What is the PhD actually for? A response to Prachee’s “Free the PhD”, and a critique of my own work

What is the PhD actually for? compbiologist.substack.com/p/what-is-th...

You need to make AI guidelines for your lab Here's why you should, and how to start

I wrote about why every lab should have AI use guidelines, and how to do it.

open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

I tried to buy a scientific paper YouTube video by Christophe

Paper mills www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEwi...

The Most Valuable Thing You Can Do as a Scientist Why mentoring and not papers, grants, or prestige, is our greatest legacy

behindthebioinformatics.substack.com/p/the-most-v...

How to Work With Anyone A key skill to unlocking your career

debliu.substack.com/p/how-to-wor...

Important point about AI and math in this excellent @matteowong.bsky.social interview with Terrance Tao

www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

How to Avoid Choking Ilia Malinin's prefrontal cortex probably got in the way

davidepstein.substack.com/p/how-to-avo...

Sociopathic AI agents AI alignment will likely require creating AIs with genuine empathy

"I have no idea how to build an empathic AI. I am quite confident though that as long as AI doesn’t feel empathy it won’t be truly aligned, no matter how sophisticated the RLHF training is that it’s subjected to. Interesting times ahead." blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/sociopathi...

How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

Anthropic Research: "We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery." www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

Please Switch to Python Or R. Or Anything. Just Not Stata, SAS, SPSS, or MATLAB.

Please Switch to Python. Or R. Or Anything. Just Not Stata, SAS, SPSS, or MATLAB.

presentofcoding.substack.com/p/please-swi...

Afcon and the power of a footballing diaspora A compelling tournament has shown the importance of players — and fans — raised outside Africa

"About a third of players in the tournament (AfCon 2025) were born to African immigrant families outside Africa. That means the starkest divides on display aren’t between different African countries, but between African-raised players and European ones."

www.ft.com/content/9d47...

AfroBiotech Roundup | William Okech | Substack Stay up to date on the latest biotech research focused on Africa and its diaspora. Click to read AfroBiotech Roundup, by William Okech, a Substack publication. Launched 3 months ago.

AfroBiotech Roundup: Stay up to date on the latest biotech research focused on Africa and its diaspora.
afrobiotech.substack.com

Why smart people sabotage themselves in conversations and how silence can become your most useful tool Win the point and lose the war, or learn the discipline that actually gets you what you want

The power of silence. newsletter.consultingintel.com/p/why-smart-...

In Sync: The Hidden Rhythms That Shape Us How the People Closest to Us Quietly Shape Who We Become

How the People Closest to Us Quietly Shape Who We Become

debliu.substack.com/p/in-sync-th...

I'm Not a Robot Prove your humanity once and for all

Couldn't get past level 17: neal.fun/not-a-robot/

Kenyan artist Thandiwe Muriu’s 'Camo series', photographic portraits cloaking models in patterned fabric #WomensArt

Opinion | Students Hate Them. Universities Need Them. The Only Real Solution to the A.I. Cheating Crisis.

Oral exams to counter the rise of AI-assisted cheating

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/o...

Can you run a Premier League football club? Step into the boardroom, navigate profit and sustainability rules and guide your club to glory

We've built a football game and it's free to play!

Can you run a Premier League club? Step into the boardroom, navigate financial regulations and guide your team to glory in our new game.

👉 ft.com/football-game ⚽️💸

Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can generate and revise text with human-level performance. These models come with clear limitations, can produce inaccurate information, and reinforce existing biases.

The appearance of large language models caused a drastic shift in the vocabulary of academic writing, according to an analysis in #ScienceAdvances of more than 15 million biomedical abstracts published from 2010 to 2024.

Learn more:

#dataviz animation thread

Great use of #rstats and the rdbnomics package

Vibe coding: a new paradigm for biomedical software development - BioData Mining

What is Vibe Coding and how can it be used to advance biomedical research? @tatonetti.bsky.social & I explain in this editorial biodatamining.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... #bioinformatics #datascience #coding #vibecoding

Illustrated use of Fish (singular animal), Fish (multiple individuals of the same type of fish) and fishes (multiple kinds or species of fish).

🧪 PSA regarding fish and fishes.

open.substack.com/pub/fishhist...

The towers of babble (are falling) Your internet comes in a sachet now

"In Sub-Saharan Africa, less than a third of mobile phones connect to the internet at all."

techsafari.beehiiv.com/p/the-towers...

Data Science and the Art of Persuasion Despite heavy investments to acquire talented data scientists and take advantage of the analytics boom, many companies have been disappointed in the results. The problem is that those scientists are t...

Data Science and the Art of Persuasion

hbr.org/2019/01/data...

Great take on modern CS Education

www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Love this! Spell out your name using NASA satellite images.
landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/apps/YourNam...

AI, LLMs, and BS – Data Visualization with R Use R, ggplot2, and the principles of graphic design to create beautiful and truthful visualizations of data

On the responsible (and ethical) use of LLMs in academia datavizsp25.classes.andrewheiss.com/resource/ai-...

LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything : Hallucinated package names fuel 'slopsquatting'

Vibe coding, hallucinated package names, and malware 🤯

www.theregister.com/AMP/2025/04/...

Not a Bitter Divorced Woman | Felgona Oyuga YouTube video by Engage Talk

Felgona Oyuga on life, love, and everything in-between

www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-yy...