Angry goose meme. Close-up in the top panel has a squinting goose asking "Which sins of science" In the bottom panel, it's angrily chasing a person yelling "WHICH SINS???" in satisfyingly large font.

The more I hear our leaders agreeing that science should atone for its sins & needs to be reformed, the more I find myself asking "which sins, exactly?"

I wholeheartedly agree that systemic biases in academia & medicine harm a whole lot of people! ...but that's not what they mean, now is it?

Causal inference courses: here's how you estimate causal effects and these are the assumptions you rely on and by the way the assumptions are always violated kthxbye

+1

Prepare More Students for Advanced Math Dear Colleague, Your district’s middle schools now have options for preparing more students for the advanced math that you teach. Help prepare students for your class by sharing the following information with your middle school colleagues. Expand Access to Pre-AP Algebra 1 in Middle School Middle schools can order Pre-AP® Algebra 1 for free if their high school enrolls students in certain AP courses.

Talk about mission creep. The leviathan College Board is now trying to worm its way into MIDDLE SCHOOL by providing an Algebra I. Pretty soon you’ll see the College Board preparing elementary school material. Will the CB produce a pregnancy guidebook? Only time will tell. 🙄 #MTBoS #ITeachMath

I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

I wish more educators and fewer lawyers would run for public office, in part b/c the best ones are naturals at explaining the whys of things.

We could use more people in public life who cultivate understanding and bring people along together instead of "voters are too dumb to appreciate language"

Same goes for every "genius" academic or scholar.

Deleting everything after the question mark before I share a link genuinely brings me joy. It feels like a tiny act of resistance.

Families across the U.S. are getting college acceptance letters — and tuition bills NPR's Ayesha Rascoe speaks with economist Judith Scott-Clayton about the cost of college in the U.S. They discuss the difference between sticker and net price and the opaqueness of tuition costs.

I just listened to an extended NPR interview w an education economist about 40 yrs of rising college tuition & student debt, and not a single mention that 40 yrs ago was about the time all states cut higher education budgets, privatized tuition, in order to pay for tax cuts and prisons

Humanity did that. Science did that. Publicly-funded research did that. Excellent universities did that. Diversity did that. International cooperation did that.

Artemis II is a perfect example of what we can do at our best.

Welcome home, Integrity crew!

Refusal to Review I wrote the below email, when invited to review a paper that was partially processed by ChatGPT. As I imagine the email could be useful inspiration for others, I decided to make it available. Feel …

“Feel free to adapt and reuse. No attribution needed (…) If you make an adaption that you also want to share, I’d love to know about it, too.”

irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/04/08/r...

A star scientist showed that better genetics lessons could reduce racism. It was the death knell for his career Brian Donovan had persuaded high school teachers and education researchers that prejudice might be ended by changing how genetics is taught.

“We’ve lost out on the ability to continue to improve this work to make it more effective, and to explore how to apply it to other areas…There are a lot of different ways that genetics has been used to justify prejudice and…that human-made social categories interface with biological categories“🧪

NASA isn't why the US doesn't have universal healthcare, or a social safety net. The US doesn't have those things because politicians with the power to provide them choose specifically not to (with varying levels of support from voters). Enthusiasm for human spaceflight doesn't drive that choice.

A full disc image of Earth, as seen from the Orion Crew Module. The planet is a pale blue, swirling with white clouds and glowing slightly lighter blue in place from reflected light. At lower left, a large brown landmass is Africa, with Spain and Portugal with twinkling lights where the planet curves. At top right, auroras glow in a thin green glow, just barely separated from the planet's surface. Earth is set against the black of space (pic: NASA/R.Wiseman)

More context on this #Artemis II image:

* This is the night side, lit by moonlight. You can see city lights in Spain & Portugal, & a sliver of day at lower right

* The Sun is entirely behind Earth, which makes it a kind of solar eclipse, but w/ Earth doing the eclipsing instead of the Moon:
☀️🌍🚀🌕

The Shingles vaccine is linked w/ reduced risk of Alzheimer's in 4 large natural experiments
Today, the potential of high-dose flu vaccines vs standard dose in a large retrospective age 65+ cohort for less Alzheimer’s. More pronounced in women (like Shingles vaccines)
neurology.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

As an alum, I love seeing this.

More money spent on education does indeed lead to better outcomes for students.

This open letter to students at Georgetown university is extremely good

medium.com/center-on-pr...

Goldman Sachs reports that 300 million full-time jobs could be replaced by AI by 2030. Labor turnover is high and hiring has slowed. 71% of Americans worry that AI will cause permanent job loss. As young people about to enter the workforce for the first time, the fear of unemployment is understandable, but we cannot save ourselves with the very tool that is putting us at risk. The irony is that as Penn pours endless money and energy into AI advancement in its attempt to get ahead, the University is only quickening its own demise. AI cannot coexist with education — it can only degrade it. As technology advances and workers are replaced by machines, schools are some of the only places we have left to explore and wrestle with human thought. With our own university leading the charge, AI is now corrupting those few sacred spaces and leaving us with nowhere to engage in true scholarship. Editorials represent the majority view of members of The Daily Pennsylvanian Editorial Board who meet regularly to discuss issues relevant to the Penn community. This body is led by Editorial Board Chair Jack Lakis and is entirely separate from the newsroom. Questions or comments should be directed to letters@thedp.com.

An unaccounted for part of the economy is how much young people virulently hate AI, despite how aggressively it's being forced on them. They realize it's making their friends dumber and ruining the world and they want nothing to do with it.

From the Penn student paper:
www.thedp.com/article/2026...

What 39 traits reveal about the autism spectrum The autism spectrum is big, vibrant and complicated, a new graphic of 39 traits shows

People often talk about the autism spectrum as if it's a simple sliding scale from "more autistic" to "less." This isn't true — the spectrum is dizzyingly complex, and @unamandita.bsky.social and I set out to visualize this in SciAm's April issue:
www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

my most recent academic pet peeve is the injection of mind-and-brain jargon into everything.

like recently someone crossed out "unconscious bias" and replaced it with "cognitive bias". what other kind of bias could there be than a cognitive one? do they think it could instead be from the pancreas?

Susie Wiles, Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, Has Breast Cancer

Breast cancer mortality dropped 58% from 1975 to 2019.

Localized, early detected breast cancer has a 99% 5 year survival rate.

Modern mammogram tech was developed by NASA for telescopes.

Last year, RFK Jr. cancelled 87 research grants on breast cancer.

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/u...

OpenAI’s push to become crucial infrastructure in education should not and cannot be separated from its broader entanglements with the US military and mass surveillance that includes students and teachers.

Disability accommodations are a rare thing that actually trickles down. You like curb cutouts? Auto-opening doors? Jar openers? Ramps? Hand rails? YOU’RE WELCOME

Even as an abled person you use disability accommodations every single day.

Supporting accommodations actually helps everyone.

move slow and repair things

Absolutely unreal how so much time, capital, energy, etc. is being put into these companies and this is what they come up with. Like, this is such a stupid and horrifyingly dystopian way to frame learning that I don’t even know where to start.

This has nothing to do with the specific content here, but Polymarket adopting the language of news, here with BREAKING, and with Texas election results earlier this week, is BAD. Polymarket is not and will never be a news org or break news. It's a betting app. It's Draft Kings for sociopaths.

Not an AI expert, but it seems much more likely to me that the language prediction algorithm is just replicating the increasing anxiety in humans' language because of all the awful things happening on our planet.

You know, principle of parsimony and all that.

New tools for understanding AI and learning outcomes OpenAI introduces the Learning Outcomes Measurement Suite to assess AI’s impact on student learning across diverse educational environments over time.

Under no circumstances should we allow OpenAI to become the self-authorized educational research evidenve source that it is trying to be. Vendors must not be research authorities. openai.com/index/unders...

Time to re-share this piece I made a year ago today about neurodiversity and neurodivergence, and why the important distinctions between them is not about grammar/linguistics.