Academic mixtape 40

It's been three months since the last mixtape! So there's lots here, including a bunch of peer-reviewed papers on the DEIJ in STEM beat. Let's get right into it:

I was surprised to see that when I got into some real talk about using AI for statistical coding last year, there was both a lot of interest and far more affirmation than I anticipated. My practices have substantially evolved since then, and I am preparing to write about that in the coming months. It's clear that as a community we are starved for knowing effective and ethical practices for using AI for coding – as it's now so commonplace, the literature has yet to catch up. So I was downright thrilled to read these Ten simple rules for effective use of generative AI for code development in environmental science. If you haven't started, this is a great starting place. If you have, it's still supremely useful. If I was teaching stats at the graduate level again, this would be in the first week of class, to be sure. (Meanwhile, how to teach statistics in a world where generative AI is used for coding? I hope that one crosses my feed soon.)

From the Department of Blogging is More Alive than Ever:

First up, Jeremy Yoder and Despite decades of effort, scientists have still not found a substitute for reading the paper.

Next up is Brian O'Meara, on The Rule of Three For Federal Financing.

and I suppose this linkedin post is what once could be called a blog post, it's about the Salem Witch Trials and Passing the Trash. Because the survivors of people who have been credibly accused of multiple incidents of sexual misconduct are reluctant to speak up because lawyers, we those of us with positions of relative safety need to use this to protect the community. If you know scicomm trainees at ASU, please pass along the word:

Let us give thanks for the courage of journalists on the university beat: "[Dietram Scheufele] violated university policy by participating in sexual and romantic relationships with two of his students. One of those students filed a complaint against him and the other participated in the investigation as a witness. The Office of Compliance concluded Scheufele failed multiple times to maintain professional honesty and integrity as required by faculty policy in his interactions with students. Investigators found he repeatedly insulted one of his students to her colleagues, which included making offensive comments about her sexual orientation and appearance. Scheufele’s conduct prompted two of the three students who filed complaints to leave the Life Sciences Communication department, they said in interviews with the Cap Times."

Women are more devalued at the academic workplace, and this is an issue for retention: "Analyzing 6,615 free-text responses reveals that feeling devalued at work, both in formal evaluations and informal interactions, is the topic where women and men’s reported experiences diverge the most when given the opportunity to discuss anything that needed to be different about their jobs—a pattern that holds for nearly 300 institutions and across both STEM and non-STEM fields, and was particularly strong for women of color and tenured women in our sample." (I'll note that the data are about feeling devalued, not being devalued, but is there a functional difference?)

188 ecologists in India got together to put out a call for expanding research and monitoring during this megaNiño that is upon us.

I am still flabbergasted at this finding: we expect almost half a million people to die from the heat brought by this year's El Niño, between now and February.

This is heartening: A multi-taxon investigation compared biodiversity recovery after habitat alteration in tropical rainforests over a 40 year chronosequence. For many taxa, the degree of recovery is mighty darn impressive.

First-hand accounts of the effects of federal and state policies on science, brought to you by a bevvy of scientific societies (three of which I'm proud to be a member!). The July 2026 report is deep, rich, and informative.

A plea for civility from the editors of Ecology and Evolution. "Plea for civility" is their phrasing, not mine!

PNAS published a special feature on the ecology of segregation in cities. These papers are absolute bangers. (I think the representation of authors from institutions that principally serve communities experiencing the legacy of redlining was a little thin, but hey, elite gonna elite, right?)

What do midcentury modern design and WWII concentration camps for Japanese Americans have to do with one another? Quite a lot - this was an education for me.

What do trail-following ants have to do with the replication "crisis" in science? (not that there is such a crisis, amirite?) Nonetheless, an interesting and fun piece in The Nautilus answers this question.

From the Journal of Museum Education: Recommendations for Trans Inclusive Practices in Natural History Museums

Seen but Silenced: Black Males Occupying White Academic Spaces

How contemporary academic structures constrain scientific creativity and hold back early-career researchers. This is a great piece of work. Yes, it's all the stuff we know about. But it's written in High Academese, deep with citations to the literature, and in a peer-reviewed Springer Nature journal (a nice tad of irony), so now we have something to cite in our broader impacts when we say that folks aren't willing to take chances and this is bad for science, and particularly bad for more junior researchers.

The latest biography of Stephen Hawking is reviewed in The Guardian, and there's some compelling evidence that he was a trash human being, regardless of his presence on the Epstein List.

This short interview with an expert on the multibillion dollar Kenyan essay mill industry was pretty interesting.