Alyssa Smith (job market era)

Main figure from the paper. Violin plots showing the length of acknowledgments sections in books by sociologists, broken out by gender, race, sexuality, parents’ education, millennium of author’s PhD, and publisher type.

I'm excited to share my new paper with a former student, Tommy Smith. "'This Work Would Not Have Been Possible without...': The Length of Acknowledgments in Sociology Books"

Open Access in @sociusjournal.bsky.social : doi.org/10.1177/2378...

come network about networks with your network???

This morning at 11am, corner of Hathorn and Broadway in Somerville MA. 3 ICE vehicles idling on nearby corners. I was following two ICE cars that were cruising around the neighborhood.

This person was just walking down the sidewalk when two ICE vehicles stopped and officers jumped out to stop him.

Why is this horrible for Universities?

Just about everyone who isn't a citizen or green card holder already who's hired for a tenure track faculty position is hired through an H1B and then, after 3-5 years, applies for a green card.

This is literally "No more foreign professors can be hired"

A General Air of Anxiety - Boston Review The Red Scare targeted my father. He taught me the meaning of resistance.

Must read

www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-g...

there are a lot of examples, even in canonical-ish works of network science or computational social science, where the stated downstream implications of data-driven analyses have so much potential for harm if taken seriously and/or circulated widely! and they often are!!

currently reading this and stopping every few pages to go Oh No

but i just wanted to emphasize the extent to which data, especially ill-gotten data or really dubious acts of quantification, get used to build up & justify dangerous rhetoric.

yes, that one! alas 💀

there’s a bluesky api users discord that might be a good place to lurk & learn more if you’re really invested

going profile by profile was doable for starter packs and the follower network but idk if that would work at scale for posts

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

How Are You Supposed To Get The COVID Vaccine Now? An Explainer | Defector As the muggy malaise of summer winds down, you might find yourself interested in taking advantage of one of several safe and proven vaccines to help protect you from the inevitable brumal surge of res...

I wrote about the intentionally byzantine process of getting a COVID vaccine this fall
defector.com/how-the-fuck...

it is amazing! i’m lucky enough to live nearby and go browse in person like a feral goblin!!

i love the formosa oolong and earl grey de la creme from mem tea! memteaimports.com

With fall fast approaching, many students will start applying for graduate school. If you need tips and tricks when interviewing with the PI and deciding where to apply/accept - A thread 🧵

Feel free to add to this!

A hand holding up a piece of white paper on which is printed in blue a picture of a clam and the words NO HEADS NO LEGS NO GODS NO MASTERS NO GENDERS. Behind this is the inked lino block

Learning how to linocut simply to illustrate my most banger bsky posts 😂

Okay, an ill-advised story time. I do not talk about my body unless it is entirely on my terms and it is unidirectional. BUT, this is so familiar to me. I am not athletic. (I’ve written about that.) But I also don’t have much somatic sense — don’t know where my body is in space.

The First Lego League is a competition that schools from all over the place compete in. As part of the competition they need to consult with an expert. A lot of clubs use our program to make that connection.

This year's theme is archaeology. It's all-hands-on-deck for archaeologists.

I keep seeing this circulating, and I'm disappointed in my colleagues in the natural sciences who think if they can "shed" enough of their humanity they will some how be protected from fascism.

Scientists who are bending to jingoism to try and protect funding aren't asking the right questions.

i’m curious whether you’re using a deterministic node ordering (such that cluster merging happens the same way each run) or, if not, how much variation you see between early iterations. i think different implementations make different choices wrt randomness and i’m not as familiar with neo4j 👀

mood?

Have you considered looking at any more matrix-y approaches, like PCA variants? We used this (arxiv.org/pdf/2004.05387) pretty successfully on a Twitter sub-network & found clusters like Magic the Gathering enthusiasts & Home Depot managers. also +1 to the rec from @ryanjgallag.com for graph-tool!

The use of national security rhetoric to justify mass incarceration echoes the same logic that led to the forced removal and incarceration of over 125,000 Japanese Americans—our parents, grandparents and extended families—under Executive Order 9066.

#AlligatorAlcatraz #NeverAgainIsNow

I have had death threats for my work on trans rights. I have been stalked. I have had people try and have me thrown out of my University. I am by no means alone, and lots of trans-inclusive academics have spoken publicly about the violence and harassment they face. But no mention of that here.

To restate; a woman from a movement known for threatening libel suits against their students to prevent criticism wrote an essay complaining about how her colleagues agreeing she sucks at her job is a threat to academic freedom.

Anyway, evergreen: www.gracelavery.org/undermining-...

A “Striking” Trend: After Texas Banned Abortion, More Women Nearly Bled to Death During Miscarriage A new ProPublica data analysis adds to the mounting evidence that abortion bans have made the common experience of first-trimester miscarriage far more dangerous.

NEW: More women have nearly bled to death during miscarriage under Texas’ abortion ban.

Experts say the trend paints a troubling picture of the harms of unnecessary delays in care. “This is striking,” one doctor said. “The trend is very clear.”

and Nathan Harkins-Oberbeck in Porter is an incredibly solid human being who gave me so many sugary snacks and breaks when i had mid-tattoo restless legs

I really like Heejung Koh’s tattoo style and bedside manner (for lack of a better term) — she’s NYC based but is a guest artist at Lucky’s in Cambridge fairly often.

Microsoft Powerpoint attempting to generate alt text, starting with an explainer on alt text: Alt Text How would you describe this object and its context to someone who is blind or low vision? - The subject(s) in detail - The setting - The actions or interactions - Other relevant information (1-2 detailed sentences recommended) The AI-generated alt text is the following: A graph of a graph of a graph of a graph of a graph.... (you get the idea; this goes on for about 12 iterations) It comes with the disclaimer "AI-generated content may be incorrect"

Microsoft Powerpoint is once again attempting to make alt texts. We have the same instructions on alt text as the last picture. The AI-generated alt text is "A graph of numbers and numbers" and it also comes with the disclaimer that "AI-generated content may be incorrect"

them: AI is the future
me, while trying desperately to turn off the AI "helpers" in powerpoint: this AI?

i think google sheets is a lesbian
in that it will not dare to assume my clearly labeled & correctly formatted "date" column is in fact a date