Academic Mixtape Thirteen
moar good stuff to read
Duke University apparently has decided that it’s not worth keeping their world-class herbarium, one of the largest and most important in the United States. The university has more money than God (as we all do, I realize), but in Dukelandia, it seems that budgets are tight and apparently this area of superlativeness is no longer a priority. And here is a great blog post about the value of collections in the midst of this collections funding crisis. And AIBS, among other folks, are calling on Duke to change course. And here’s the story in Science.
Leveraging a department-level climate survey as a tool for action.
How many universities have closed in the past decade? Where are those universities and what kinds of institutions are they? Here are the answers to those questions.
A huge piece of the microplastics problem is car tires?! And also, did you know there is a new journal called Microplastics and Nanoplastics?
A bunch of high school science books are getting sex and gender wrong. And here’s a particularly cogent new article accessible to broad audiences that explains how biology is not binary.
More than 2/3 of all people are willing to contribute 1% of personal income to address climate change.
“Women and gender minorities make defining contributions to science. Despite increased representation of women across the scientific career ladder, institutions routinely fail to support their career advancement or value their input. For an equitable and intersectional future faculty, definitions of excellence must evolve to better value women’s contributions.”
“Back in 2015, I knowingly blew up my life”
And the trash keeps getting passed, again and again.
There have been some good things in Frontiers, but man, this might be the metaphorical nail in the coffin of their credibility. In case it passed your notice a couple week ago, here are two wholly nonsensical AI-generated figures that were in the published version of a peer-reviewed paper in a Frontiers journal:
When you look at the actual reviews of this paper and the editorial paper trail, it’s downright flabbergasting. A bit more here from Zen Faulkes.
Citations for sale, get your red hot citations!
I appreciated this brave, frank, and informative article from a financial advice columnist who gives us a deep dive into how they got scammed for $50,000. Around the same time, an article came out from one person who you would be most equipped to detect a scam (Cory Doctorow), but scammed for several thousand dollars. Lesson here? Apparently everybody has a vulnerability. Even you, even me.
Mechanistically, how are moths attracted to lights? It turns out that they do not fly towards lights, per se. This is a great piece of observational and experimental research, methinks.
More on, “Blogs are back, baby!!” this one from Southern Fried Science.
On a related note, how a podcast ended up being a bit hit even though the new episodes came out sporadically, not that often, and highly variable in length. The secret? It was actually good. (This coincides with my attitude towards this newsletter. I want to write regularly, but more important to me, is that when I do, it’s gotta be good. I’m not gonna post just for the purpose of posting.)
Why are major media outlets fascinated with the Ivy League institutions when nearly all higher education and research is led by other institutions? “One popular hypothesis: The reporters flock to Harvard to work through their personal struggles with generational overachievement. There’s no “crisis in higher education”; there’s just a crisis of New York Times writers with daddy issues and anxiety over what the end of legacy admissions could mean for their children’s college prospects.”