PlantEvolution 🌱🌾

@plantevolution.bsky.social

Weigel Lab aka WeigelWorld Repost≠endorsement #OpenScience COIs http://tinyurl.com/DWCOI2022 GoogleScholar http://tinyurl.com/DeWeScholar

Now, the next chapter! Our lab at the Institute of Molecular Biology, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, is fully up and running. We are actively recruiting passionate researchers at all levels to tackle bold ideas in cell biology, chromosome architecture, and evolution: sites.google.com/view/ecg-lab...

ECG LAB

"The only constant in life is change." — Heraclitus Genetic conflicts — the good, the bad, and the ugly — shape our lives over time We aim to understand why even the most essential genes and chrom...

sites.google.com

🧵 on why you should not be coy about pitching new ideas to prospective postdoc advisors (even if you have to tell them you have a better idea than they do)

@ching-hochang.bsky.social · 3d ago

Research is full of uncertainty, but every once in a while, nature works out exactly as you hypothesized. In 2019, while finishing my PhD, I pitched a bold idea in an email to @harmitmalik.bsky.social (below). Seven years later, it feels surreal to see that hypothesis become empirical reality. 🧵👇

NEW: In March the White House released an FY27 budget request that zeroed out the National Science Foundation's directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). For months it was unclear what would happen. Now, with FY26 over, the damage to SBE is coming to light. My reporting:

‘Complete devastation’: How NSF gutted its social sciences research

Agency body that funds sociology, linguistics, and archaeology studies in U.S. gave 90% fewer new grants this year

science.org

This is it. This is what everyone is enabling by humoring genAI: you spend months writing something that took you years to get at, for an opaque algorithm that a few control to spit a number and cut you off right there and then. This is what we're up against 🧪

John Stott@jpsastro.bsky.social · 2w ago

Had a UKRI funded grant proposal rejected at the "AI triage stage". "This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review." 🧪 #academicsky

I am writing to let you know that, unfortunately, your application was not successful.

Review process

As part of the initial triage of the 179 proposals submitted to this call, each was assessed using an AI-based review. Every proposal was read independently by several different AI models against the same seven criteria used to shape this call (including cyber security relevance, research quality and novelty, importance of the problem addressed, feasibility of the project plan, likely outputs and impact, value for money, and responsible research practice), with each model asked to give a score and a written justification with supporting quotations from the text. To guard against any one model's idiosyncrasies, we also ran a second, independent process in which different AI models debated the merits and weaknesses of each proposal before reaching a judgement, again against the same criteria. Scores from both processes were combined to produce an overall ranking. 

This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review.  Projects selected for funding were drawn from those that progressed to the full human review stage. We recognise that AI-assisted assessment is a new and evolving part of the review process, and we are continuing to evaluate how well it aligns with the judgements of human reviewers on this call. We will soon produce a document detailing our method, so that others can build upon it and improve it.

Feedback on your application

Your application was not selected to progress beyond the AI triage stage.  To provide transparency on the outcome of this assessment, we are sharing below the scores (out of 5) from each of the two AI review processes described above, together with the mean score across the two processes.

In today’s random thoughts. Just because a gene controls a conserved process does not suggest or even support that the gene is conserved. Lots of family specific genes input into or control highly conserved processes.

Please pass along: I’m recruiting PhD students to join our Macroecology Lab. We study physical ecology, macroecology, and biodiversity — spanning scaling, trait-based ecology, theory, comparative biology & ecoinformatics. Several avenues for funding. Please reach out if interested 🧪🌐🌾

BildBild

Are you looking for a postdoc exploring the cell biology of development, defining how cells change shape and move? Do you want to develop a research program & teaching skills preparing you for a position at a college or small University? Our new NIH grant will support those goals 1/n Please share

Wir brauchen ein Wort für die seltsam verquere Freude, in einem Text Holprigkeiten oder Fehler zu finden, weil es uns zeigt, dass er nicht von einer verdammten AI geschrieben wurde.

I try to be a peer reviewer who reviews the paper presented, not the imaginary one it could be with many years of work. Sometimes work, even from labs I respect, doesn't meet the standard. Today I re-reviewed a paper & was impressed at how the authors did the work to solidify their claims. Kudos 1/n

Joe Romm gave one of the most memorable talks I’ve ever heard at Columbia many years ago. Among other things, he said, “Sustainable development is like teenage sex. Everybody says they're doing it, very few people actually are, and those who are doing it are doing it badly.” RIP legend.

Michael E. Mann@michaelemann.bsky.social · 3w ago

It is with tremendous sadness and sense of loss that we regretfully share the news that @penncssm.bsky.social senior research fellow, and my close personal friend Joseph Romm has passed away unexpectedly. He will be sorely missed here. web.sas.upenn.edu/pcssm/news/r...