LA Times wrote about this yesterday:
Sanjay Madhav, an associate professor .. said that these and other costly ventures were part of a “series of poor decisions” made by university leadership in recent years.

“The administration has made a lot of irresponsible financial decisions,” said Madhav, who is involved in a #union organizing effort for non-tenure track professors. “The regular employees, they ultimately pay the price for the poor decisions.”
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-07-15/usc-budget-deficit-layoffs

#HigherEd#Academia

The slings and arrows of academic publishing when you are a "romantic weirdo":

What happens if you don’t want to pay to publish?
https://euromathsoc.org/magazine/articles/215

#academicchatter #publishing #academia #oa #openaccess

I will never understand why the authors of a manuscript that they post on a preprint server spontaneously decide that it will be better for whoever reads their manuscript to have not only all the figures at the end, but also separated from the legends?

WHY 😭

(Same question for papers sent to review btw. Most journals allow for the format of your choice for the first submission. WHY not make it a nice, easily readable format??)

#ScientificJournals#ResearchPapers#Academia#Preprint#PeerReview

The Journal of Trial and Error is hosting its second Trial & Error Award ceremony this year and nominations are still open!

The aim is to celebrate researchers who have explored scientific failure in any scientific article published between April 1, 2024 and March 31, 2025. The scope is considerably wide, so if you think something might fit, send along your nomination!

The winning article will be selected via live lottery from the pool of nominees at the Trial and Error Symposium on October 7, to which all nominees are welcome to join (and others, of course).

The Journal of Trial and Error feels strongly that our community is strengthened through the recognition of failed research as invaluable to the scientific process. This award was designed to explicitly celebrate this research and to disrupt the culture of stigma surrounding failure in our community.

Help us to redefine how we value failure in the pursuit of knowledge, and in doing so shed some light on the contributions of your colleagues.

You can follow this link to the nomination form: https://trialanderror.org/awards-2025-form

#academia #OpenScience

"We, the presidents of Gaza’s three non-profit universities— Al-Aqsa University, Al-Azhar University-Gaza, and the Islamic University of Gaza — together accounting for the vast majority of Gaza’s students and faculty members, issue this unified statement to the international academic community at a time of unprecedented devastation of higher education in Gaza."

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/7/14/an-open-letter-from-the-presidents-of-gaza-universities

@palestine#Palestine#Israel#Gaza #education #academia

@alex_p_roe Speaking of fruit fly research, you'd be amused or surprised to learn that the original U-net architecture (which today powers stable diffusion, among many other machine learning techniques) introduced in a paper by Ronneberger et al. (2015; https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.04597 ) was developed to perform image segmentation of fly neural tissue as imaged with electron microscopy, to reconstruct neurons and therefore map the brain connectome.

So all those "wasteful" research funding grants to fruit fly research motivated and led to the biggest discovery fueling the whole of the modern "AI" boom. One never knows where basic research will lead, it's impossible to predict. Hence basic research is not at all wasteful, on the contrary, it's essential, it's the foundation of a rich, wealthy, creative society. And also very cheap, comparatively: https://albert.rierol.net/tell/20160601_Unintended_consequences_of_untimely_research.html

Search also for the returns on the human genome project, or on the humble origins of DNA sequencing, to name just two among many.

#Drosophila#StableDiffusion#MachineLearning #academia

An email landed in my inbox today promoting a faculty retreat for my college with a large time slot on "AI for productivity". I responded in part with:

"I say this without exaggeration: There is no way to adopt generic AI tools (like LLMs) at an institutional level in a way that is ethical."

I hate that universities are often so willfully ignorant when it comes to adopting new technologies. As if they are somehow separate from the moral, ethical, and political implications of their development and use when they are in fact central to it.

#AI #criticalAI #futures #resist #academia #academicchatter #labor

"In a move that activists are saying is an attempt to quell the passionate student and worker movement for Palestinian liberation within the City University of New York (CUNY), student organizer Hadeeqa Arzoo Malik has been suspended for a year.

"Along with CCNY’s academic sanction case against Malik, CUNY has also fired four faculty members."

https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/cuny-suspends-student-activist-leader-fires-four-faculty-members-in-escalation-of-repression-against-palestine-activism/

@palestine#Palestine#Israel#Gaza#CUNY#NYC#NewYork #education #academia

🤣 'Positive review only': Researchers hide AI prompts in papers • Nikkei

｢ The prompts were concealed from human readers using tricks such as white text or extremely small font sizes ｣

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Artificial-intelligence/Positive-review-only-Researchers-hide-AI-prompts-in-papers

#ai #academia #research

Hi, academics,
I have a question that is somewhat important for understanding the treatment of some untenured folks at a university.

This question is specifically aimed for academics who are working in a country where they are not citizens: How much, if any, assistance did/does your university provide with your necessary visa requirements? (I was going to do a poll but its probably too fine-grained of answers.)

Please share if relevant!

#academia #academicchatter #academics #academic