A cluster hire here at UNSW Science, looking for cross-disciplinary Level B/C academics. Come and work in Sydney!

https://www.unsw.edu.au/science/about-us/recruitment-science

#academia

The Fediverse is overflowing with incredible artists, engineers, designers, photographers, and brilliant minds in academia. With the job market on fire globally, let's make a habit of hiring from within our own community, please 🎨📚

Need a designer for a project? A photographer? A researcher? Post your gigs here. Let's create a close-knit support system to help fellow people weather the storm.

If you are hiring: look here first. Post your short-term gigs, full-time roles, and freelance contracts. Give people here a chance.

If you are looking: share your work, follow the hashtags, and connect. Let's take care of each other.

#FediHire #GetFediHired #Academia #MastoArt #art #Photography #Freelance #SoftwareDevelopment #programming #photography

Free book! The Myths and Legends of the Bantu and Other Africans is now available for download to email subscribers, and will be free until the end of the month.

This is an entertaining book that brings you a wonderful world of legends, folklore, and amazing creatures that will fuel your imagination.

It might be of interest to #academia

Get it here
https://www.ododopress.com/non-fiction/myths-and-legends-of-the-bantu/

#freebook #books #bookstodon #mythology #folklore

Alt...

The cover of an ebook, with a brown color scheme. There are two creatures, half-people with only one hand or one leg, and with wings, they are colorful like moths but appear bluish. The text says Myths and Legends of the Bantu and Other Africans, Revised and Edited by Dilman Dila, written by Alice Werner.

I'm reviewing a grant proposal. Someone I know said "just use an LLM, then read what it says, use what you like, send it in." That is many things but above all irresponsible, and here is why.

I read the grant and wrote my own evaluation. The grant is not exactly in my field of research, so there was quite some looking up of papers, techniques, and jargon in the process. What I wrote is my perspective (what I have been asked to provide) and makes sense to me only because of the leg work and time I put in.

Now suppose the LLM had written an evaluation, with the "correct prompting": "You are a senior neuroscientist and have been asked to evaluate this grant proposal ... write an evaluation of maximum so many words and in a neutral tone without emphatic or bombastic terms, using rigorous language".

No matter what the LLM would have generated, I could not have assessed whether it was correct or not, and hence, I wouldn't be able to send it in. Plus it wouldn't be my perspective.

Had I used an LLM, I would have learned nothing, and sent in what amounts to, possibly, gibberish, or brilliant commentary: I would not have been able to tell either way. That it'd be written in beautiful language and grammatically correct amounts to nothing, or worse than nothing: the appearance of my thought process without the substance.

Took me some hours, that weren't paid. In the face of plummeting salaries in academia, that is no longer OK. My response should have been to decline to review it, to contribute to pushing grant agencies (and scientific journals) to pay for our work, but alas, I am, somehow, an idealist fool. But I don't do that for for-profit journals; there I draw the line nowadays.

#academia #LLMs

Update. "Fired Over Speech, Professors Take Their Employers to Court—and Win."
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/academic-freedom/2026/07/30/fired-over-speech-professors-take-their-employers-court

"The recent spate of censorship and academic freedom violations is the worst since the McCarthy era, according to one lawyer. But as faculty rack up legal victories, universities may start to think twice before punishing extramural speech."

#Academia #AcademicFreedom #Censorship #FirstAmendment #Trump #Universities #USLaw #USPol #USPolitics

Rhizome Function Anagram Random Generator

preprint | https://zenodo.org/records/21551292

doi | https://orcid.org/0009-0009-5144-3278

Herein are described principles and a scheme of random number generation styled as, pangrandomonium, or ‘pangrand’. Pangrand is a anagrammatic random number generator that uses rhizome functions as chaotic indexing and shuffling instructions to reorder and sum perfect pangrams. Brief descriptions are given for the principles of pangram summing and rhizome indexing functions, Source code of the random number generator is included herewith. The source code is attached to the PDF file.

Sections:

1. Pangrams (Holoalphabetic arrays) ;
2. Rhizome Functions ;
3. Rhizome Hardness Problems ;
4. Random Generator Methods ;
5. Errata ;
6. Source Code.

#Preprints #Random #Cryptography #RNG #Pangrams #Anagrams #Pascal #Papers #RhizomeFunction #AcademicMastodon #Cryptology #Math #NumberTheory #Papers #Academia #ComputerScience #CompSci #AcademicChatter #OpenScience

A proposed White House rule would give political appointees unprecedented control over scientific funding.

One physicist, who helped discover the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle,” explains how the move would’ve stifled that breakthrough.
https://www.propublica.org/article/federal-science-grants-russell-vought-omb?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

#News #WhiteHouse #Trump #Science #Physics #Research #Funding #Academia

A student was telling me, they haven’t read some papers I asked them to read because it takes them a very long time.

Well, let me tell you: it took me 20 days (with 2-4 hours per day) to read a single large paper in my field, to understand the multiple years of work that went into it with its many implications for my own research and for the broader field. 20 days. And it was worth it.

There are no shortcuts.

#academia

"Professor fired over #CharlieKirk post could receive $1.9M in settlement."
https://thehill.com/homenews/education/5948386-professor-fired-over-charlie-kirk-post-could-receive-1-9m-in-settlement

This is just the latest in a series. Universities that disciplined professors for criticizing Charlie Kirk knew or should have known that they were violating those professors' free-speech rights. But they did it to align themselves with the Trump admin, even on the wrong side of the law. Consider these settlements and damage awards to be a cowardice tax.

#Academia #AcademicFreedom #Censorship #FirstAmendment #Trump #Universities #USLaw #USPol #USPolitics

NEW: For decades, oil companies have funded universities’ research into climate change “solutions” that would not require the public to stop using oil and gas.

Carbon capture is one of their favored ideas.

One snag: It won’t fix the climate crisis.
https://projects.propublica.org/why-carbon-capture-cant-solve-climate-change/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

#News #Climate #ClimateChange #Oil #Gas #Environment #Research #Science #Academia