As an (ex) university professor, there is nothing, NOTHING better than getting an email out of the blue from a student from ten years ago who found some article he thought you’d be interested in, and then goes on to tell you how “you probably don’t remember me, but your class totally changed my life and now I live in Japan and am really into astrophotography”.
academicchatter
I hate how busy everyone always is in academia. It feels so inevitable and necessary, but it's just not. We do it to ourselves! I know it stems from the pressure to publish and prove your worth to get grants and tenure and all that. A lot of this is institutional, not the choice of individuals, but we are also the institutions.
In my experience, taking time and care is not only more comfortable, it's usually faster and more reliable! If we could all just chill out a bit, it would be better for everyone involved...
A colleague is asking how many #Neuroscientists are here on Mastodon / Fedi. If you are one, could you make yourself known in this poll? Also, more specific comments about your field welcome! 🧠
please boost around if you don't mind
#Neuroscience #Academia #AcademicChatter
Options: (choose one)
Macron is now openly calling out bigtech extractive practices and commidification of the user. Good. We need a lot more of this. We need universities to lead this pressure everywhere.
#digitalsovereignty #eu #Datasociety #academia #academicchatter
"75% of scientific researchers in the U.S. are considering leaving the country" - must-watch if you haven't fully grasped yet the attack of Trump on US science.. It's somehow more impactful to see actual testimonies instead of facts and numbers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLvO070E_dI
The whole #Trump thing is sad but the long-term damage of what he is doing against research and science, not just in the US but worldwide, is horrible. Just like the damage on the planet, it is not too late to resist of and fix it though! Universities should stick together, people should come out in support of scientists, PIs should come out of their silence - as in this video - to alert the public on the ongoing destruction.
Quoting @Nonya_Bidniss:
https://infosec.exchange/@Nonya_Bidniss/115464536239675362
We’re excited to invite you to Computational and Medicinal Chemistry by the Lake 2026, happening June 2–4 in beautiful Kuopio, Finland.
This three-day symposium brings together researchers from academia and industry to explore the latest in drug discovery — from PROTACs to AI-driven screening, molecular dynamics, and more.
We’d love to see you too there — let’s talk science by the lake!
https://sites.uef.fi/cmcl-2026/
#medchem #compchem #science #kuopio #AcademicChatter #drugdiscovery #chemistry
I think EVERY student, graduate students included, should register with the disability office, and here's why.
#AcademicChatter #HigherEd #Disability #AccessIsLove #Neurodiversity
It's amazing how often I'll stumble across whole fields of study that are relevant to my work, but which I never even knew existed until I accidentally bumble my way into the right papers.
The academic literature has a*massive* discoverability problem. I'd be lost without personal recommendations and citation trails!
If you're in STEM, at what level did you first get taught ethics (in general, and as specifically relevant in your field)?
Mastodon only allows 4 poll choices so please write in the comments if these choices don't cover you.
#Ethics #Science #AcademicChatter #STEM
Options: (choose one)
This situation isn't that much different from what most post-docs experience in academic R&D IMO.
- highly trained individuals
- neither staff nor student
- pay under industry level
- fixed term contracts
- little growth prospect but lottery tickets and politics
- requirement to move without support
- department shenanigans
Insult to injury here is the fact that many get suckered into sub-contracting as self-employed.
@academicchatter
I got my PhD almost exactly 10 years ago. I have a permanent position as an academic at a reasonable research university. I have held some version of this position for the last 8.5 years. I am also a brown woman who is much shorter than average, and I don't wear makeup. At conferences, I go out of my way to talk to students to meet new faces, and also to help them build a network. All of this is just context for the rant that is incoming.
Over the last 10 years, in more or less every research event I go to, someone has asked me if I am a student. I proceed to explain that I am not. I have mostly no problem with the people who apologise at this point and move on.
But a majority of people double down at this point. With things like: "but you look so young" or "take it as a compliment" or "so... <dubious look> postdoc?" or "I thought you were a student of <slightly older white tall male collaborator>'s".
This needs to stop! It's not a compliment - they're implicitly disregarding 10 years' worth of my work. On one hand it tells me that they're placing me (in their mind) on the bottom rung of the academic ladder. On the other hand it also exposes their biases, which is a whole problem in itself.
I have definitely made incorrect assumptions about someone's "academic level" in the past, but over the years I have learned to know better.
So, PSA to everyone. Don't assume, ask. Or better yet, don't try to rank people from the outset. It will go a long way towards making events more inclusive.
Hey, Glasgow-local people, want to do an experiment? Come into my lab and have your eyes tracked while I study how you process sound and syntax, predict meaning, and encode memory!
One hour, and I pay £15 cash in hand.
Boosts welcome (especially people on Glasgow/Scotland-related servers!)
Edited to add link: Sign up here: https://forms.office.com/e/46AtS0ikaj
#Scotland #Glasgow #linguistics #experiment #psycholinguistics #academicChatter
Edited 1y ago
I used to review student work digitally. I would type up notes, do tracked changes edits, and etc.
At some point last year I slowly switched to printing out student work and reviewing it by hand with a pen. I'm not sure why I changed my process but I did. Once I finish a review, I scan it in and send them the PDF plus leave the hard copy outside my office for them.
Students initially didn't like it because they had to interpret my handwriting.
But in the last few months, students have been quite happy because they know I'm not using AI to review their work. They can literally see my handwriting.
The students can (and often do) feed their work through AI to do a pre-review before sending it to me. I have other thoughts on the usefulness of AI in these cases but I allow the students a great deal of latitude in that regard as long as they disclose and document what they're doing with AI. They don't need me feeding their work through AI.
I suspect it'll become a differentiator between how I approach education and how some colleagues are now approaching it. If I'm not using my expertise, then why am I even employed when the students could use an LLM without a faculty member doing it for them?
Anyway... It turns out handwritten feedback once again has a place in education.
I've also gone back to paper and pencil in-person exams. Students are not entirely thrilled about it but some are starting to come around to the idea.
I'll be teaching a course in the fall on data communication.
One of the assignments I hope to put together is a lesson on how data is manipulated. I want to show how easy it is for climate change deniers, anti vaxxers, etc to crop data, stretch or flip an axis and suggest the opposite of what the data is actually showing. Still thinking through the assignment and I'm thinking of having them make an honest representation and one less so.
I think there's value to such a lesson given how much downright lying we have from not just randos but even political circles these days.
Was just going to use publicly available data sources but then I am thinking that there must be researchers here who have awesome data they wouldn't mind seeing put into visual form. If you do have data you'd be willing to let me use, please drop me a comment or PM and let me know how to access it. Thanks!
(P.S. would appreciate a share for wider reach)
I talked to @404mediaco about generative AI's impact on teaching. Apparently I wasn't alone... not by a long shot. @jasonkoebler got a ton of responses about this topic and ran many of them here:
https://www.404media.co/teachers-are-not-ok-ai-chatgpt/
While it's distressing to read all of them, it's good to see I'm not alone.
I am hiring!
I have a fully funded PhD position available for someone with an interest in logic and statistics, at Delft University of Technology (Netherlands).
Application deadline: 31 August 2025
#AcademicJobs #AcademicMastodon #GetFediHired #AcademicJob #SymbolicAI #Statistics #AI #ConstraintProgramming #CombinatorialOptimisation #SensitivityAnalysis #FormalMethods #CombinatorialOptimization #Delft #TUDelft #AcademicChatter
Pleased to announce that my book, Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Democratic Social Media, is now available online, and will be out in print in a couple weeks!
https://moveslowlybuildbridges.com
That site has more stuff, too -- links to related articles, some notes about how I researched it, and a contact form in case you want to talk about the fediverse with me! (I'd be happy to chat with journalists about it!)
#academicChatter #bookstodon #fediverse #mastodon
Love this.
A peer reviewed blank page was published in 1974, without revision.
The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer's block” by Dennis Upper.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis.
https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1974.7-497a
Credit: Found this gem via ‘stephenknowstuff’ on another platform
#writersblock #academicchatter
Edited 145d ago
My new paper got published, about urban civic learning, alternative counter culture spaces and democratic cities. Open Access!
>> Hacker–maker urban spaces as infrastructures of incidental civic learning
I have a new article out together with @rwg : "What is 'alternative' about 'alternative social media'?"
It is published in Résaux, in their special issue on Alternative Internets edited by Stéphane Couture and @guillaume https://shs.cairn.info/journal-reseaux-2025-6?lang=en
The article is available in French (translated by Pauline Côté and edited by @guillaume) and English: https://shs.cairn.info/journal-reseaux-2025-6-page-183?lang=en
1/3
Somewhat regular reminder that I quoted Sir Terry Pratchett in my dissertation.
https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/3455662
#GNUTerryPratchett #TerryPratchett #AcademicChatter #AcademicMastodon #Bookstodon
I thought this was a particularly good analysis of the problem of using LLMs for science. It explores the purpose of science, the perverse incentives that drive people to use LLMs, and the impact this has on skill building and training future scientists.
My lab group has been struggling with this topic lately, without much consensus. This blog post captures a lot of our thinking, and very clearly made some good points that we appreciated. It mostly just describes the mess we're in without offering much useful advice, but just laying out the problems do nicely is helpful. That said, I do worry the author may be underestimating the impact these tools might have on experienced researchers.
https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/
#academicchatter #llm
Just received my contributor’s copy of “Chinese Science Fiction in Translation and Its World Impact: Connecting Futures”! This is a wide-ranging volume on the translation, adaptation, and reception of Chinese SF, with some excellent people offering their insights, so please give it a look.
My chapter is titled “Future without Tense? Time and Tense in the Translation of Chinese SF” and focuses on a comparison of the use of grammatical tense in the English and Finnish translations of three SF short stories written by Xia Jia, Chen Qiufan, and Regina Kanyu Wang. I also briefly discuss tense and estrangement more generally in English translations of Chinese SF, with reference to the theoretical conceptualizations of Brian McHale and Simon Spiegel.
#ChineseStudies #ChineseLiterature #Translation #TranslationStudies #ScienceFiction #SFStudies #SpeculativeFiction #LiteraryStudies #LiteraryScholarship #AcademicChatter #Tutkijahommat
Edited 107d ago
And another talk!
Free public post: What's the Deal with Narrative Genre? A Folklorist's Guide to Stories (Part 2). https://www.patreon.com/posts/whats-deal-with-160301254
You've heard us called "Homo sapiens," the wise hominid. Well we're not always wise, but we are always telling stories. In this talk I explore the types of stories we humans use to make sense of the past (history, myth and legend) and how they can each tell us the truth.
It's the second installment of three community talks that I gave in the spring of 2024, diving into how folklore theory can enrich the way we read and make meaning of stories.
#academicChatter #anthropology #folklore #folkloreThursday #folkloreSunday #histodons
New free public post on my Patreon! Let's Get Unruly Together: Living into the Legacy of Franz Boas. https://www.patreon.com/posts/lets-get-unruly-159985037
Who is Franz Boas? (The founder of American anthropology, that's who.) What makes him special? (Uh, well he lost his job for being antiracist when eugenics was common sense and Hitler was rising to power, and then he started an entire movement full of outcasts and renegades?) Is he still relevant? (YES.)
Edited 99d ago