Let me get this straight. There's a title. There's a commentary article. There's an abstract. There's a set of bullet point highlights. There's a graphical abstract. AND YOU STILL THINK I NEED YOUR AI AGENT TO SUMMARIZE THE ARTICLE FOR ME?

Society journals support the scientific community, including advocacy for funding and science policies. $ to for profit journals just ends up in another shareholders yacht.

Vaughn Cooper@vscooper.micropopbio.org · 2w ago

Authors!🚨 While you scramble for scarce $ 🤔 “Springer Nature reports revenue growth of 6.2%..and adjusted operating profit growth of 7.7%. They reported even more stunning submission growth of 30% and published article growth of 13%.” Publishing in society journals helps YOU not them👇🏻. Pass it on.

'"At the end of the day ... they're either going to play for you or they're going to play for someone else around the country," Kiffin said at a news conference Monday. "So we've made the decision to recruit them like probably most people are."' - This is exactly what I hear peers say about using AI

Put one in Central Park or Lincoln Park before putting one in Saline or Ypsilanti Michigan then we might believe you

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2mo ago

Hassett: "Data centers are very good for towns bc they create so many jobs & bring people in with high incomes that can buy houses & stuff like that. So if you take a sleepy town that hasn't seen much in the last 30 years & put a data center there, there are gonna be a bunch of happy residents."

"AI is just like..." is a common refrain that absolves people from doing hard work. Read this all the way to the end and then try again. The difference in learning between Serrano's students and classmates is a 1000000000000-fold. Beyond the learning is the humanity www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

A poll for principal investigators and group leaders: If a journal compensated reviewers for evaluating a submitted manuscript, would you prefer to 1️⃣ Be paid directly 2️⃣ Use the money as a credit for future publications 📊 Show results

Submit to the JB Biofilms Collection! Research Articles & Minireviews on biofilm formation/dispersal, Abx tolerance, polymicrobial interactions, signalling, imaging & more. Submission deadline: 30 September 2026. journals.asm.org/journal/jb/b... @asm.org #JBacteriol #ASMjournals

Someone recently gushed to me about an undergrad they wrote a letter of recommendation for to med school. He then said he used AI to write the letter. I lost a lot of respect for him and was left dumfounded. Someone else recently asked me how is AI dehumanizing. This.

I don't even know what to do with this. Both my worst scores and best scores ever. All for the same proposal. 🤣

Currently responding to reviewers' critiques that I'm sure were written by generative AI. We complain that reviewers don't seem to read what we give them, but these are so much worse. So hard to take the comments seriously. I don't like what this is doing to me.

Reminder that R is not RStudio. Just read a paper that performed their analysis "using RStudio (v.4.1.2, v.4.3.0)". Those are R versions (and why two different versions?), not RStudio versions. RStudio versions look like "2026.04.0". Regardless, the R version is more important than the RStudio

So @biorender.bsky.social wants to tap into the prism market? Can't wait for all the figure legends to have the biorender attribution text and the same soulless appearance. I think I'd rather re-learn how to make plots in Excel than use either.

In case you were wondering...

New episode of #MattersMicrobial! This time, Dr. Joe Zackular joins the #QualityQuorum to discuss the wily bacterium Clostridiodes difficile (also known as C. diff) which can cause serious disease in humans. Informative session! Please spread the #GoodMicrobialWord! youtu.be/9oSR01l-EkY?...

April 1st seems to have become World AI Day, eh? Let that sink in the next time that you use AI for something: we suspect that what you say and show as your own is a lie.

My next newsletter "What is the most common form of 'chartjunk' in the scientific literature? " is coming out tomorrow morning. Subscribe to get it and stay in the loop on everything I'm up to in helping scientists make the most effective data visualization! shop.riffomonas.org/posts/

Riffomonas Professional Development

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Looking for someone to give a talk to your group on the problems with AI for culture, society, or education? I'm a STEM professor at the U of Michigan and would be happy to give that talk.

I always always tried to get students to see this. In fact, they are so much more.

When I scan through open peer reviews I'm surprised by how rarely people comment on the design of visuals. I've been working to develop a constructive approach to critique and have been trying them out on the Tube. Here's the latest www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWpt...

How would you improve upon this set of pie charts published in Nature Microbiology (CC401)

YouTube video by Riffomonas Project

youtube.com

The fundamental premise behind AI-enabled cheating is that coursework is merely busy work, because your'e just doing it for professors. We would never say that showing up for football practice is merely busy work because you're just doing it for your coaches.

Each Monday I post a video critiquing a figure from recently published paper and on Wednesday (9AM Eastern) I do a livestream either recreating the figure or refactoring it. This week's figure has a problem that is too common in science youtu.be/DNop0UjdfFg

How to improve the structure of a data visualization to be aligned with your text (CC399)

YouTube video by Riffomonas Project

youtu.be

Because I'm ranting... Please figure out how to replace "_" with " " in your taxa names. Then figure out how to italicize them. Not sure how difficult this is to do in Prism, but it's pretty straightforward with stringr/ggplot2/ggtext in R. How do plots like this appear in journals with 20 JIFs?

I'm seeing more and more of this: broken y-axes. Regardless of what you think about them (I'm "anti"), examples like this one don't need them! You could easily put ticks every 5000 units without a break

New paper up on bioRxiv! This is my third and hopefully final paper on rarefaction. It's still better than the other available methods. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Rarefaction is better than robust Aitchison PCA and other compositional data analysis methods at controlling for uneven sequencing effort

Amplicon sequencing typically results in a wide distribution in the number of sequences obtained from each sample. How best to account for this variation has been a persistent problem in the microbial...

biorxiv.org

The annual freak out is on over the university no longer paying for GraphPad Prism...

Healthy organizations have competitive elections.

The last time you reviewed a paper for a journal, did you comment on the design of any of the figures?

Just FYI: people are anti-vaxxers for their kids. It's also for their pets and livestock. They've gone so far off the rails. People ask us about mRNA vaccines for sheep an other animals worried something weird might happen to the meat. I wish! We can't get enough vaccines approved for meat animals

We've all heard seminar speakers say (myself included), "I know this is too small for you to read, but..." This usually happens because people are repurposing panels from their papers without adjusting for the medium (1/20)

I'm editing and putting the finishing touches on a grant proposal. The though of having AI write the whole thing or even a part of it is pretty unthinkable. When you write you see what you truly know. It forces you to think and troubleshoot your logic. (1/3)