For plant scientists stuck in the US (and able to legally work in the US), there are a bunch of USDA-ARS openings are here:
https://orise.orau.gov/usda-ars/current-research-opportunities.html #PlantScience #Botany #Biology #GetFediHired #AcademicChatter
In recommendation letters for a prize, people reach for strong language to support their candidate.
US-American, first and last sentence: [The candidate] is a superstar!
British, somewhere in the middle of the text: The result obtained is very good indeed.
I'm not making these up.
The 5cm of snow we got over the weekend and ongoing cold snap have led to a uni closure for the rest of the week. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to refill my coffee and go finish season one of Ludwig. #academicchatter
Together with Mario Birkholz of @neuSoM fame, I have written an article about Mastodon and the Fediverse in the journal of the German Physical Society: https://pro-physik.de/zeitschriften/download/23119
It's free to read but in German. Let's hope that @DPGPhysik's move to the Fediverse will inspire other scientific societies and universities to follow!
#physics #mastodon #fediverse #academicchatter #wisskomm #physik
Oh, Mike Levin. His name is unavoidable in my area of research. He has so much to say about evolution, development, adaptive biology, and multi-scale intelligence, and "everyone" has heard of him.
He brings attention to important ideas, but in a problematic way. He exaggerates, all the time. I hate hearing him talk about amazing natural phenomena, and then push beyond natural into make-believe territory. It's misleading, and risks undermining the parts that are legitimate!
It all has a subtle emphasis on bending living matter to our will that makes me deeply uncomfortable. I draw the opposite conclusion from these ideas: life resists control, and adapts through negotiation and symbiosis.
He attracts attention and funding by overselling what's possible to folks hungry for power and control. It draws others to him, for inspiration, support, and momentum. He's making a movement. It's difficult to pursue this sort of thing without defining my work in relation to his.
Hey, hat zufällig jemand Zugriff auf dieses Paper?
Does anyone have access to this paper?
https://doi.org/10.1116/6.0003769
#MissingPaper #CanIHazPaper #AcademicChatter #PhDLife
Edit: oh. Just found it. Thanks.
I discovered a new type of spam: Amalfi Coast Hiking Spam for Professors!
"bring to your attention a matter that is anything but trivial: that of well-deserved summer holidays".
I used to review student work digitally. I would type up notes, do tracked changes edits, and etc.
At some point last year I slowly switched to printing out student work and reviewing it by hand with a pen. I'm not sure why I changed my process but I did. Once I finish a review, I scan it in and send them the PDF plus leave the hard copy outside my office for them.
Students initially didn't like it because they had to interpret my handwriting.
But in the last few months, students have been quite happy because they know I'm not using AI to review their work. They can literally see my handwriting.
The students can (and often do) feed their work through AI to do a pre-review before sending it to me. I have other thoughts on the usefulness of AI in these cases but I allow the students a great deal of latitude in that regard as long as they disclose and document what they're doing with AI. They don't need me feeding their work through AI.
I suspect it'll become a differentiator between how I approach education and how some colleagues are now approaching it. If I'm not using my expertise, then why am I even employed when the students could use an LLM without a faculty member doing it for them?
Anyway... It turns out handwritten feedback once again has a place in education.
I've also gone back to paper and pencil in-person exams. Students are not entirely thrilled about it but some are starting to come around to the idea.
Reddit has blown up the past few weeks because WCAG accessibilty rules go into affect April 22 this year. Everything in our learning management systems must be compliant. Every image must have alt text. All PDFs accessible. All videos captioned. Faculty that have quizzes with images, handwritten solutions to problem sets, etc, etc, will have to spend hundreds of hours doing nothing but modifying their content to meet these standards.
#HigherEd #AcademicChatter #Academia
1/
Replicating someone else's experiment can be so difficult. At least for computational experiments it's not so bad... if they share their code!!! Why do so few researchers share their code? :sadcat: #academicchatter
Forest dieback, often related to #ClimateChange, is increasing in many parts of the world, and there is an urgent need to develop an efficient large-scale monitoring system of forest health, to improve forest management.
This study by Carletti et al 2025, based on a combination of satellite and ground level observations, will allow to improve detection of forest dieback, with a species specific calibration, and can therefore be used to produce high-resolution dieback maps at species levels and thus monitor dieback trends over time.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22797254.2025.2547386#d1e1030
#AcademicChatter #BioDiversity
#ForestManagement #Forests #Forestry
#ForestHealth #ForestDieback #ForestDynamics #ForestMonitoring
If you are writing a manuscript, please for the love of all that is holy DONT MAKE TABLES PART OF ANY FIGURES! (like Fig 1A is a table, and then B is some diagram).
Tables are not really figures. I get it, we like to color them to emphasize things, etc, but they aren't really part of figures.
Also, if you have Supp tables 2 - 10 as separate Excel files, then Supp table 1 better be in a separate file too, or collaborators and readers will not know where to find it.
Some students I once supervised had assumed that a cross (†) in a journal article's author list meant that the author had died before publication... 😢 #AcademicChatter #ScientificPublishing
Stupidity Delusion level off the scale.
My email app is sad if I dont tell it I love it now and again.
(Universities: we must prepare our students for empathy with agentic ai)
#aibubble #aidelusions #TechFantasyLand #fomo #AIgrifting #academia #academicchatter
Since campus is closed tomorrow, I don't have to work, right?
Having finally found the right combination of time and focus to get back to manuscript updates and revisions, I feel subtle satisfaction and fulfillment. Some co-authors, who have otherwise done great job in the lab and in the manuscript they delicately deviate from co-authorship towards „reviewership” are mildly irritating, but not sufficient enough to taint the net good feeling of this moment.
#academicchatter #academicwriting
Given that web search engines aren't showing me much that isn't crud, can someone link me to their favorite web resource for formatting & content hints for doing a European style academic CV?
@Laura I don't know in what science you are working, but in my field, biology, on a theoretical basis, I would not have considered that obervations cause reality, but that they reflect an event. On a more practical level, the way observations are done can cause bias in the obervation, but I would not invoke a causality, rather an inflection.
So I’m thinking about applying to this career development instructor position that I saw on LinkedIn. And I thought, at first, that it was for a school that has an extension agency in a somewhat remote part of Canada. In fact, it’s for a technical school in an extremely remote part of Alaska. And I don’t know what it says about me that I found that out and thought, “yeah sure I’ll move to the wilderness to teach people about professionalism”.
A few years ago I founded the Institute for Critical Social Theory with my colleague and co-director, Seyed Javad Miri. ICST’s journal, “Critical Persoectives,” just released its second edition. If you want to download the pdf, see the link below. You can also find a link to purchase it via the link below. #philosophy #sociology #religion #politicalscience #academia #academicchatter #university #college #anthropology #psychology #psychoanalysis #MENA
https://www.criticalsocialtheory.com
