Academic Mixtape 37

So this year NSF is rejecting graduate fellowship applications without review a bunch – more in biology? What's up with that? Here's the grassroots effort that led to this story.

Universities that don't cave into the extortion attempts from Trump are winning.

Also, NSF Biology just went through a massive restructuring. Here's more on that.

It's appalling, if not shocking, to see so many academics had been cozying up to Epstein, not just for the money but for the sexual assault.

A biologist and conservationist working in Veracruz, Miguel Ángel De la Torre Loranca, was kidnapped last November. As of a couple weeks ago, still no word about him. (There's a link to a gofundme for his family that's been circulated but I don't have enough info to know that it's legit, if any of you know more please let me know.)

The human cost of the war on science in the US

and the US has lost more than 10,000 government PhD-level scientists. These is not a reversible loss.

It's funny but wholly predictable that when you remove race-conscious admissions, that you get more students of color admitted. The anti-higher-ed folks have been asking for merit based admissions, well, here you go.

Diverse editorial boards make for better peer review! Nice to see peer-reviewed research telling us what we already should know. What's encouraging is that men editors are declining in their tendency to preferentially invite men to be reviewers.

Choosing happy is a hell of a process, says Thundercat.

This is not new but it's worth sharing! "The Ungrading Learning Theory We Have Is Not the Ungrading Learning Theory We Need"

Don't click on this color game unless you've got time to be distracted

So it is purely coincidence that most eusocial animals are haplodiploid? Looks like it, right? (My own perspective on this could be a whole manuscript, which I'm definitely not going to write.)

Why all our sister campuses are getting recordbreaking donations from Mackenzie Scott, over in CSU Dominguez Hills I'm wondering what we have to do for her team to recognize the amazing things that we'd do with similar levels of funding. Meanwhile, at least one other campus isn't playing by the rules with the funds they've received.

This story about the kidnapping of a soccer coach on a fake interview for a coaching job is wild. (Also by the way, while I am not funding the NY Times per se, I am currently paying one dollar a monthly for The Athletic, which they had acquired recently, and their journalism is amazing.)

Science is best communicated through identity and culture – how researchers are ensuring STEM serves their communities

Scientists have traditionally focused on educating the public on science or correcting misinformation. But researchers from marginalized communities often have broader goals in science communication.

The ConversationEvelyn Valdez-Ward

It's very easy to convince AI robots things that aren't true. Here's how a BBC journalist got ChatGPT to say that he was a world-leading competitive eater.

Want to see why I left Substack? This jawdropping video of the CEO of substack about permitting overly racist and white supremacist material on the platform is stunning. Please give it a watch, and maybe consider passing it on to your friends still on substack. That way they at least can make a conscious choice to support this.

And here's a new story in the Guardian about how Substack profits from Nazi newsletters.

Why is the Washington Post cratering so spectacularly?

Science at the Edge of the World

It's nice to see that some of Feynman's contemporaries knew he was an ass and were willing to talk about it.

"I'm still your America," from McSweeney's

The last links are from substack, just a heads up, in case that's not how you roll:

The LA Fires Changes Nothing; Life under a clicktatorship; The tragic decline of newspapers