much joy from grading. I used to love when students would turn in a polished, thoughtful final paper.

Now I wonder if I'm actually reading their work...and start looking for the em dashes.

AI has all the signs of something that could lead to labor legislation reform: rapid technical change, significant (negative) impacts on workers/the middle class, with the potential for a few in society to capture the overwhelming majority of gains. /end

The disparity in wealth and degrading labor conditions gave rise to industrial unions. Furthermore, comparative industrial relations work has shown that the middle class plays a key role in shaping labor law because they have the political clout and resources to demand greater protections. /3

100 years is a long pattern, but past instances of technical change are instructive: the industrial revolution did not raise workers' incomes for nearly 100 years. While some became very wealthy, the middle class witnessed extended working hours and degrading labor conditions. /2

The future of white-collar work may be unionized Law firms, banks and tech companies are seeing an uptick in employees choosing to join unions.

The last time the US passed legislation expanding union rights for private sector employees, the color television was not yet sold in stores.

Could AI lead to the first expansion of private sector labor rights in nearly 100 years? 1/

www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

80% of NYC-area air traffic controllers absent amid 'surge' in callouts: FAA Staffing shortages snarled flights at a slew of major airports on Friday.

Public sector employees are prohibited from striking, so they will sometimes call out en masse citing sickness - called catching the “blue flu” (named for police departments that would call out sick to put pressure on cities during collective bargaining).

abcnews.go.com/US/delays-sa...

Looks like the computer science undergrads are about to get a lot of free food.

Uber’s secret weapon is its team of economists It’s hard to explain just how much economists love Uber.

And how private companies will step in to provide data to their preferred researchers. Gig companies did this with great success — no doubt AI companies will do the same. qz.com/1367800/uber...

A quote from a study on competitive balance in MLB indicating that redistributing non-gate revenue based on on-field performance will increase competitive balance in MLB

a quote from an academic study on competitive balance in professional sports that says reducing the time to free agency will increase competitive balance in MLB

Given the owners deep concerns about competitive balance, how about this? Research finds that distributing non-gate revenue based on team performance and reducing the time to free agency will both increase competitive balance in MLB.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The PBA collective agreement expired in July. If Mamdani wins, Adams can sign a new contract giving the PBA whatever it wants — just as Trump did with ICE after the 2020 election.

I tend to think of social media as a never ending academic conference: people can promote their work, network, brand build, etc. It’s both a new form of labor and, as you point out, created an alternative job market signal outside of disciplinary structures.

Opinion | Trump’s ‘Compact’ With Universities Is Just Extortion

"Every aspect of it seeks to dictate decisions that have traditionally been left to each university — a degree of control over higher education that is characteristic of authoritarian countries."

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/o...

For example, making a digital platform increasingly awful for gig workers.

#labor

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

My lab is crowdsourcing journal review times to increase transparency in academic publishing. If this journal is on Manuscript Central, would you upload it to the Coauthor project website? coauthor.fly.dev Thanks!

A statue of Touchdown the bear, Cornell University’s mascot, wearing a red scarf.

Opening day! Here we go, Big Red!
@scjohnsoncollege.bsky.social

I think this is right. Tech elites have largely insulated themselves from the economic consequences of their actions. Yet they are deeply bothered by social pressure, criticism, or isolation. So they use money to shape culture (eg influence elections, buy social media platforms, etc.).

My lab built the Coauthor plugin to help people make informed decisions about how long they will wait for a manuscript decision.

Would you be willing to upload your manuscript data from this journal?

coauthor.fly.dev

I agree this is an important issue -- and the Coauthor dashboard will soon display the average number of rounds before a paper is accepted.

If you have suggestions for other metrics that may be useful, let me know. We are always looking for new ways to improve the dashboard.

Thanks!

Promising way to crowdsource data on academic journal decision timelines. I'm uploading my data. You can too!

Stories like this are why my lab started the Coauthor Project. If this was a manuscript central submission, can you upload it to the dashboard?

coauthor.fly.dev

My memory on this is a bit fuzzy, I remember hearing that today, independent voters are more likely to vote for the same party in consecutive elections than those who identified with a party 40-ish years ago.

The Enshittification of Work: Platform Decay and Labour Conditions in the Gig Economy This study investigates the mechanisms by which gig platforms degrade labour conditions over time, building on the concept of platform decay, or ‘enshittification’, initially developed in the context...

🚨 I’m excited to announce that, “The Enshittification of Work: Platform Decay and Labour Conditions in the Gig Economy” is now available online !

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...