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#academia

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🖥️ **Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI**

"_Through four experiments with over 4,400 participants, we reveal a social penalty for AI use: Individuals who use AI tools face negative judgments about their competence and motivation from others._"

J.A. Reif, R.P. Larrick, & J.B. Soll, Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (19) e2426766122, doi.org/10.1073/pnas.242676612 (2025).

#OpenAccess #OA #Research #Article #Psychology #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Technology #Tech #Academia #Academic @psychology

"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."

aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/7/

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

Al Jazeera · An open letter from the presidents of Gaza universitiesBy Ayman Sobh

I'm not at all ashamed to be enjoying the "What the REF!?" podcast, brought to you by members of the Hidden REF committee:

hidden-ref.org/what-the-ref/

If you want to hear some excellent dialogue about the UK's Research Excellence Framework and trying to diversify the range of outputs that universities submit, have a listen!

(Sadly, I don't think Hidden REF or any of the team are on Mastodon.)

The Hidden REFWhat the REF - The Hidden REFWhat the  REF?! A new podcast to demystify the REF What the REF?! is a new podcast that will investigate issues around research culture, recognition for […]

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.

“If the papers are being peer-reviewed by humans, then the prompts would present no issue, but as one professor behind one of the manuscripts told Nature, it is a “counter against ‘lazy reviewers’ who use AI” to do the peer review work for them.” #ai #academia
theguardian.com/technology/202

The Guardian · Scientists reportedly hiding AI text prompts in academic papers to receive positive peer reviewsBy Josh Taylor

So much has been done to erase the toll of #COVID that it's noteworthy this was published.

It's not just the aftermath of COVID, but a reminder that you should be doing your utmost to make sure academia is anti-ableist and accessible, even if you don't think you'll ever become disabled. Disability is one of the marginalized groups you can easily transition into.

ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth #Disability #Ableism #Academia #UCAccessNow

@academicchatter

Been looking for academic jobs in #archaeology for ten months now, and I still have no idea where I'm going to end up. Advertised positions are extremely rare, and my attempts to activate my network informally so far have come to nothing. It's odd to have no need for more XP, just to be waiting for the right ad to appear.

Replied in thread

@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; 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: albert.rierol.net/tell/2016060

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

arXiv logo
arXiv.orgU-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image SegmentationThere is large consent that successful training of deep networks requires many thousand annotated training samples. In this paper, we present a network and training strategy that relies on the strong use of data augmentation to use the available annotated samples more efficiently. The architecture consists of a contracting path to capture context and a symmetric expanding path that enables precise localization. We show that such a network can be trained end-to-end from very few images and outperforms the prior best method (a sliding-window convolutional network) on the ISBI challenge for segmentation of neuronal structures in electron microscopic stacks. Using the same network trained on transmitted light microscopy images (phase contrast and DIC) we won the ISBI cell tracking challenge 2015 in these categories by a large margin. Moreover, the network is fast. Segmentation of a 512x512 image takes less than a second on a recent GPU. The full implementation (based on Caffe) and the trained networks are available at http://lmb.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/people/ronneber/u-net .

"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."

mondoweiss.net/2025/07/cuny-su

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

Hadeeqa Arzoo Malik prepares to speak on June 8 at CUNY4Palestine’s press conference and rally to address repression across CUNY. (Photo: Jude Seminara / @judesies)
Mondoweiss · CUNY suspends student activist leader, fires four faculty members in escalation of repression againstBy Billie Estrine

Dear #academia, as a woman in a male dominated field (compt. biology) I don't need more mentors. When I don't know what to do or want opinions, I have a list of wonderful women and men that I contact for advice.

What I need is champions that will put my name forward when someone ask for an expert, a collaborator on that grant that will get funded for sure or for a conference invite.

That's what privilege gives, and I have some*, but would do with a bit more.

*I promise to give it forward