Billy Mitchell

Columbia Students Should Decertify Their Union They could help end the constant conflict on campus.

I just found this article published 3 days ago advocating for Columbia to decertify their graduate student union.

The author quotes the National Right to Work Foundation as if its opinion is relevant here, but doesn't acknowledge his own history working with the foundation, which is easy to find.

Following up from this tweet yesterday, I realized that the national right to work foundation is on a warpath against graduate student unions right now and attempting to astroturf support ...

Cornell Ph.D. Student Files Federal Complaint Challenging Graduate Student Unions' Legality A Ph.D. student filed a complaint alleging that a union contract from CGSU-UE violates federal labor law.

I couldn't imagine being such a loser that I try dismantling one of the only means of labor advocacy for grad workers, but I'm also not Russell Burgett

a woman drinking a cup of tea with the words " i got the tea " below her ALT: a woman drinking a cup of tea with the words " i got the tea " below her

Hearing rumors from multiple sources that NIH COO Eric Schnabel was terminated yesterday for allegedly trying to award a large contract to his wife (who sometimes uses her maiden name) for "public outreach" associated with the autism data science initiative.

#EndlessGrift

Nice write up of our paper (with @vpmurty.bsky.social) showing that memories expressed with greater “authenticity” are more accurate, but people don’t use that information in judging whether someone actually remembers the event accurately or not, and instead use unreliable signals of accuracy.

a man says please tell us what you know in a netflix advertisement ALT: a man says please tell us what you know in a netflix advertisement

Did the Tr*mp administration cancel your NIH or NCI grant proposal? Know someone who was affected? The Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in the House wants to hear from you. Please fill out this link and share. forms.office.com/pages/respon...

#CancerResearch #OncoSky #CanSky

This is the same dickhead that fucked up the 2023 GEO strike and has protestors arrested. Man has no business in higher ed.

RFK Jr. threatens to bar government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals The health secretary said the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet are in bed with pharma.

RFK somehow manages to make socialists sympathetic to private, predatory science publishers over a nationalized publicly-funded science communication option.

Dark Age Modernity

Americans favor labor unions over big business now more than ever, analysis of new data @epi.org from me & Adam Reich of Columbia Labor Lab.

In data back 60 years, Americans' sentiments are both warmer toward unions & cooler towards big business than ever before.
www.epi.org/blog/america...

Lab-kept bumble bees roll small wooden balls around for no apparent purpose other than fun, a 2022 study reveals.

Learn more on #WorldBeeDay: scim.ag/4dAwCuD

“In 2020, prisoners filed a class action lawsuit—the seventh class action lawsuit against PDP since 1971—over dangerous conditions…leading to a 2022 settlement that again resulted in federal court monitoring and required that city officials fully staff the city’s jails. PDP has failed to comply”

I would guess that Zohran Mamdani cultivates alternative media because the New York Times covers him in the Styles section as a “long shot” while he is running a solid second place in the polls.

🙃

Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, recently used my second-place finish in the 1,600-meter run, and that of my teammate in the 800-meter run, to malign Soren Stark-Chessa, the trans-identified athlete who finished first. One of the reasons I chose to run cross-country and track is the community: Teammates cheering each other on, athletes from different schools coming together, and the fact that personal improvement is valued as much as, if not more than, the place we finish. Last Friday, I ran the fastest 1,600-meter race I have ever run in middle school or high school track and earned varsity status by my school’s standards. I am extremely proud of the effort I put into the race and the time that I achieved. The fact that someone else finished in front of me didn’t diminish the happiness I felt after finishing that race. I don’t feel like first place was taken from me. Instead, I feel like a happy day was turned ugly by a bully who is using children to make political points. We are all just kids trying to make our way through high school. Participating in sports is the highlight of high school for some kids. No one was harmed by Soren’s participation in the girls’ track meet, but we are all harmed by the hateful rhetoric of bullies, like Rep. Libby, who want to take sports away from some kids just because of who they are. Anelise Feldman Freshman, Yarmouth High School Yarmouth

this is a letter to the editor from a high school track runner who came in second to a trans girl in a race. her state house rep in maine started talking about it. so she wrote this: www.pressherald.com/2025/05/14/r...

Silence won't save you...

“I just don’t know [that] there’s a lot of wisdom in keeping our heads down anymore,” says Starbird

Today marks the 3 year anniversary of the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist. Shireen was killed by an Israeli sniper on 11 May 2022 for the crime of exposing the brutality of the Israeli government in the Jenin Refugee Camp.

I am shocked there hasn't been some sort of website outing the names and face of all these mask wearing freaks. If you know an ICE worker....you should post about it. Who are these people? Who is making a pot roast when their kidnapping racist ass garbage boyfriend comes home from a hard day at ICE?

BREAKING: Tufts Student Rümeysa Öztürk Released From ICE Detention by Judge The decision is another blow to the Trump administration’s effort to detain and deport international students for their speech.

BREAKING: Rümeysa Öztürk released from ICE detention by a judge.

“The decision is another blow to the Trump administration’s effort to detain and deport international students for their speech,” writes @premthakker.bsky.social for Zeteo:

zeteo.com/p/breaking-t...

Hungary Renews its War on Academic Freedom Academic freedom in Hungary suffered a fresh blow this week when the parliament, where ruling party Fidesz has a two-thirds majority, adopted a controversial bill undermining the independence of the H...

Also, Orbán shuttered the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2019 (www.hrw.org/news/2019/07...) and is replacing it with centralized privatized research orgs (sciencebusiness.net/news/hungari...). I'm sure our administration wants to privatize everything they possibly can, so this is their playbook.

Which is all to say - it's not enough to just be more informed by this. Knowing what this is the basis for is supposed to make you angry enough to do things to stop it, so we should be reacting accordingly.

Lysenkoism - Wikipedia

If you want to read a general overview of the effects of Lysenko, there's Wikipedia articles on his philosophy, actions, and the effect he had on the Three Years of Great Famine in China
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenko...

The results are still unfolding for Orbán but Lysenko was one of the most consequential mistakes the Soviet Union made and thousands died because of it.

Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions Changes seen as a response to presidential directives on what research to fund

Maybe not a violent act itself, but it's a precursor to violence. Viktor Orbán and Trofim Lysenko are the two closest analogues I can think of. Both abolished and centralized science institutes.

www.science.org/content/arti...

I'm sure they're contracting with private sources for a lot of this data, which will make them the sole arbiters of truth and privatizes research more. Anything to kill public ownership of and free access to information.

Why is this not the photo of William James used in every intro psych textbook?

WSJ hires Kohei Saito as new chief editor

LETTER: Mitchell Morgan is unfit to represent Temple - The Temple News A member of TUGSA argues that Board of Trustees Chairman Mitchell Morgan, who will speak at Temple's 138th commencement, does not represent the student body.

Letter to the Editor: Mitchell Morgan - Billionaire Landlord and Temple University Board Chair - Is Unfit to Represent Temple

temple-news.com/letter-mitch...

I was asked to write my own letters of rec the first handful of times I needed them, so I started offering by default just to expedite the process (or when I asked folks on tight timelines). It was a massive relief when I got mentors who didn't expect me to write my own though.

I usually post posters *before* I present them but I forgot. Presented at SANS 2025.

Examining the effects of continuous ratings on neural activity during video fMRI, we found differences in attention, control, and default mode networks, but no differences in memory or character assessments.