Academic Mixtape 28
good stuff to read
It’s been almost a month since the last mixtape, so I’ve accumulated a variety of links I’m excited to share with you, and things I think you should read or know about. Let’s go.
Nature does a great profile of Lauren Esposito and their work to broaden participation in the scientific community.
Field-based courses still matter, but not like they used to. “Many spent years of their lives outside—but on athletic fields, not in the woods or down in the creek. Their connection to nature has been mediated by screens or experienced through enough filters to make nature itself feel like artifice. The distance between students and a comfortably broad understanding of the biodiversity around them persists even after heading off to university.”
Longtime online science blogger and overall interesting guy Chuck Pearson wrote the thing about AI in the classroom and cognitive offloading that we all need to read. It’s so good: “The thing that makes me worry is how much these people are giving up the very mental tasks that make them human." [emphasis his]
Yet another high-profile research paper showing that all of the time researchers put in to getting grant money and managing grant money takes away from the research enterprise itself.
Removing institutional barriers to long-term fieldwork is critical for advancing ecology. So, SO much this. It used to be common for grad students to be able to just head off and do work for long periods of time. Nowadays, the publication pressure before even finishing the PhD is an evolutionary arms race that is harming the opportunity to spend much time in the field at all. Maybe it’s the old guy in me, but I get so bummed out for today’s grad students who aren’t provided with a few years to really dig into a project in the field.
A thought-intriguing essay about how changes that we’re seeing in our classrooms are trickle-up effects of changes to K-12 education.
Consider doing more public outreach as a scientist. Written for neuro people, but really applies to all of us.
Intermittent tech fasting. Sounds like a healthy approach. (and different author, but same point)
I haven’t seen the latest Bob Dylan film, A Complete Unknown, but nonetheless I found this take on the film incredibly valuable, and talks about the invisibility of Pete Seeger’s wife Toshi in the film, even though as history played out, she was at the center of it all.
How to tell if you are Captain Jack Aubrey in a Patrick O’Brian novel.
An academic paper on misinformation on Facebook during the 2020 election. It’s interesting. It shows that moderation really does work to prevent the spread and reach of misinformation, and shows how gaps in moderation caused misinformation to spread. Also, now that they are no longer doing fact checking, of course we can expect more lies to spread on the platform. No surprise, but the research behind this is interesting and valuable.
The National Academies just released a report on Understanding and Addressing Misinformation about Science. Like all their reports, the full PDF is free to download.
Speaking of which, here’s the post from Putlizer-prize winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes who quit her position at the Washington Post after censorship from leadership. It turns out having one of the oligarchs own one of our major newspapers is a problem for us. I used to be bullish on the WaPo, but those days are gone. Here is the rough initial sketch of her cartoon that was killed. Jeff Bezos doesn’t want you to see it, so I thought we should share it widely.
But will I still look at good pieces in the WaPo? Apparently, because this one about men doing domestic labor is interesting. It shows that the growing trend for men to spend more time on housework is mostly in the realm of cooking, and this generally coincides with cooking not being seen as a chore, but as a hobby. So really we aren’t seeing many gains at home in this way and men still suck at pulling their own weight at home.
In the same vein, this blog post newsletter entry about declining enrollment of men in college is quite something. Research is showing that men are staying away from college because more women are there and thriving. Essentially, if it’s good enough for women, then men shouldn’t be doing it, is what these men are thinking. I was making the same point about career paths not much earlier.
This ProPublica investigative report on the insides of a militia has many draw-dropping moments. As these militia continue to take on a role parallel to the SA and the SS, I think all of in the US need to understand this stuff.
Several months ago, word came out about multiple incidents of sexual harassment and assault by Neil Gaiman. The details were scant and I think folks just hit the pause button on him. It took a while but a journalist has come out with a detailed report of his misdeeds, which are truly horrific. I saw multiple people on saying, ‘you don’t have to read this article if you don’t want to subject yourself to this, it’s not necessary for you at all.” I did read it, and regret having done so. With that content warning, here is the article.
It so happens that a buddy of mine may have actually caught the moment that Eaton Fire started on film in pixels, from an electric tower that should have been shut down with the wind speeds that we were experiencing.
From Rebecca Solnit: The chronicle of a fire untold. (One of the neat things about subscribing to the guardian is that she’s a columnist there! There some writers at the WaPo and NYT that I miss, but I can still follow them on Bluesky at least.)
Ed Yong on breaking down and putting yourself back together.
Steve Heard reflects on ten years of blogging.
Also I read his most recent post about how different folks have different innate abilities. Which is true, to a certain extent. Some folks are better at some stuff than other people. But he really pushes my ‘annoy’ button when he says this about drawing and the creation of art in general. Folks who say, “I’m no good at drawing” are the people who don’t practice drawing. If you practice at it, you get good. Simple as that. Even if you don’t have as much innate ability. Same for playing instruments, scientific writing, math, etc. Sure, some folks who don’t have much experience with drawing might be able to pick up a pencil and do something good right off the bat, whereas others don’t have the ability. But to say that you’re simply not good at it because you haven’t put in the effort to learn? That’s just sad to me. Because if something matters to you, you can put in the time. It’s more honest to say, “I’ve never bothered to learn how to draw well,” or “I’ve never invested the time at that.” Which is what I say about lots of things, like the mandolin or Portuguese. It’s okay to say that about drawing. Okay, now I don’t have to write a post about it, because I just wrote a paragraph about it. If you agree with me, feel free to comment on his post to let him know he’s wrong, which as his tagline says, is “often.” Usually I find him quite the opposite of wrong, notwithstanding his own opinion of himself.