where is the academic freedom letter, i would like to sign it

Stars and Stripes@starsandstripes.bsky.social · 2d ago

A civilian geography professor was fired from West Point for pushing back after department officials barred faculty from teaching that humans contribute to climate change.

Great to see a Leeds colleague receiving this prestigious Royal Society Award.

RE: freedom of speech, academic freedom, and race science. In this (long) thread, I’m going to 1) establish my bona fides on academic freedom and race science, 2) show why academic freedom and freedom of speech are different and… 1/34

New >100-author preprint led by @zixuanjia.bsky.social @yutoozaki.bsky.social and @danya-pav.bsky.social is IMO our most important yet. TLDR: music is not "useless" "auditory cheesecake" - across 901 participants speaking 30 languages, singing bonds us together >1.5x more than speaking. osf.io/pv3m9

Call for papers for the next ICMPC (Int. Conference on Music Perception & Cognition) is now up (due end Oct): www.jyu.fi/en/events/ic... I'm honoured to join the other fabulous keynote speakers (@tuomaseerola.bsky.social, Bahar Tunçgenç, and Robert Zatorre). Can't wait to see everyone in Finland!

As Maya Angelou said, when people show you who they are, believe them. I'd rather have a klan member clearly articulating his views of how I should be eliminated than these garbage people dressing up their racism in intellectualism. You can fuck all the way off.

Lots of names on this list I don't recognize, but all the ones I do are like "Ah, OK". As I understand it, there are clear violations of contract in Cofnas's actions. The question is more: why didn't the univ notice this sooner?

David Veevers@davidveevers.bsky.social · 6d ago

here is the thing. if you tell me that you believe that race is a biological category and that it is a guide to the objective superiority and inferiority of groups of people, i am not calling you a racist to *insult* you, i am calling you a racist because it best describes your beliefs.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 5d ago

not only that, they are demanding that they not be called racist when they are observed to be signing up to support the racist

Sorry chatbot lovers but the waning of Boolean operators in most search functions on websites has made my life actively worse. You can't find anything, you can only have things suggested to you.

In the wake of Arday's death, Nathan Cofnas (who led the X mob against him) states his motivation. Beyond whistleblowing, he states that after a 'revolution' removes professors like Arday, it will open opportunities for him to become 'head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard'.

Time to start the new superstition that Mayo can only win the All Ireland while wearing white #GAA

oh nice to see this thread resurrected. dual (and more) life cycle organisms are so common. those of us who study vertebrates are studying some of the most boring animals ever to evolve on this earth

Rebecca R Helm@rebeccarhelm.bsky.social · last yr.

I want to tell you a story, and it begins with this VERY WEIRD animal: Meet Thetys vagina... [a thread 🧵] 📸 m_patton bit.ly/2Mgw8Sf 🌿🧪🦑🐙🌊

Has anyone noticed that data on Zenodo is downloaded at an absurdly high rate? I deposited data a few days ago. I haven't made any post about it. I can only assume that the 16 downloads are NOT humans trying replicate or extend the work. Who is harvesting data from Zenodo??? Any blog posts on this?

My son just told me is favourite sentence is: “I didn’t say we should kill him” because if you emphasise each different word it changes the entire meaning

our new paper with @plechac.bsky.social puts thousands of poems across languages in one shared space of poetic form! we use sequence alignment on rhyme schemes to investigate 'fixed forms' and all things between: not only 'sonnets', but 'sonnet-like' things. doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Every time this goes around I’m stunned that there are still people who’ve never seen it, this performance is to drag what the Mona Lisa is to paintings, but maybe you’ve never seen the Mona Lisa, so today is the day you shall behold it

Eric Ansley Díaz@geekboyeric.bsky.social · 2mo ago

RIP Bonnie Tyler. And RIP Tandi Iman Dupree. This remains the best stage entrance by a drag queen of all time, even some 25 years later, and the best use of Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero” ever. youtu.be/IHQA5vqn6rw?...

The great thing about the World Cup if you are Irish, is that you get to passionately support a different team every couple of days.

What's with articles on "how scientists will adapt" and "AI inevitability in science" these days? Speed and volume are not ends in themselves. If we prioritize efficiency over curiosity, we risk optimizing for what AI can do rather than what science is for.

Kevin Mitchell@wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 2mo ago

This is so weird to me, coming from developmental / cellular / molecular neurobiology - where you have to actually physically *do* experiments…

My latest piece for @quantamagazine.bsky.social might stir the pot somewhat. It takes on the contentious notion that biological organisms can be considered to possess agency. www.quantamagazine.org/is-life-just...

Is Life Just Different? | Quanta Magazine

The idea of ‘biological agency’ — that life devises its own goals and behaves accordingly — complicates our understanding of what it means to be alive. But does it serve a scientific purpose?

quantamagazine.org

In the spirit of self-promotion, here again is a summary of the best work I've done to date, containing the sort of insight and advance that I went into science to deliver ** Linguistic intuitions are about communicativeness, not grammaticalness ** thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/how-i-stoo...

How I stood on the shoulders of giants

A few years ago I experienced a rare privilege. I saw and and understood a truth about the nature of reality that no-one else had ever seen before.

thomscottphillips.substack.com

HR @ Weyland-Yutani@professormusgrave.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Yes, self promotion sucks, academics, but if you don’t do it nobody will find out about your work. The point is to publish and be read, not publish and hope you are discovered by fate, lifted out of a humble and pure obscurity so that you may be both famous and retiring

RE: https://spore.social/@yoginho/116680080654641368 Offend in every way: a spontaneous little rant about honesty, integrity, and civility in academic (and social-media) discourse. https://www.johannesjaeger.eu/blog/offend-in-every-way Or: read it in thread form ... 👇 #academia #civility […]

Yogi Jaeger@yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 3mo ago

Online discussions about scientific concepts often bring out something that also runs deep in academia, but usually remains outside the spotlight of public discourse: the personal attachment of people to their ideas. Planck already said: science progresses one funeral at a time. What he meant […]

shocking stuff... I was ready for a light bit of eugenics, but that was a bit too much for me

Daniel Shanahan@danielshanahan.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I have a piece about the dark history of musical preference research in the @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social.

And finally it was published! Massive thanks to my coauthors, the editor and reviewers, and the institutions that supported our research. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

What did the dove sing to Pope Gregory? Ancestral melody reconstruction in Gregorian chant using Bayesian phylogenetics

An attractive goal in the study of Gregorian chant melodies is reconstructing unobserved melodies as they may have been transmitted along their history, especially as early chant notation does not cap...

journals.plos.org

Gustavo A. Ballen@gaballench.bsky.social · 2y ago

What did the dove sing to Pope Gregory? A thread on phylogenetics and cultural evolution featuring our new preprint with Jan Hajic jr. and Klára Mühlova (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...) and previous contributions to the field.

Complexity is ubiquitous in the world around us. But different stimuli are complex for different reasons. Does the mind nevertheless represent a ‘unified’ notion of complexity across domains? In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show the answer is: yes! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Zeng et al. (2026, Science) reported an intriguing study of rhythmic pattern discrimination in bumble bees (Bombus terrestris). Yet the claim that ‘[they] form robust abstract rhythm representations’ may be premature. See doi.org/10.31234/osf....

Psychology not special, this is just terminology, I think? The way we describe is framework > theory > model - so framework is most general set of ideas. Model is most specific instantiation.

What is a psychological theory? Here's our take on this tricky and controversial question in this week's Experimentology chapter summary. Many things called "theories" in psychology aren't actually theories — they're frameworks. 🧵 experimentology.io

Can there also be bans for citing papers as supporting a claim when they, in fact, show the exact opposite of the claim?

anil oza@aniloza.bsky.social · 4mo ago

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

irishtune.id is live! Identify the Irish tune in a live performance or uploaded recording. Is it the best automated Irish tune identification in the world? You be the judge: share your feedback and comments here or using the irishtune.info feedback form.

I have no idea what causal inference means anymore. It's a grab-bag ranging from "we drew a DAG" to "we have identified Universal Truth and your puny RCT is no match for our IPW." Thinking clearly about your data, model and limitations isn't "causal", it's the bare minimum. #statsky #rstats #episky