Academic Chatter

Academic Chatter

@academic-chatter.bsky.social

Join #AcademicChatter for support & community in higher education.

13,203 Followers 555 Following 81 Posts Joined Jun 2023
21 hours ago
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US researchers are advising students not to enter academia A survey of NIH-grantees in Massachusetts reveals delayed hiring in labs, layoffs, careers being pursued abroad and research scope reductions

US researchers are advising students not to enter academia.

"More than two-thirds of the researchers in Massachusetts... who responded to a survey conducted by The Boston Globe recommend their students consider careers outside academia."

#AcademicSky

www.chemistryworld.com/news/us-rese...

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3 days ago
Jobs - The University of York

Exciting news! The @yorkpsychology.bsky.social are recruiting 3 new ART (research and teaching) lecturers! One role will be prioritised for cognitive, affective and/or social neuroscience.

#neuroskyence #cognition #psychscisky #neurojobs

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1 week ago
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Do women academics need to work 2.4 times harder to succeed? - LSE Impact What reproducing Wennerås & Wold's classic 1997 study on peer review bias reveals about policymaking and the use of evidence in research policy.

💥New | Do women academics need to work 2.4 times harder to succeed?

✍️Ulf Sandström

#AcademicSky #GenderBias

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1 week ago
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The growing market for student academic misconduct services - LSE Impact A growing market for student academic misconduct services is increasingly outsourcing research ethics in higher education institutions.

👀ICYMI: "It has evolved into a platform-oriented business model that systematically captures students precisely when they are likely to feel uncertain or anxious"

@gengyantang.bsky.social, @saraheaton.bsky.social #AcademicSky #ResearchMisconduct #HigherEducation

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1 week ago

People refuse to acknowledge how an LLM actually works, and insist on assigning meaning and understanding to its output. There is no meaning, and the system understands neither the user’s question nor its own “response.”

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1 week ago
Flyer for event on Defending Democracy in the Stacks, free virtual event on 3/4

📚 🗃️ Super excited for this FREE Wed. 3/4 virtual event, when I’ll be in conversation with Tamela Chambers, Colleen Shogan, and Laura McEnaney on #libraries, #archives, & freedoms. Join us for “Defending Democracy in the Stacks” Register here: umass-amherst.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

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1 week ago

US citizen researching in New Zealand (hoping to stay after my studies 🤞🏽).

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2 weeks ago

One of the things I value about this space is its international reach.
If you’re happy to share, where are you posting from? 🌎❤️

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2 weeks ago

One of the things I value about this space is its international reach.
If you’re happy to share, where are you posting from? 🌎❤️

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2 weeks ago

”once misinformation from AI-generated summaries remains uncorrected and seeps into published theses, research papers, and other outputs, it could contribute to a loop of misinformation.”

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2 weeks ago
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Assistant Teaching Professor in Computational Social Science and Cognitive Science University of California, San Diego is hiring. Apply now!

Our department is hiring an Assistant Teaching Professor!! This is a joint-appointed position with Computational Social Sciences (css.ucsd.edu). It's 75+ degrees F and sunny today, just thought I'd mention apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04461

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2 weeks ago

This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions.

It does not.

It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed.

🧵 1/

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2 weeks ago
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What oral histories can teach us about effective environmental research - LSE Impact What can oral histories tell us about the tacit knowledge required for successful collaborative environmental and sustainability research.

👀ICYMI: "Through the oral histories, we capture aspects of the experience of research that might be difficult to access in other ways."

✍️ @angecass.bsky.social & Paul Merchant

#ResearchMethods #Sustainability #AcademicSKy

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2 weeks ago

There seem to be a whole (older) cohort of eminent social psychologists who essentially do not understand the concept of sampling error, and I wonder to what extent that lack of understanding was an adaptive trait for a career.

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2 weeks ago
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198 effect sizes in ego depletion resesrch showed an effect size of d=0.62. Preregistered large replications (including some by original authors) yielded an effect size of 0. No one has been able to offer any other explanation for this huge research waste than massive p-hacking.

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2 weeks ago

Higher Ed is not about job training! STEM has long benefitted from this rhetoric but we are all threatened by this concept. The University is meant to be broad and forward thinking, not something that follows the trends of the market which are inherently short-sighted and lacking imagination.

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2 weeks ago

Peer review is not there for you to tell experts in the field how you'd prefer the style of the paper to be, or what method or analysis you have a clear bias for.

Your job is to check for correctness, spot errors or gaps, protect the integrity of the scientific method, not piss on others.

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3 weeks ago
Microsabbaticals at Princeton Psychology Microsabbaticals at Princeton Psychology provide a several-week-long visit to our department for early-career faculty. The program focuses on early-career scholars who would benefit from interactions ...

Are you a junior faculty member interested in spending 2-4 weeks at Princeton Psych? Consider applying for our Microsabbatical program! It’s a fully funded visit for professional development and creating long-term collaborations.
psych.princeton.edu/diversity/mi...

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3 weeks ago
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Good impact narratives must connect to our everyday lives - LSE Impact Research impact is often communicated in abstract and bureaucratic language. To be meaningful it needs to connect to peoples' everyday lives.

👀ICYMI: "despite the emphasis on impact, its meaning remains abstract for non-specialist audiences."

#Impact #SciComm #PublicEngagement

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3 weeks ago
Reads: Most importantly, there is no AI without massive financial and ideological backing. It is therefore pointless to discuss its techniques or capabilities without asking who controls it, who benefits from it, who builds and deploys it, and what it is doing in the world. As Stafford Beer (2002) argued, the purpose of a system is what it does. Reads: Though less explicit than Thiel’s call to replace politics with technology, major tech firms have effectively privatised core digital public goods. Platforms like Facebook, Google Search, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT operate at infrastructural scale in Ireland, shaping
information, communication, and access to knowledge. Yet their algorithms remain opaque, their governance remains private, with minimal democratic accountability to the public who depend on them; effectively ceding aspects of democratic process to commercial interests.

The monopolization of digital spaces has turned democracy into something the highest bidder can buy and is degrading the digital public goods themselves. As the AI industry, social media and search platforms grow more extractive and less trustworthy, they erode the foundations of democratic life: trust, dialogue, and accountability, blurring the line between truth and falsehood.

An example is the deepfake video falsely showing President Catherine Connolly withdrawing from the presidential race last October, which amassed over 160,0001 Facebook views before being removed.

GenAI’s non-deterministic, stochastic architecture produces plausible output without regard for accuracy or truth.

This makes generative AI a societal disaster and a major threat to truth, democratic processes, information ecosystems, knowledge production, and the social fabric Reads: For truth, democracy, and the rule of law to endure in the AI era, we need to cultivate an ecosystem of transparency and accountability. Yet governance by algorithms inherently places our digital public squares and democratic processes in the hands of those
building these systems in line with their political and profit-seeking agendas. Without real mechanisms in place, talk of transparency and accountability are empty gestures.

An internal Meta memo outlining plans to launch facial recognition in smart glasses “during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns”5 illustrates how those advocating for accountability are under-resourced, retaliated against, and targeted.

Large tech and AI companies, despite selling promises of innovation and societal benefit, monetize and undermine the very society they claim to serve. What is needed is not just regulation, but active enforcement.

Given the track record of tech giants, stricter regulation and enforcement is not “anti–freedom of speech” or anti-competitiveness. It is one of the clearest ways governments can show they serve the public interest. After all, innovation that disregards truth and democratic processes risks undermining democracy itself.

I appeared as an expert witness before the Joint Committee on AI at the Houses of Oireachtas (parliament of Ireland) to discuss "AI: truth and democracy" this morning. You can read my opening statement here: www.oireachtas.ie/en/publicati...

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3 weeks ago
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Why are UK universities failing? - LSE Impact The HE sector in the UK faces the prospect of a university going into administration. How have universities fallen so low and is change possible?

🗣️"The sector has become a hybrid institution caught between public expectations and market imperatives, governed by leaders rewarded for financial agility, rather than intellectual integrity."

#AcademicSky #HigherEducation

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1 month ago

New paper, on a worrying trend in meta-science: the practice of anonymising datasets on, e.g., published articles. We argue that this is at odds with norms established in research synthesis, explore arguments for anonymisation, provide counterpoints, and demonstrate implications and epistemic costs.

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1 month ago

A variation: Scientists who claim they’re “not interested in causality” because they assume the term only applies to deterministic, law-like relationships that are unrealistic in their field. Instead, they’re interested in how “X drives Y”, the effects of X, the “extent to which X matters for Y”>

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1 month ago

🧠 We’ve widened the entry criteria for our MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at Durham: www.durham.ac.uk/study/course...

We now welcome students from a broad range of backgrounds—Psychology, Biology, Engineering, Physics and more as Neuroscience thrives on diverse perspectives

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1 month ago

Insights from the Perspectives on Scientific Error (#PSE8) conference

🧵 Day 1: what a thought provoking morning.

Replication remains one of the cornerstones of scientific progress, yet replication studies are still notoriously difficult to publish. Many never make it into print at all.

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1 month ago
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Rethinking Economics, the movement changing how the subject is taught Born of student disquiet after the 2008 crash, the group says it is reshaping economists’ education

“By demanding that economics education should be more pluralist ethically conscientious, historically aware & oriented towards the real world, Rethinking Economics exposed the staggering deficiency in how economists are educated & induced significant changes in economics teaching around the world”

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1 month ago

Dear Blueskies, question: could you recommend a recent-ish, peer reviewed study on implicit/unconscious bias in faculty hiring? I know the classics, but I am wondering what new(ish) research is out there that could be used in a workshop setting. Thank you very much! #AcademicSky #EduSky 🗃️

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1 month ago
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We just dropped the next 4 essays in Reframing Impact: AI Summit 2026, our new series with Aapti Institute and
@themaybe.org – this time with Nikhil Dey, @timnitgebru.bsky.social, @audreyt.org, and @abeba.bsky.social 🧵

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1 month ago

The UK *is* losing a generation of scientists.

I know lots of brilliant people who have left their jobs / the country because of the limited jobs & funding.

Once lost, they cannot ever be replaced.

The UK government is overseeing the death of UK academic science, and it doesn't seem to care.

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1 month ago

I'm on the edge of the "R Statistics Community" in what looks like an @societyforepi.bsky.social gathering on causal inference with @lizstuart.bsky.social, @jeremylabrecque.bsky.social, @jlrohmann.bsky.social, @idiaz.bsky.social, @mattpfox.bsky.social, @miguelhernan.org, & @noahgreifer.bsky.social

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