Drew Parton

YES, PREACH! I am of the contentious position that all sweet things are better cold.

I’m excited to announce that I will be joining the fine folks at Rochester Regional Health as non-clinical teaching faculty this coming January!

I’ve never received a predatory journal invite quite this ominous and vaguely threatening…

Affective science has lost an extraordinary member of our community: Dr. Paul Ekman, who passed peacefully at home at the age of 91 on Monday. Dr. Ekman's pioneering cross-cultural research on the interpretation of facial expressions in emotional terms...(1)

My stats-burnt brain read this as “Poisson Regression” at first 🤷🏻‍♂️

A concise response that my logic professor always used against arguments from tradition/popularity was "yeah, well, we used to shit in holes too."

In our rejoinder, we argue 1) Dark terminology isn't used responsibly as BL et al. claim, 2) the term can be replaced with a more sensible and scientific one, 3) data support our position (Stanton et al., 2025), and 4) popularity ≠ importance. @davidchester.bsky.social @drlynam.bsky.social

This is incredible and I love my hometown for it.

I’ll be talking about the asymmetric relationships between psychopathy and positive/negative empathy (though the analyses diverge from this abstract)! :-)

Fat Bear Week 2025 | VOTE Choose the fattest bear of the year! Some of the largest brown bears on Earth make their home at Brooks River in Katmai National Park, Alaska. Brown bears get fat to survive and Fat Bear Week is an annual tournament celebrating their success in preparation for winter hibernation.

Happy fat bear week to those who celebrate https://explore.org/fat-bear-week

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

<em>American Journal of Community Psychology</em> | Wiley Online Library Violent injuries tend to cluster together geospatially. The discriminatory housing practice of redlining undertaken by the United States federal government in the 1930s has been repeatedly linked wit...

🚨New Paper Alert🚨

Just published in AJCP - one of my students and I (along with an awesome team of collaborators) explored the ostensible impact of historic redlining practices on contemporary violence exposure risk of adolescents living in those communities.

Data and code here: osf.io/ekxmf/

Very "fun" and "cool" to graduate and go on the science job market right now 👍

If I have to explain to you why it's a bad idea to use a machine that makes shit up 15-80% of the time AND destroys the environment AND contributes to rising fascism and genocide AND puts brilliant skillful creatives out of work by stealing their work, then we're already speaking different languages

The spin-off movies about his children are absolutely unhinged and include: talking animals, magical Egyptian artifacts, aliens; the puppies win a dogsled race, go to space, replace Santa's reindeer, become superheroes, and get attacked by a hellhound that needs to consume the souls of puppies.

people who use AI as a replacement for thinking, learning and communicating should be shamed and punished. the same way we shame and punish drunk drivers, or people who negligently discharge firearms.

it is bad to misuse tools in a way that damages society

What fresh hell is this?

A picture depicting a “hand shake” meme wherein two seemingly disparate groups are united by a shared factor. Here, Mathematicians and Climbers are united by the shared trait “being very particular about chalk brands”

This came to me in a dream.

AI, peer review and the human activity of science When researchers cede their scientific judgement to machines, we lose something important.

New from me and @carlbergstrom.com in @nature.com on navigating LLMs in science, from the jumping off point of peer review.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

@sjwest.bsky.social

Four years, six studies, and many many revisions later, our paper on prosocial aggression -- harmful acts that are motivated by a broader goal to help the target of the aggression -- is finally in press in Motivation Science! Check out the finalized preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

I’m not sure if you can overdose on schadenfreude but we’re about to find out

GenAI is basically the microwave oven of writing. Sure it can heat up some leftovers but no one is going to a microwave restaurant and your kids will grow up and make fun of you for how much you relied on it to make bland ass food

My Phd student Noah is recruiting Trans* and Non-Binary folks to participate in a survey study on well-being (uwo.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...). Check it out if relevant and of interest to you, and appreciate any signal boosting in your networks!

Screenshot of the linked Quarto website, with input checkboxes to change different conditions for a regression model that predicts economic performance based on US political party, with a reported p-value

I’ve long used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive “Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory” to illustrate the idea of p-hacking when I teach statistics. But ABC/Disney killed the site earlier this month :(

So I made my own with #rstats and Observable and #QuartoPub ! stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way/

Not strictly Star Trek, but I highly recommend The Expanse to any sci-fi fan. Mix of really hard, grounded science fiction and cold-war-esque politics.

Maybe the real blue sky was the friends we made along the way?