Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

🧵 New report just dropped 🚨 "Fractured Reality: How Democracy Can Win the Global Struggle Over the Information Space" — from the EU Joint Research Centre, led by Mario Scharfbillig and I. A landmark read for anyone working on disinformation, platforms & democracy. 👇

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I'm hiring! 📢 Fully funded 4-year PhD position in Language Evolution using Communication Games at @mpi-nl.bsky.social. Come work with me on how different social pressures shape the evolution of new communication systems in the lab! Deadline for application is May 18th! share.google/fGTKbFS4v4Gb...

Competent and compelling rebuttal of Labour’s most ill-advised and cruel policy on extending time to settlement. The UK government should hang their head in shame.

Tracking the facist project in the US /w Christina Pagel Science Counterpunch - S1 Ep8

This is for those of us trying to retreat into the crumbling ivory tower: open.substack.com/pub/protagon...

You're Not Overreacting. This Is Actually Fascism. YouTube video by Rutger Bregman

Hard to disagree: youtu.be/DDf25rNyT1A?...

Would the opposite question - how to use LLMs to create beneficial language input for human babies - also fit the topic?

Is there a hybrid option?

How Trump govt has undermined fair elections over last month YouTube video by Professor Christina Pagel

Watch out for the midterms. The Trump administration has chipped away at free and fair elections over the last year - here are some of the things they've done over the last month...

All actions available on www.trumpactiontracker.info

Subtitles available!

youtu.be/EkgsDCtAv-E

Utter brilliance, especially the footnotes!

AI Chatbot That Only Responds ‘Huh’ Valued At $200 Billion PALO ALTO, CA—Hailing the new product as a “game changer” in the development of large language models, Silicon Valley insiders confirmed Tuesday that an AI chatbot that only responds “huh” had been va...

theonion.com/ai-chatbot-t... @dingemansemark.bsky.social 😁

Year 2, Week 5 Jan 24-30, 2026 - wounds to bind

Each Friday night, I write about what happened in US science & higher ed. 🧪

Year 2, Week 5: Jan 30
- shutdown w/UMN student leaders + Texas A&M protesters & AAUP/AFT advocacy
- where we stand on research $$
- so many measles (21 day quarantine, oof)

& so much more - buttondown.com/liminalcreat...

This mind-numbing idiocy also fails to take into account the benefits our domestic students derive from their international peers.

Resources for Researchers — IASCL The IASCL staff members wish you a Happy New Year!

We recently added a list of keynote speeches and presentations by child language scholars. Check it out! www.childlanguage.org/resources-fo...

You definitely want to follow @trumpactiontracker.bsky.social

Those of us who have been voicing disapproval (which is probably most academics) would be putting ourselves in harms way if we visited. So - hybrid conferencing it has to be.

It doesn’t matter whether you call this fascism or something else - history teaches us what atrocities social systems are capable of if not stopped in time. That time is now.

The shooting of Alex Pretti was (US) state sanctioned murder and has been followed up by attempts to destroy evidence and stop local police (and even the FBI) from investigating.

Minnesota police are trying to counter the lies and illegality.

Terrifying

open.substack.com/pub/heatherc...

Detecting parallels to the autism debate: changes in diagnostic criteria & awareness account for much of the increase yet the search for external causes persists. Also, there may be causes for mental health decline (if confirmed to be real) that attribution to social media conveniently obscures.

Headline: "Scientists discover emperor penguin colony in Antarctica using satellite images"

Yesterday it was cows using tools, today its penguins using satellite imagery.

What I find astonishing is that a handful of individuals are able to run a species of 8 billion+ into the ground and there seems so little combined agency of the rest of us.

Truly one to watch! Congrats @damianblasi.bsky.social !

Average agreement with the statement "I often feel very lonely" plotted over time

I started reading up on the whole "loneliness pandemic" narrative because this seems like a literature where the age-period-cohort problem may be relevant (or maybe it isn't?).

Here's data from Australia (HILDA), average agreement with the statement "I often feel very lonely" (SD of ca. 1.8).>

Personal reflections on a Trumpian 2025 The implications of a year in Trump's new America and why I started tracking Trump - and why I'm not stopping.

It would be nice to still live in times when I mainly used social media to amplify cool sciency stuff. But these times have passed. open.substack.com/pub/christin...

Language Development Research, Volume 5, Issue 3 is now available for download on the LDR website. Thank you to all of our contributors!

Wishing everyone a joyous New Year!

ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/issue/101/in...

The misinformation situation is worse than you think Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Make your donation have the maximum impact: https://givewell.org (pick YOUTUBE and then Simon Clark at checkout) The handbook: https://zenodo.org/records/15696097 Become a patron at http://www.patreon.com/simonoxfphys REFERENCES 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20250

Superb video by @simonoxfphys.com Simon Clark on how truth on climate change is twisted and dismantled by Trump administration: www.youtube.com/watc.... 1/2
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Does adolescence really last until age 32? Those “turning points” in brain aging aren’t quite what you think

I finally got some time to flesh out my rant about these headlines...
TL;DR: age differences ≠ aging
jenndowd.substack.com/p/does-adole... #demography #episky #medsky #neurosky

UK to rejoin EU’s Erasmus student exchange programme Exclusive: British students will be able to participate in EU-wide scheme from January 2027, sources say

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

So agree! Psychology as a science is maddeningly ahistorical. Are there any big cohort data on mental health spanning the last 2,3,4 decades to run some interrupted time-series analyses trying to tease apart effects of events from continuous trends?

What's happening to the CDC's views on vaccines? | Beyond the headlines YouTube video by Professor Christina Pagel

Part 2 (10 mins) covering attacks on science, civil rights and how Trump wants to be a king.

again there will be some short versions of some of it later this week...

All based on www.trumpactiontracker.info

youtu.be/9fudutXpn08