Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

I just did some primary-school level investigative work using Google Scholar to find out whether the use of generative #AI is genuinely a widespread issue in #AcademicPublishing and, within five minutes, I have cause for despair... 😲 #AcWri #AcademicChatter

"If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell [scientists] they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bullk of their time competing against each other to convince you they already know what they are going to discover." - David Grabber, The Utopia of Rules.

Exploring @eb's blog and oh my god how does this post have less than a hundred visits

https://boehs.org/node/npm-everything

Were #hiring! We're looking for a #postdoc in #machinelearning for unsupervised learning of large-scale high-dimensional biological data. Know anyone who would be interested? Last day to apply is March 31, 2024. https://www.umu.se/en/work-with-us/open-positions/postdoctoral-position-2-years-in-machine-learning-for-analysis-of-large-scale-high-dimensional-biological-data_707668/

Covid vaccination markedly reduced blood clots, heart attacks, heart failure, stroke and other adverse cardiovascular outcomes, as seen from over 20 million people, about half of whom were vaccinated https://heart.bmj.com/content/early/2024/01/24/heartjnl-2023-323483

Folks this #LexisNexis risk assessment product that vacuums up all automotive data and uses it to raise your insurance rates is none other than the offspring of #RELX, parent of #Elsevier. Far from being an isolated product unrelated to scholarly publishing, year after year in their promotional material they boast how these are integrated systems at both a technical and operational level - your prestige publications fund this, and your professional metrics sold via SciVal are part of the same pool of data.

Who wants to bet that funders wont blink at an "aggregated funding risk score that draws from our proprietary analytics data for a whole-researcher productivity profile." We're beyond surveillance conspiracy theories, these products are here today, and every prestige publication makes us complicit and digs the grave for our own profession.

https://mastodon.social/@kashhill/112083090485396217

Administrative staff increased by 17% from 2005 to 2012, while permanent scientist positions increased only by 0.04%. Total teaching staff did not match the increase in students of 25% and the precariously employed scientists increased by a whopping 50%: for every permanent scientific position, about 10 fixed term positions were created, increasing the already unhealthy competition among the academic precariat to insane levels.

3/4

@moritz_negwer

Short-term and short-sighted reputation management.

“the difference between a significant p-value and a non-significant one is not necessarily significant.”

RE: https://mastodon.social/@AnnaAnthro/112066954260249162

As #MothersDay approaches in the UK, it would be great if pubs/cafes/restaurants/etc offered their deals to all women and not just mums. For many, the exclusion just makes a crappy day that bit harder. Remember, it isn’t always by choice.

#parenting #inclusion #MothersDayUK

Pre Self: what fraction of a journal’s papers are preprinted?

https://quantixed.org/2024/03/09/pre-self-what-fraction-of-a-journals-papers-are-preprinted/

#computing #publishing #science #Crossref #PubMed #Rstats

Interesting, interesting!

'Our findings suggest that current genomic language models (gLMs) do not offer substantial advantages over conventional machine learning approaches that use one-hot encoded sequences. This work highlights a major limitation with current gLMs, raising potential issues in conventional pre-training strategies for the non-coding genome.'

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.02.29.582810v1

Postdoc position! We're a new research group at @IJMonod, Paris, interested in the cellular secretory landscape and its re-organisation during fibrosis.
Join us, and play a central role in shaping our vision in the coming years!
DM/email for questions
https://emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/UMR7592-ISHRAO-003/Default.aspx?lang=EN

Gelman: "a lot of studies just shouldn't be done". too much noise, too poor an experimental design.

#preregistration

Researchers need to start simulating what data they are expecting to collect before they collect it.

My only comment on Gemini is that y'all take everything seriously when it offends white people when we've been yelling about issues for how long and when has a product ever been pulled and when has there ever been this type of shock and media attention?

It's such a pleasure when I get to ask a former PhD student for help on a current project—because it's an area that she knows better than I do.
In other words, I succeeded when she was my student.

The CEO of Exxon just said "we've waited too long" to tackle climate change. He blames "society" and "activists" from keeping Exxon from working on this.

Yes, Exxon. Yes, Exxon. Yes, Exxon: the corporation that for decades has been spending millions to slow progress on climate change, despite its own research showing the problem was urgent.

He said:

"We've waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets in terms of what we need, as a society, to start reducing emissions.... Frankly, society, and the activist — the dominant voice in this discussion — has tried to exclude the industry that has the most capacity and the highest potential for helping with some of the technologies."

What the fuck is this — some sort of dark and twisted joke?

The interview is here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240228015207/https://fortune.com/2024/02/27/exxon-ceo-darren-woods-interview-pay-the-price-for-net-zero/

https://www.salon.com/2024/02/29/exxon-ceo-to-world-climate-isnt-our-fault-now-pay-the-price/

Happy Birthday, R!

#rstats