I hate - HATE - Concur with the power of a thousand suns. The simple recording of 3 receipts (hotel, airline ticket, conference fee) becomes a two-hour time trap in a labyrinth Stanley Kubrick would admire. #academia#academicchatter
Did I share this here earlier? Over 1300 Jewish faculty urged against turning "Antisemitism Awareness Act" into US law
"Criticism of the state of #Israel, the Israeli government, policies of the Israeli government, or Zionist ideology is not – in and of itself – antisemitic. We accordingly urge our political leaders to reject any effort to codify into federal law a definition of #antisemitism that conflates antisemitism with criticism of the state of Israel"
We've all suspected this one, but here's an actual experiment: if the people deciding on grant proposals get only a 1-page summary instead of the full proposal, it doesn't really make any difference. 😑
(Probably even more noteworthy: even if both panelists see the full proposal, they're only in agreement 53.4% of the time, which is basically random chance 🙄)
So it's all one big lottery, who would have thought.
Apparently one of the most common uses of LLMs in #academia is copy editing: cleaning up your #writing on points of spelling, grammar and style. This is wildly unattractive to me. I love writing. My personal style, my personal voice, are extremely high priorities to me. It annoys me no end when a journal editor replaces one of my unconventional style choices with something bland. If an editor ran a paper of mine through an #LLM I would scream bloody murder.
@mrundkvist I agree, but every spell-scheck, every grammar-check etc in Microsoft Word is a result of AI. I would like to find a word-processor that does NOT use AI at all.
If you are gonna nitpick authors about an arbitrary overlap percentage in Crossref reports, then don’t run the report including the affiliations, author list, references, standard disclosures, and mandatory statements in the cover letter (not even part of the manuscript!) all counting toward the overlap.
So annoying. Authors are stuck dealing with manuscripts that obviously do not have problems with text borrowing
@FlockOfCats or you know, just have a human look at the report after it’s spat out to see where the issues are and ignore those where similar wording is completely appropriate (yes my company does this).
@clare_hooley yeah that’s really what gets me. They push this work onto the authors, instead of just looking for 2 seconds, yet Elsevier is the one making billions 🙄
Sure #academia can be toxic at times and all of that.
Also:
this week I sat several times together with colleagues from Russia and Ukraine to discuss future possible projects.
an iranian told me how it was to be in Tehran at the end of April, when the Isreel-Iran situation escalated.
yesterday at my dinner table there were 1. an italian 🙋♂️ 2. a german 3. a brazilian 4. a kroatian 5. an iranian , and it was awesome to discuss the state of the world from all points of views.
@AlexSanterne@academicchatter I don’t think scientists have changed because people haven’t changed, and man is the history of science littered with petty shit
"While suggesting that there is individual work to be done often gets derided as ‘neoliberal’, it’s often the personal connections we can make and the way we can use data to show people how climate crisis affects their lives that can help us mobilise for broader forms of advocacy at structural levels." (@roopikarisam)
"We call upon our colleagues in the homeland and internationally to support our steadfast attempts to defend and preserve our universities for the sake of the future of our people, and our ability to remain on our Palestinian land in Gaza. We built these universities from tents. And from tents, with the support of our friends, we will rebuild them once again."
@immibis@academicchatter Western politicians love Israel, it is their favourite pet project that keeps the fantasies of colonisation and tech dystopia alive, so I have absolutely no faith in them. But as a scholar, the silence of universities that pride themselves over DEI and decolonisation, speaks volume about how empty all those words are, when acting on them means upsetting (white supremacist) funders.
Over the past few years, Republican state lawmakers have introduced more than 150 bills in 35 states that seek to curb academic freedom on campus. Twenty-one of these bills have been signed into law. #Academia#HigherEd#Colleges