Whoever thought of letting shops post short-form video on DoorDash. You are a genius of temptation…

🥁🥁🥁 Newly out from us today in Science Advances: “Biased AI Writing Assistants Shift Users’ Attitudes on Societal Issues”.

Large Language Models are providing users with autocomplete writing suggestions on many platforms. Could these suggestions shift users’ own attitudes? (spoiler: YES) (1/7)

Here’s to hoping

Also a Review of Habermas Is Habermas a titan of recent philosophy or a stodgy academic lacking a burning political vision?

I enjoyed this recent @mattpolprof.bsky.social piece on Habermas, which makes the sympathetic observation that Habermas *wanted* philosophy to be dull and difficult, if by that you mean modest and respectful of the arguments of others www.liberalcurrents.com/also-a-revie...

The link has a 404 error on my end!

Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? No. No it can't. Come on, now.

Here's @davekarpf lucid on AI and research.

AI kills the paper and good riddance

davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-replace-social-...

The secret to engaging in social media debate is knowing you will never win anyone over. The best you can hope for is to have people who already agree with tell you you're awesome. You might great a dopamine thrill from the righteousness of your anger! Fine benefits, all. But you will never win.

TRIGGER WARNING, because here is a US Marshal from Trump‘s Gestapo Force in Memphis kicking a puppy today in the Whitehaven neighborhood and breaking its rib. They were serving a warrant and I guess BIG MAN got scared of the schnauzer.

(I didn’t take the video, the dog’s person did)

Los Alamos confirms UMich data center to be used for nuclear weapons research A representative of Los Alamos National Laboratory confirmed nuclear weapons research will be a priority for its portion of the data center it intends to construct in collaboration with the University...

This is one of the more interesting localized struggles right now - at the intersection of data centers, rising electricity costs, and nuclear weapons www.michigandaily.com/news/news-br...

IMAGE: a stylized cell phone with flames coming out of it. TEXT: Delete the Starbucks app off your phone. Seriously. Starbucks is the biggest violator of labor law in modern history. We have the power to tell them union-busting is bad for business. Don't shop at Starbucks until they do better by their baristas!

If Starbucks won’t respect workers at the bargaining table, they don’t deserve our clicks or orders.

Our call to action is simple:

📱 Delete the Starbucks app. #DeleteTheApp

bit.ly/deletetheapp

AAUP Sends Letter of Concern Regarding Expanding Surveillance at the University of Michigan January 23, 2026Via email and physical mailDomenico Grasso, President, University of Michigan3190 Ruthven Building1109 Geddes Ave.Ann Arbor, MI 48109grasso@umich.eduDear President Grasso,The AAUP (…

Important letter from the University of Michigan AAUP chapter and @aaup.org national challenging the expansion of surveillance practices at our university: umaaup.org/2026/01/23/a...

[Trying this again with the right pictures!]
Really pleased with this paper -- posting a new version with a better discussion of the previous literature, some new results on calendar-time portfolios, and some fixed errors!

paulgp.com/papers/finan...

Crowd of people standing on corner of Waldo and San Pablo Avenues in El Cerrito holding signs calling for slower speeds and safer crosswalks. Cars driving by in the background. My sign says "Slow Down, Save Lives".

Thanks El Cerrito/Richmond Annex Walk & Roll for holding a powerful vigil yesterday for Donna Revecho, who was killed while crossing San Pablo Ave.

It was inspiring to join dozens to stand up for safe streets.

We need to hold Caltrans accountable to make San Pablo safer & prevent more tragedies!

Very very cool work

Getting journal rejections like

Post a bird to support @sbworkersunited.org and warn your followers not to buy Starbucks for the duration of the ULP strike.

Don't Buy Starbucks! At any location, today and beyond, while workers are on ULP strike!

As of this morning, Starbucks workers across the country are officially ON STRIKE. And we're prepared for this to become the biggest and longest ULP strike in Starbucks history.

Say #NoContractNoCoffee with us: DON'T BUY STARBUCKS for the duration of our open-ended ULP strike! $SBUX

So good 🥲

Ann Arbor got a gentler version. Surprised the first snow stuck…

My 11-year-old sitting with her pile of Halloween candy, sorting it into a bar graph

We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.

"Anna, Lindsey Halligan Here." Anna Bower Monday, October 20, 2025, 5:40 PM Share On: f X inK My Signal exchange with the interim U.S. attorney about the Letitia James grand jury.

EXCLUSIVE: One Saturday afternoon in October, my phone lit up with a notification.

I glanced down at the message.

“Anna, Lindsey Halligan here,” it began.

So began my text exchange with the woman who is prosecuting the president's perceived political enemies.

www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna...

Mailer that reads: Molly, Seasons may change, but the need for blood is constant.

slightly ominous mailer from the Red Cross

Lack of geographic diversity in peer review skews “publishable” research - Impact of Social Sciences An analysis of peer review data for 204,718 submissions to 60 Institute of Physics journals finds that reviewers tend to favour submissions from their own countries.

Analysing submissions to 60 Institute of Physics journals, @jamesmzd.bsky.social & Misha Teplitskiy find that #PeerReviewers tend to favour submissions from their own countries, meaning authors from countries with few reviewers face a major structural barrier.

@lseimpactblog.bsky.social

How authoritarian states co-opt academic modernisation and bibliometrics for control - Impact of Social Sciences Do bibliometric performance metrics, which underpin global higher education policies, also provide a means for authoritarian states to coerce academics?

🗃️ From the archive: "When implemented without democratic oversight, global performance metrics risk becoming tools of centralisation"

#Bibliometrics #ResearchAssessment

Austerity measures all over the place but the university has $50 million for… whatever this is

two men are standing next to each other in front of a counter in a room . ALT: two men are standing next to each other in front of a counter in a room .

There’s a Drake and Josh version that students will also not understand

Miyagawa Shuntei's 1898 painting, "Playing Go (Japanese Chess)"

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go!

400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

Lack of geographic diversity in peer review skews “publishable” research - Impact of Social Sciences An analysis of peer review data for 204,718 submissions to 60 Institute of Physics journals finds that reviewers tend to favour submissions from their own countries.

💥New: Lack of geographic diversity in peer review skews “publishable” research

✍️ @jamesmzd.bsky.social & Misha Teplitskiy

#PeerReview #PeerReviewWeek #PRW25 #AcademicSky

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
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