Very interesting piece by Vassilis Galanos on the use of #ai in higher #education #teaching
I recently heard Vassilis talking about this, and it gave me a lot to think about!
🤖 🤖 🤖 🤖 🤖
New posting! This one is about the number of unpaid hours in #academia, an insight that's come from the realisation of how much time I'm still committing despite now (currently) being unemployed. To what extent is academic research sustained by the massive expenditure of unpaid labour? How much unpaid overtime do you think you're clocking? Let's lift the lid...
https://totalinternalreflectionblog.com/2023/06/29/pro-bono-a-riff-on-unpaid-labour-in-academia/
@steveroyle @TIR_scienceblog But, that is a problem academics have put on themselves.
I am very privileged because I work in an extremely supportive department (can't say the same for the larger structure of the uni, but I really can't complain about the local environment).
In the past few years I learnt to be very strict and to say no more often. I don't work weekends and I track how much time I spend on different activities during the day, so I have an exact account of how much time I spend doing what. This is very useful to motivate saying no to certain things (I've already spent x% of my time doing xyz, so that's it for this month).
I'm happy with what I do, my career hasn't suffered because of it and I am more efficient at what I do, because I am not overworked.
I do perfectly understand, however, that not everyone is in the position of doing this. We need to change the current academic culture if we want change. This starts from teaching our students about good life/work balance; exposing and discouraging toxic behaviours in the workplace; voice concerns when something is happening. These will likely go unheard, but the more people do it the more changes are likely to happen.
In a new video @geerlingguy spots the #enshittification of #RedHat #Linux quoting @pluralistic thanks to the new Redhat source code paywall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8
Turnitin acknowledged that its AI detector sucks
https://www.utimes.pitt.edu/news/teaching-center-doesn-t?fbclid=IwAR1Lp40fzkpNbWFPt1J-CeUBzbk8ENplO0Z2jgff1_AumOiZSe80R79vOE4
@PhilippBayer ahahah ok, that makes sense.I was envisioning grand plans of crawling the literature for most used primer sequences! Imagine the nightmare of seeing 'Other users of this gene have also used this primer'
@PhilippBayer Interesting idea. How would you define 'common', though?
While big tech tries to force employees back to the office, smaller tech companies are using remote work as a competitive advantage to hire and retain talent. 81% of firms <5,000 employees allow remote work or have a remote work options.
""If you require someone to move to a certain location, you are inherently limiting the talent pool that you’re going to be working with." @zuhayeer
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/6/20/23762655/tech-perk-remote-work-freedom-airbnb-yelp
You are doing #Bioinformatics? Would you say data analysis requires interactive work, e.g. using jupyter, rstudio, etc.? Or would you prefer using a workflow system, e.g. #snakemake, #nextflow, #galaxy, etc.?
I am not talking about visualization, though. Visualization is important and can be achieved regardless of the approach.
Please boost. Thank you.
Great job for someone who wants to bring down Elsevier
"Do you believe we can break out of the culture of publish-or-perish, and find new and fair ways to evaluate the contributions researchers make to society?
We are seeking a motivated, proactive and organised individual to develop and deliver a research outputs analytics service across the university."
Full time, permanent
£41-50k
Imperial College London Library
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/description/ACA00173/research-outputs-analyst
@WhyNotZoidberg @GalmeshRosewood If you’ve held a “Save” icon in your hands, that makes you ancient now.
“We welcome proposals to found new journals as well as proposals to transfer existing journals to PsychOpen GOLD (e.g., transforming a subscription based journal to an Open Access journal). Applications are invited from scientists and scholarly societies from all parts of the world.
PsychOpen GOLD journals are published completely free of charge for readers, authors, and editors or scholarly societies (Diamond Open Access)”
See details :
https://psychopen.eu/call2023/
That thing when you've been waiting for a submission to get peer reviewed for over a year and the journal has periodically written you to say they are trying but nobody will review it and then you finally get the reviews and they are 1) seemingly responding to a completely different text and/or 2) suggesting you shift the main focus to something you clearly decided to NOT focus on (for obvious reasons).
Now to craft the reply to this nightmare and ask myself again why we didn't just withdraw it and send it elsewhere. But also, to question the usefulness of these reviews and ask myself if they did a single thing to improve the piece. (Uh, yeah, no).
I also realize peer review is a broken system and I myself have declined MANY requests over the past year due to illness as many other folks have since #longCOVID is in fact a mass disabling event and will impact all the free labor we used to do.
But still, had to have a gripe.
First day on Mastodon, great news to share already: The
@EUCouncil
calls for #transparent, #equitable, and #openaccess to scholarly publications, urging a shift towards free dissemination of research:
As PhD student, I only have little experience in being a reviewer in #PeerReview. But I always try to give concrete suggestions for improving unclear sections/sentences/missing information. Being concrete helps to be modest and keep away the idea that there is an 'ideal text' somewhere in my mind (to which my papers would never live up either).
However, this could be a different story if I had to do a review per week...
@PhilippBayer Novelty should not be ground for rejection. That plays a big component in the reproducibility crisis we're seeing by pushing publication of flimsy (but, hey, novel and shiny!) science
Senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and Zhejiang-Edinburgh Joint Institute (ZJE).
Undergraduate Programme Coordinator, Biomedical Informatics at ZJE.
I teach #imageanalysis & #dataanalysis with #RStats & #python.
My research is focused on how #heterogeneous behaviour in #pituitary (and other) cells shapes their function as a population.
I'm also very interested in #reproducibility and #openscience.