Carlos Peña

Science in 2025

It is time to abandon student evaluations of teaching

Comment by Gordon Hodson (@gordonhodsonphd.bsky.social)

Web: go.nature.com/4jfAzXo
PDF: rdcu.be/ef9y5

In this commentary, I argue that student-based teaching evaluations are problematic bc

✳️ systematic biases (e.g., racism, sexism)
✳️ poor construct validity
✳️ undermine standards and learning

We should evaluate teaching as seriously as we do research. Or don't do teaching evaluations.

Fortement d’accord avec ce point de vue. Je travaille dans le domaine, mais j’ai horreur des extrêmes absurdes auxquels songent certaines personnes.

4 enveloppes, marquées de « Jura CH, Matériel de vote » sur fond noir.

Ready to vote. Prêt-e-s pour voter.

La simple question de savoir pourquoi ouvre des perspectives terrifiantes.

Are we going to witness a real bubble burst? Or a slow, boring deflation instead?

Monday again...

Claus Wilke on Alphafold and the problem of protein folding in 2025

No, AlphaFold has not completely solved protein folding Biology is hard. Yes, even for AI.

AlphaFold is great, but contrary to public opinion it has not completely solved the protein folding problem. Much work remains to be done.
clauswilke.substack.com/p/no-alphafo...

Governments like mine have a duty to stand up to Israel. Far too many have failed | Gustavo Petro Without decisive action, we risk stripping the global legal order of its remaining protections for less-privileged nations, says Gustavo Petro, president of Colombia

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/08/governments-stand-up-to-israel-colombia.

« C’est l’été, c’est normal» m’a-t-on dit cette semaine 😡.

‘We are perilously close to the point of no return’: climate scientist on Amazon rainforest’s future Carlos Nobre, who has fought for decades to save the rainforest, says up to 70% of it could be lost if a tipping point is reached

"We are perilously close to the point of no return" - climate scientist on the future of the Amazon rainforest. The world's leaders have seemingly unanimously agreed that keeping a liveable biosphere is less important than ensuring the richest people get a little richer.

Springer Nature Discovers MDPI – The Strain on Scientific Publishing Home page for the paper ‘The Strain on Scientific Publishing’ by Mark A Hanson, Dan Brockington, Paolo Crosetto and Pablo Gomez Barreiro

Springer-Nature launched a series of "Discover" journals that closely mimic MDPI titles -- sharing *identical* journal names, and likely similar business model.

What is going on, and why researcher will - as always - fall for it?

A 🧵

the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post...

Rachel Thomas, PhD - Deep learning gets the glory, deep fact checking gets ignored an AI researcher going back to school for immunology

"a fascinating case study on the limits of AI in biology and the harms of current publishing incentives" rachel.fast.ai/posts/2025-0...

Drosophila Genetic Database The Drosophila Genetic Database, FlyBase, is on the brink of collapse due to the sudden termination of the FlyBase NIH grant, which includes salaries for 5 literature curators based at the University ...

#drosophila @flybase.bsky.social request emergency funding:
"As it stands, by the end of July, 2025, there will be no future updates to FlyBase, and in the worst case scenario access to the website will also be lost" => please donate!

www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...

Should LLMs be used to review papers? AAAI is piloting LLM-generated reviews this year. I wrote a blog post arguing that using LLMs as reviewers can have bad downstream consequences for science by centralizing judgments about what constitutes good research.

bryanwilder.github.io/files/llmrev...

🧪🔬 On the downsides of funding megaprojects and why we need to reconsider power relationships when funding science.

I guess if @snsf.ch #SNSF has any hard data on the comparative impact that #NCCR projects have on the careers of researchers at different stages in their career...

#AcademicSky

En Colombie: Chigüiro

When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History | Quanta Magazine Researchers in “natural language processing” tried to tame human language. Then came the transformer.

This is a fantastic oral history of the last 10 years of NLP and AI. www.quantamagazine.org/when-chatgpt...

Photo du poster du projet

Lancement du projet interreg « GESICA »

Very informative chart from Washington Post

La #Suisse veut à nouveau renvoyer des demandeurs d’asile déboutés en #Afghanistan – du moins s’ils ne sont pas « vulnérables ». Pourtant, ce pays demeure dangereux, indépendamment du genre ou de l’âge. La Suisse devrait accorder sa protection, et non pas expulser ! www.admin.ch/gov/fr/accue...

Les profits avant tout: le Parlement ne veut pas de loi pour le s... Trois ans après le début de la guerre d’agression menée par la Russie en Ukraine, la Suisse se dérobe une fois de plus à ses responsabilités en matière de politique économique. Le Conseil de...

Le Conseil des États a rejeté aujourd’hui une motion visant à établir un cadre législatif pour encadrer le secteur des matières premières.
🟥 Sans loi spécifique, la Suisse continuera à tirer profit de sa place de négoce, principalement aux dépens des populations dans les pays producteurs. 👇

Transformers and genome language models - Nature Machine Intelligence Micaela Consens et al. discuss and review the recent rise of transformer-based and large language models in genomics. They also highlight promising directions for genome language models beyond the tra...

🔥 Unveiling the Future of Genomics with Genome Language Models (gLMs)! 🔥

Our comprehensive review, "Transformers and genome language models," is finally published in Nature Machine Intelligence! ​

Link: nature.com/articles/s42...

Un sursaut dans l’horreur - Le Courrier L’assaut génocidaire contre Gaza a repris. Dans la nuit de lundi à mardi, Israël a mené des bombardements d’une violence inouïe sur l’enclave, avec des centaines de mort·es à la clé, dont de nombreux ...

Triste retour à l'horreur.
lecourrier.ch/2025/03/18/u...

I've recently put together a "Fairness FAQ": tinyurl.com/fairness-faq. If you work in non-fairness ML and you've heard about fairness, perhaps you've wondered things like what the best definitions of fairness are, and whether we can train algorithms that optimize for it.

A #bioinfo @xkcd.com comic. Nice.

We’re Charging Our Cars Wrong Complex, costly charging infrastructure is limiting the adoption of EVs

Interesting proposal (cheap technical solution) to improve the whole EV Charging chain. Thus improving EV adoption.
spectrum.ieee.org/ev-charging-...

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”