Melissa Morabito
@profmorabito.bsky.social
Professor of Criminology & Justice Studies
Another day, another reason to avoid AI
Mel Andrews@bayesianboy.bsky.social · 2mo agoWhen utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.
Wildly inappropriate that Taylor and Francis used generative AI to create image descriptions for all of my figures without giving me and my co-authors the opportunity to do so. Does this mean they uploaded the entire manuscript?
Kind of surprised that this hasn't been bigger news. It's finals week for a whole lot of universities, and yet, Canvas (a learning/grading platform used by ~9,000 schools globally) is currently inaccessible because of a pay-or-have-your-data-leaked hack. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...
“PAY OR LEAK”: Hackers Target Big Higher Ed Vendor
The criminal extortion group ShinyHunters breached Instructure last week. The hackers, who have also attacked individual universities, demanded the ed-tech giant pay up or face a data leak.
insidehighered.com
Today is the release of Governor Healey's proposed FY27 state budget. I will remind you as always, that budgets are a moral document. What we fund is what we value.
Experimental evidence that students are more likely to contest grades when they are delivered by an evaluator with a female-sounding name. "These findings suggest that women in evaluative positions face disproportionate resistance when delivering negative assessments."
Also, who will enforce these policies? Are we asking school staff to take cellphones away? Police?
Tracy O’Connell Novick@tracynovick.bsky.social · last yr."Cellphones are not the root cause of educational or mental health problems" www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/14/o...
It will take so long to make up for lost time too.
Ben Casselman@bencasselman.bsky.social · last yr.Some of the stats in here are really striking. Per one paper, federal investments in R&D account for at least a fifth of all productivity gains in the U.S. economy since World War II. And the societal return for every $1 invested in the sciences is *conservatively* estimated at $5.
"When most Americans think about our great universities, they probably don’t think about the origins of lasers, FM radio or bar codes..." 1/ www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/o...
Opinion | Universities Gave Us the iPhone, the Jet Engine and Gatorade. We’re Tossing That Away.
The postwar compact on research that powered America’s economic and military dominance is under threat.
nytimes.com
🚨NEW🚨: Donald Trump is attempting to strip away federal support for libraries. We will NOT let that happen. Last night the President signed an order to gut the Institute of Museum & Library Services. But together, we know we can show up & defeat it. Full EO: www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...
Please consider submitting to a special issue on police responses to violence against women, co-edited with Tara Shelley www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/calls-for-pa...
Police Response to Violence Against Women
The special issue will review police response to violence against women, identify challenges to police response, highlight effective response strategies, and consider intersectionality, disability, an...
emeraldgrouppublishing.com
Shocking but not shocking? I feel for the federal workers who spend their days in these spaces.
Charles Ornstein@charlesornstein.bsky.social · 2y agoUnquestionably, major policy changes, edicts and directives handed down by the new Trump administration will upend lives. But I've also been struck by the widespread efforts to erase/whitewash history. Stick with me for a pretty shocking series of events from just the past few weeks.
The entire samhsa.gov website is gone? Can anyone else access it?
SAMHSA - Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
An official website of the United States government
samhsa.gov
The American College of OB/GYN’s website is now hosting the critical documents purged by the CDC This is what every professional medical organization should be doing right now #MedSky www.acog.org/clinical/cli...
ACOG Endorsed
The following documents have ACOG’s endorsement and are listed in order of endorsed date.
acog.org
Please consider submitting to a special issue on police responses to violence against women, co-edited with Tara Shelley www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/calls-for-pa...
Police Response to Violence Against Women
The special issue will review police response to violence against women, identify challenges to police response, highlight effective response strategies, and consider intersectionality, disability, an...
emeraldgrouppublishing.com
The Internet Archive has to date downloaded 500 terabytes of US government websites, which it crawls at the end of every presidential term. The whole archive is fully searchable. This effort's housed by a donation-funded nonprofit, not a branch of the US government. blog.archive.org/2024/05/08/e...
End of Term Web Archive – Preserving the Transition of a Nation | Internet Archive Blogs
blog.archive.org
Auschwitz was at the end of a long process. It did not start from gas chambers. This hatred was gradually developed by humans. From ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder. Auschwitz took time.
Local police don’t have to participate. www.npr.org/2025/01/24/n...
Local governments across U.S. signal they won't aid Trump migrant crackdown
Local government officials around the U.S. signal they won't assist — and in some cases they'll actively oppose — the Trump administration's efforts to conduct a massive deportation of migrants.
npr.org
NIH appears to have canceled/postponed all of its study sections—the independent review panels that approve federal grants for health research. Such grants fund the work/salaries of 300k people at more than 2,500 institutions
Jane Liebschutz, MD MPH (she/her)@liebschutz.bsky.social · 2y agoAll NIH study sections canceled indefinitely. This will halt science and devastate research budgets in universities.
Not sure that I ever saw the full poster before today.
This is why large research firms have an advantage. They have staff dedicated to these tasks.
Daniel P. Moriarity@dpmoriarity.bsky.social · 2y ago"A study of federally funded research projects in the United States estimated that principal investigators spend on average about 45% of their time on administrative activities related to applying for and managing projects rather than conducting active research" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
New article out ‘Police Reform and Involuntary Hospitalization’ looking at one of hidden responsibilities of local police departments academic.oup.com/policing/art...
Police reform and involuntary hospitalization
Abstract. Involuntary hospitalization to receive a psychiatric evaluation is a serious mental health and legal matter that often requires involvement from
academic.oup.com
My students are always shocked by the outcome of this case.
John Pfaff@johnpfaff.bsky.social · 2y agoIf you don’t know what this case is: Woman gets restraining order against violent ex. He violates it. She calls cops. They don’t come by. Repeat several times. Eventually, he murders her and daughters. Family sues cops, said had obligation to respond and failed. SCOTUS? “Nah, no obligation.”
❗New research on prosecutors! The Prosecutors and Politics Project has just released a new report: A National Study of Prosecutor Elections and Campaign Contributions: 2018-2019 Key findings include changes in contested vs uncontested prosecutors, as well as a big increase in $$$ raised.
