Heidi Baumgartner

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Capybaras lounging in yuzu-filled hot springs is my happy place

It's been a ton of fun to work with @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @asifamajid.bsky.social on this. I'm so lucky to get to support projects like this (and @manybabies.org and @btscon.bsky.social and ...)!

Small joys like this (☝️) are the only thing keeping me sane right now

Just got an “out of office” reply with the most amazing example of “there’s a German word for that.”

Abwesenheitsbenachrichtigung!

omg

Possible to start to tell a unified story: "Trump is personally too old, crazy, and confused to run things, so at any given time the question is which co-president is in charge. At first it was Musk, & we got the crazy chaotic DOGE era. Then Navarro: a trade war that crashed markets. Now Miller..."

It’s completely insane that US troops are illegally deployed to suppress domestic opposition and it’s not uniformly condemned by the press and political elite.

Rondeline giving her acknowledgements at her defense.

Anjie showing cat photos at her defense.

Huge congratulations to Drs Anjie Cao and Rondeline Williams on their successful defenses this week!! @anjiecao.bsky.social

There are a couple in progress! :)

Please assign these articles for your teaching as well as your own browsing, and let us know 1) how you're using them and 2) what articles you need to help you in your teaching!

OECS thematic collections.

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind.

Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

“We want scientists who hold identities that may be under attack to know that we are proud to be your colleagues, and that our science is stronger as a result of your being in this field.” 👏

my endorsement for any democratic presidential candidate who promises to send the entire DOGE team to prison

What DEI threatens isn’t merit. It’s monopoly. Political science professor Hakeem Jefferson argues for DEI's importance to de-monopolizing universities.

A colleague at Stanford’s business school used The Stanford Daily to argue—poorly—against DEI. The piece was riddled with historical errors and left one searching for fact, so I broke my public writing hiatus to respond.

I hope you’ll read and share the piece.

stanforddaily.com/2025/04/22/w...

Language

Thanks to Evan Kidd, @mcxfrank.bsky.social & @asifamajid.bsky.social (Eds) for organizing the awesome *Open* Encyc. of Cog. Sci. and entrusting me with/ the honor of penning the entry on "Language" (in < 3500 words, so do see other entries for much, MUCH more!)
oecs.mit.edu/pub/ho9e9c80...

“From her cell in Louisiana, she described the plans she had in the coming months. Completing her dissertation. A conference in Minnesota. Students to mentor. A summer class to teach.”

American Rendition: Rümeysa Öztürk’s Journey From Ph.D. Scholar to Trump Target Languishing in Louisiana Cell “So horrifying and so heartbreaking”: Öztürk’s close friend provides an intimate look into one of the hundreds of foreign students who have had their visas revoked — and in dozens of instances have be...

Our client Rümeysa Öztürk has not been charged with any crime.

She is being held in ICE detention in retaliation for her political beliefs. Writing an op-ed is not a deportable offense.

It works. The government here largely works. Because we are so spoiled by how well it works, we are letting a fool convince us it is broken.

title of paper (in text) plus author list

Time course of word recognition for kids at different ages.

Super excited to submit a big sabbatical project this year: "Continuous developmental changes in word
recognition support language learning across early
childhood": osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨4-5 new postdoc positions in language & cognition🚨

😇 One postdoc will work specifically with Eon-Suk Ko and I on the ManyBabies-AtHome project, focusing on infant word recognition in global, remote settings using collaborative, open science practices [https://shorturl.at/5l3tW]. @manybabies.org

Open letter urging Stanford governance to resist federal attacks on higher education On behalf of the Stanford Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, Cecile Alduy asks President Levin and Provost Martinez to explicitly resist threats from the federal government.

stanforddaily.com/2025/04/10/o...

In which I, a person who trained over 1,500 early career scientists all over the world in how to use Twitter, tell the scientific community that Twitter sucks now and you should use Bluesky for networking and outreach instead.

Psych-DS is (1) spellcheck for your datasets and (2) a pathway to standardizing data in our academic fields that *everyone* can learn.

And it's live RIGHT NOW!

psych-ds.github.io

(This is the announcement post I've been leading up to)

An incredible leader who is meeting the moment. Send this to everyone you know in higher education administration.

It’s so weird how we’re all just working like this is still a normal country.

We don't actually know what will work. That means that lots of things could work. The possibilities exist.

If you are a faculty member at a US university, please consider signing this excellent petition asking our presidents, chancellors, etc to work together to defend our institutions from the direct attacks by Trump administration: sites.google.com/view/we-must...

A 4 pane comic drawn by ButtPoems called PROFESSIONAL Pane 1 One person is laying on the ground, another walks up "hey you never responded to that thing I sent you" Pane 2 Laying down person: "sorry... I'm having an existential crisis" Person 2: "ok" Pane 3 Person 2, walking away "just remember to look when you're done" Pane 4: Person 1, still laying on the ground, now by themselves "ok"

My coauthors and I trade off these roles every week

This segment from @maryannefranks.bsky.social is an incredibly tight argument that captures the breadth of the Trump assault on free speech perfectly and in less than a minute.

Spread it far and wide.