Students Angry Over AI

It's not Just Students That Cheat Using AI

#YoutubeShort #Education #Academia #AI #AIAbuse

Kudos to the #Rutgers University Senate:
senate.rutgers.edu/wp-content/…

"Be it resolved that, the Rutgers University Senate urges the President of Rutgers University to formally propose and help establish a Mutual Academic Defense Compact (#MADC) among all members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance [#BTAA]…Under this compact, all participating institutions shall commit meaningful funding to a shared or distributed defense fund…Participating institutions shall make available, at the request of the
institution under direct political infringement, the services of their legal counsel, governance experts, and public affairs offices to coordinate a unified and vigorous response."

#Academia #Universities
@academicchatter

Looking into #ScienceAdvances as a journal to publish in..
Why is there a reference limit, and why is it so low (80 references)? In this day and age? For an online-only journal?

science.org/journal/sciadv

PS: remember that you can rate the submission & revision process of journals on #SciRev scirev.org/

#ScientificPublishing #Academia #ScientificJournals

AAMC Statement on Drastic Cuts to NIH-Funded Research

"Every American has benefited from NIH-supported medical research conducted at medical schools, academic health systems, and teaching hospitals nationwide. Every American will be harmed by the undermining of this long-standing partnership between academic institutions and the federal government"

aamc.org/news/press-releases/a…

#academia #nih

#Academia
#AcademicChatter

If you work at an r1 in the US, it's likely that at least some of them will bankrupt in the next year. New guidance issued instantly capping indirects at 15%.

Those that don't go bankrupt are going to be purged of a substantial amount of staff and faculty.

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/no…

🌟Hello #AcademicMastodon🌟

I'm Hannah and currently working on the research project to understand the role of #Mastodon in #academia during my internship here.

If you haven’t done so already, please consider participating in the project. I would love to hear from you:

🔗rug.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/…

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who has already participated in the survey! It is really insightful to read your opinions and experiences.

#AcademicChatter #OpenScience #Plushtodon #SocialMedia

Why is it concerning that the analysis relies entirely on Matlab toolboxes?

1. Reproducing the analysis requires access to the exact toolbox with the exact version number. May also have platform dependencies (e.g., outputs slightly different results on macos, linux, and windows).
2. Often the version of the toolbox is not reported. It isn't in this paper.
3. Increased use of the toolbox may lead to price gouging, excluding many who can't afford to purchase it. Besides the unfairness, this impacts the ability of just about anyone to reproduce the analysis from the raw data.
4. After some years the toolbox may not be available at all, for example if the company considers its maintenance a burden with negative returns on investment.

If you are a reviewer or an editor: at the very least demand the reporting of the toolbox version and the operating system version where it was run. And ideally demand enough specification of the algorithms used by the functions provided in the toolbox that an independent reimplementation and reanalysis is possible.

#reproducibility #academia

The #Inkscape 1.4 will be released in less than 24h and it has some neat features including (but obviously not limited to) "Affinity Designer File Import" and "Support for internal links in exported PDF files".

I know lots of people in #academia use (or used to use) Affinity Designer. This is your chance to go OpenSource and free yourself from that limiting ecosystem.

Read more about this 1.4 release here:

inkscape.org/doc/release_notes…

Inkscape 1.4 Release Notes | Inkscape

^inkscape.org

Universities are not just businesses, but an investment in future generations

I would go a step further and argue that universities should nit be treated like businesses at all

nature.com/articles/d41586-024…

#academicchatter #academia

Universities are not just businesses, but an investment in future generations

Many UK universities are in a financial crisis. But the government is leaving them to flounder, treating higher education as a private-sector industry and research as a public investment.

^{www.nature.com}

"The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter"

arxiv.org/html/2406.04005v1

Academic Twitter was great, & it breaks my heart that the community I found there has done so little to rebuild on Mastodon, even tho Mast is far better. I loved learning abt new research & pubs (& occasionally posting abt my own). A fair # of people migrated to Mast but most didn't stay, at least in my field of literary studies.

What can academics do to build & rebuild academic exchange on Mastodon?

#Academia @LitStudies

Post the kind of posts you want to see. Tell your colleagues. Email links to good posts to colleagues. Mention your handle in Mastodon in conference talks as a way to reach you.

All of that was done to promote Twitter, unwittingly. Now we can do it purposefully, until it becomes self-sustaining.

#Academia

Have you ever thought about questionable research practices (QRPs) in academia?

The Retraction Watch team have highlighted this new paper in PLoSOne that has a systematic analysis. The authors identify 25 QRPs and then survey a lot of academics.

The results are interesting, widespread use of QRPs, sort of a grey area of acedemic behaviour, with some explanatory factors.

I'm bookmarking this for future use.

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti…

#academia #academicchatter #research #researchethics #academicpublishing

Is something rotten in the state of Denmark? Cross-national evidence for widespread involvement but not systematic use of questionable research practices across all fields of research

Questionable research practices (QRP) are believed to be widespread, but empirical assessments are generally restricted to a few types of practices.

^{journals.plos.org}

I often get invited to speak at bizarre meetings that are not in my field of expertise. I have often wondered what these meetings must be like, or if they really exist.

What is it like to attend a predatory conference?

nature.com/articles/d41586-024…

#academia #academicchatter

What is it like to attend a predatory conference?

Nature sent a reporter to find out as part of an investigation into dud events.

^{Ro, Christine}

"A History Instructor Complained About Parking Fees. It Cost Him His Job"
chronicle.com/article/a-histor…
(#paywalled)

He complained about the high price of parking. He disputed the President's numbers in a "cordial" but "tense" public meeting on the topic. He turned over the research documenting his numbers. Two and a half weeks later, the provost fired him, explaining that #TarletonStateUniversity would not "tolerate intolerable behavior."

#Academia #AcademicFreedom
@academicchatter

Inkscape, Johnny, Inkscape. But you know that already 😀

For figure panels, for posters, even for presentations now with its multi-page documents. Works brilliantly. I could not have done my work as a scientist over the last 20 years without #inkscape.

Inkscape has existed for 20+ years and, thanks to the power of open source, will continue to exist for decades to come, when all these and more subscription services have come and gone.

#academia

Why Scientific Fraud Is Suddenly Everywhere

"We’re so fixated on metrics because they determine funding for a university based on where it is in the rankings. So it comes from there and then it filters down. "

nymag.com/intelligencer/articl…

#academia #academicchatter

Here's a question for #academia: why shouldn't I count my contributions to major open-source projects which are scientifically relevant (e.g. Linux [1], OpenCV [2]) just like publications?

- They have a unique identifier.
- They are most certainly peer-reviewed (if you don't believe me, try to submit a Linux patch sometime)
- They are archived long-term.
- They are publicly available.

So... where's the difference?

[1] github.com/torvalds/linux/blob…
[2] github.com/opencv/opencv/pull/…

[RFC] Java Camera2 View for Android by floe · Pull Request #10081 · opencv/opencv

Based on #10050, here's a first alpha implementation of the Camera2 adapter class which should allow zero-copy access to preview image data. Comments very welcome. Known issues at the moment: tuto...

^GitHub

Counting citations hasn't been a reliable measure of scientific impact for a while, especially on platforms like Google Scholar that compile info from random documents. Hyper-authorship, predatory journals, etc have all contributed to the problem.

This preprint just drives home how important it is to measure scientific impact more carefully and without reliance on automated metrics

Google Scholar is manipulatable

arxiv.org/abs/2402.04607

#science #academia #publishing #citations

Google Scholar is manipulatable

Citations are widely considered in scientists' evaluation. As such, scientists may be incentivized to inflate their citation counts.

^arXiv.org

Holy shit I love this research paper

biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/70…

#anthropology #anthro #academia #academicresearch #longevity

You all… it has started 😱

What should I do if I suspect one of the journal reviews I got is Al-generated?

#PeerReviewing #Academia #PublicationEthics

What should I do if I suspect one of the journal reviews I got is Al-generated?

I've submitted a paper to one of the well-reputable journals and received two reviews asking for a revision. One of the reviews is on-topic and helpful. The other, however, I suspect was generated ...

^{Academia Stack Exchange}

Job! An endowed professorship at Arizona State University in the systematics and taxonomy of ants. A rare opportunity for the right sort of ant nerd/desert rat.

#Ants #Academia #Entomology

apply.interfolio.com/135564

From Chris Brink: "It is not difficult to construct a university ranking. What is needed is not so much any technical skill as enough blind self-confidence to tell the world that the arbitrary choices you have made in constructing your ranking actually represent reality."
universityworldnews.com/post.p…

#Academia #Rankings #Universities
@academicchatter

Academic rankings: The tide begins to turn

The development of academic rankings has reached an inflection point as some of the world’s leading universities – concerned about fundamental fla...

^{University World News}

The #UMontana is cancelling more than 5,000 #journals from #Elsevier, #TaylorAndFrancis, and #Wiley, forced by "rising journal…#prices and a stagnant #budget…The library has seen a $700,000 reduction in money received since fiscal year 2020."
nbcmontana.com/news/local/mans…

#Academia #Cancellations #Libraries #Publishers #ScholComm #Universities
@academicchatter

Mansfield Library at UM set to cut largest e-journal packages

Cuts are coming to the Mansfield Library’s collections to address a more than $300,000 funding gap.When University of Montana students access the library’s onli

^KECI

So true – it's nigh impossible to weigh the impact of research but years afterwards. Ask the microbiologists who were studying extremophile bacteria in a Yellowstone pond whether they thought their work would lead to the sequencing of the human genome and modern medicine as we know it. Or ask the zoologists who pulled out bioluminescent and fluorescent jelly fish out of the sea whether they thought scientific research in developmental biology, neuroscience and biology as a whole, remarkably even DNA sequencing, would be so thoroughly transformed. And these are just two examples in biology.

PCR: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymera…

GFP: jellyfish Aequorea victoria en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fl…

#academia #science

Protein that converts blue and ultraviolet light ranges to green light.

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

So many good points in this piece by
@PhilippBayer

My highlight in this screenshot (#science delivery & success is a TEAM effort!), but if you're vaguely involved in #academia +/- #bioinformatics, do have a read and think how it all may apply to you. #academicchatter @academicchatter
genomic.social/@PhilippBayer/1…

Philipp Bayer

2023-07-02 13:58:01

A new blog-post: the two cultures of bioinformatics, and how academia selects against one philippbayer.github.io/blerg/p…

The two cultures of bioinformatics

i ramble about bioinformatics careers

^{Hello! Welcome!}

Happy to say I defended my dissertation "Methods and complexity in phage-bacteria ecology and evolution"!

Much thanks to all those who supported me throughout my PhD.

I'm glad to be sticking around the Turner Lab for another year as a post-doc to continue my work on multispecies phage-bacteria communities

#PhDone #AcademicChatter #AcademicMastodon #Academia #PhD #Ecology #Evolution #Phage #Phages

Today @eLife has reached 1,000 manuscript submissions using the new model, Reviewed Preprints elifesciences.org/about/peer-r…

See all published Reviewed Preprints elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre…

Within themes, #eLife makes no distinction between old-style articles (where editors decided whether a manuscript is accepted) and reviewed preprints (where authors decide instead). Keep in mind both have the reviews attached, including as of recently a brief assessment paragraph summarizing, with a controlled vocabulary, the significance of findings and, more importantly, the strength of evidence.

See the subset of #eLife publications tagged as #neuroscience elifesciences.org/subjects/neu…

#ScientificPublishing #academia #eLife

Reviewed Preprints

Preprints that have been invited for review by eLife are published as Reviewed Preprints and include an eLife assessment, public reviews and a response from the authors (if available).

^eLife

For anyone on the fence about #eLife's new publishing model, note there is no such thing as an "eLife paper", since the purpose of the review process in scientific publishing is to provide accurate, constructive reviews to authors. In modern times, dissemination doesn't depend on mailed-in printed periodicals.

Each eLife publication has an evaluation attached to it in the form of an assessment–be it negative or positive. Critically, authors decide whether to go forward with assessments as they are and go public, or to revise the manuscript and request re-review to improve both the manuscript and, consequently, the reviews and assessment.

In other words, nothing changed, except, it's the authors who decide how to move forward with their own manuscript, rather than the editors.

#ScientificPublishing #academia

Over on the bird site they're talking about how MDPI journals have been added to the list of "predatory" journals.

What do you think?

predatoryreports.org/news/f/li…

#academia #AcademicChatter #academic #science #publishing #PeerReview

• About time! All MDPI journals are "predatory" (57%, 26 votes)
• Mmm, only some MDPI journals are "predatory" (20%, 9 votes)
• MDPI journals are iffy, but not fully "predatory" (20%, 9 votes)
• MDPI journals are fine! (2%, 1 vote)

Hello, world! We are the Climatematch team and we just landed on Mastodon.
Climatematch Academy is a wide-reaching, inclusive and approachable program aimed to introduce computational methods for climate science.
You can find more information about us on our website academy.climatematch.io/
Follow us for the latest update on our upcoming online course on July 17-28, 2023.
cc @neuromatch

#climate #climatematch #science #earthscience #environment #academia #Neuromatch

I have an open #PhD position for developing soft and biodegradable sensors.
Possibly using #AI #ML 🤖 and, obviously, #3DPrinting

#academia in Wageningen, the #Netherlands

more info here (and please boost):
wur.nl/en/vacancy/phd-in-soft-…

@aspuru