Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Titus Brown @titus.idyll.org · 16h

or:

rm -fr / >& /dev/null &
clear

Reposted by Titus Brown

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 22h

a key thing about vought — and all of these guys — is that they have a totally top down and hierarchical vision of the world. they believe that the cultural changes they hate can be turned off by destroying the federal government because they can’t imagine that they emerged bottom-up in society

Thomas Zimmer @thomaszimmer.bsky.social · 22h

What he’s railing against is a profound shift in culture, status… He’s obsessed with the idea that America is controlled by a leftist “ruling elite” - but “elite” isn’t defined socio-economically or by political power, it means something like: Getting to define “real America” and who gets to belong.

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the Cherissa Prime @mscherissa.bsky.social · 21h

Right on.

Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 1d

“If you share your knowledge outside the scientific community, then you’re already exerting societal influence, according to Judi Mesman. This isn’t problematic for the prestige of science: ‘Pretending to be neutral doesn’t make sense to me.’”

www.nwo.nl/en/there-is-...

‘There is no clear boundary between science and activism’ | NWO

If you share your knowledge outside the scientific community, then you’re already exerting societal influence, according to Judi Mesman. This isn’t problematic for the prestige of science: ‘Pretending to be neutral doesn’t make sense to me.’

www.nwo.nl

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Karen Masters @karenlmasters.bsky.social · 1d

Jess Wade is amazing, and it's my absolute honour to be one of the more than 2000 women in STEM whose wikipedia page she started: mymodernmet.com/jessica-wade... 🧪🔭👩‍🔬

Meet the Physicist Who Wrote Over 2,000 Wikipedia Biographies for Women in STEM

After noticing a lack of entries on Wikipedia for incredible women throughout history, this incredible woman decided to take matters into her own hands.

mymodernmet.com

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Titus Brown @titus.idyll.org · 20h

V. good read.

Vaughn Cooper @vscooper.micropopbio.org · 23h

Terrific article. Could @standupforscience.bsky.social become one of this generation’s “Garland Fund” revolutionaries?

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/o...

Opinion | How to Save the American Experiment

www.nytimes.com

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Avishay BSG (Ben-Sasson-Gordis) @avishaybsg.bsky.social · 21h

I conclude with some grim thoughts. Still, at least in the US and Israel, things haven't progressed to the point I describe here. They could, because no democracy is safe from collapse, but there's still a ways to go as Hirschman teaches us. And so we think, argue, and do politics. 26/26

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Avishay BSG (Ben-Sasson-Gordis) @avishaybsg.bsky.social · 22h

Democratic backsliding in the mode that @kimlanelaw.bsky.social calls "autrocratic legalism" uses constitutional and legal rhetoric, process, and reasoning to dismantle competitive liberal-democratic institutions. 8/

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Joshua Weitz @joshuasweitz.bsky.social · 22h

From last night.... chaos is a management strategy to undermine and demoralize health experts and the federal workforce.

We should call it out and reject it.

These are not 'errors'.

More here:
open.substack.com/pub/joshuasw...

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Titus Brown @titus.idyll.org · 22h

Reading the Cuttlefish 2 paper and I really admire the clarity and simplicity of the introduction. Makes me understand a few things in new, different, and productive ways. Lovely.

Scalable, ultra-fast, and low-memory construction of compacted de Bruijn graphs with Cuttlefish 2 - Genome Biology

The de Bruijn graph is a key data structure in modern computational genomics, and construction of its compacted variant resides upstream of many genomic analyses. As the quantity of genomic data grows rapidly, this often forms a computational bottleneck. We present Cuttlefish 2, significantly advancing the state-of-the-art for this problem. On a commodity server, it reduces the graph construction time for 661K bacterial genomes, of size 2.58Tbp, from 4.5 days to 17–23 h; and it constructs the graph for 1.52Tbp white spruce reads in approximately 10 h, while the closest competitor requires 54–58 h, using considerably more memory.

genomebiology.biomedcentral.com

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 1d

“the manosphere generates its own untested and speculative evolutionary hypotheses, or “just-so stories”, about men, women, and society…

..we reflect on implications for evolutionary scholars and for the field as a whole, in terms of ethics and public image”

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

A Hundred and Two Just-So Stories: Exploring the Lay Evolutionary Hypotheses of the Manosphere | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core

A Hundred and Two Just-So Stories: Exploring the Lay Evolutionary Hypotheses of the Manosphere

www.cambridge.org

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Teresa Rayon @trayon.bsky.social · 1d

Model organisms as platforms for training scientific minds

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 23d

🧵 Thread with my favourite quotes from:

📝 Guest, O., Suarez, M., Müller, B., et al. (2025). Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

1/🧵

Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia

Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these col...

doi.org

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Matthew Terrill @matthewterrill.bsky.social · 1d

I was already a hard AI-skeptic but this cements my long suspicion that there is no feasible path to anything close to return on invested capital for these data centers. Tech would need 15 to 25 times current AI revenues within the next 2-3 years just to break even. Not financially viable.

"I clearly hit a nerve in the industry, when judging by the number of individuals who reached out to chat," he wrote in an followup blog post. "In total, l've spoken with over two-dozen rather senior people in the datacenter universe, and there was an interesting and overriding theme to our conversations: no one understands how the financial math is supposed to work. They are as baffled as I am, and they do this for a living."
Kupperman's original skepticism was built on a guess that the components in an average Al data center would take ten years to depreciate, requiring costly replacements. That was bad enough: "I don't see how there can ever be any return on investment given the current math," he wrote at the time.
But ten years, he now understands, is way too generous.
" had previously assumed a 10-year depreciation curve, which I now recognize as quite unrealistic based upon the speed with which Al datacenter technology is advancing," Kupperman wrote. "Based on my conversations over the past month, the physical data centers last for three to ten years, at most."
In his previous analysis, Kupperman assumed it would take the tech industry $160 billion of revenue to break even on data center spending in 2025 alone. And that's assuming an incredibly generous 25 percent gross margin - not to mention the fact that the industry's actual Al revenue is closer to $20 billion annually, as the investment manager noted in his previous blog.

"In reality, the industry probably needs a revenue range that is closer to the $320 billion to $480 billion range, just to break even on the capex to be spent this year," Kupperman posited in his updated essay. "No wonder my new contacts in the industry shoulder a heavy burden - heavier than I could ever imagine. They know the truth."
Kupperman called that gulf between tech industry spending and actual revenue in 2025 "astonishing."
However, it doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. For example, how does it all shake out when we account for 2026, when hundreds of new data centers are expected to pop up?
"Adding the two years together, and using the math from my prior post, you'd need approximately $1 trillion in revenue to hit break even, and many trillions more to earn an acceptable return on this spend," he writes.
"If the economics don't work, doing it at massive scale doesn't make the economics work any better
- it just takes an industry crisis and makes it into a national economic crisis," he concludes.
Overall, the pessimists broadly agree: it's no longer a matter of if Al is massively overhyped, but when the whole thing comes crashing down.
More on Al hype: Data Shows That Al Use Is Now Declining at Large Companies

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Titus Brown @titus.idyll.org · 1d

Finally read this. Really nice.

Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · Aug 20

Here is a PDF of chapter 17 - it's just 3 pages and will fill you with hope and optimism, or so I've been told share.eva.mpg.de/index.php/s/...

Statistics courses and books—this one included—tend to resemble horoscopes. There
are two senses to this resemblance. First, in order to remain plausibly correct, they must
remain tremendously vague. This is because the targets of the advice, for both horoscopes
and statistical advice, are diverse. But only the most general advice applies to all cases. A
horoscope uses only the basic facts of birth to forecast life events, and a textbook statistical
guide uses only the basic facts of measurement and design to dictate a model. It is easy to do
better, once more detail is available. In the case of statistical analysis, it is typically only the
scientist who can provide that detail, not the statistician.242
Second, there are strong incentives for both astrologers and statisticians to exaggerate
the power and importance of their advice. No one likes an astrologer who forecasts doom,
and few want a statistician who admits the answers as desired are not in the data as collected.
Scientists desire results, and they will buy and attend to statisticians and statistical procedures
that promise them. What we end up with is too often horoscopic: vague and optimistic, but
still claiming critical importance

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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 2d

Every targeted institution (my own very much included) should cut and paste this letter onto their letterhead.

Kathleen Clark @kathleenclark.bsky.social · 2d

A master class from MIT in responding to authoritarian overreach:

Your “premise … is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.
… America’s leadership in science & innovation depends on independent thinking & open competition for excellence.

Dear Madam Secretary,
I write in response to your letter of October 1, inviting MIT to review a "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education." I acknowledge the vital importance of these matters.
I appreciated the chance to meet with you earlier this year to discuss the priorities we share for American higher education.
As we discussed, the Institute's mission of service to the nation directs us to advance knowledge, educate students and bring knowledge to bear on the world's great challenges.
We do that in line with a clear set of values, with excellence above all. Some practical examples:
• MIT prides itself on rewarding merit. Students, faculty and staff succeed here based on the strength of their talent, ideas and hard work. For instance, the Institute was the first to reinstate the SAT/ACT requirement after the pandemic. And MIT has never had legacy preferences in admissions.
• MIT opens its doors to the most talented students regardless of their family's finances. Admissions are need-blind. Incoming undergraduates whose families earn less than $200,000 a year pay no tuition. Nearly 88% of our last graduating class left MIT with no debt for their education. We make a wealth of free courses and low-cost certificates available to any American with an internet connection. Of the undergraduate degrees we award, 94% are in STEM fields. And in service to the nation, we cap enrollment of international undergraduates at roughly 10%.

source:
https://orgchart.mit.edu/letters/regarding-compact

• We value free expression, as clearly described in the MIT Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom. We must hear facts and opinions we don't like - and engage respectfully with those with whom we disagree.
These values and other MIT practices meet or exceed many standards outlined in the document you sent. We freely choose these values because they're right, and we live by them because they support our mission - work of immense value to the prosperity, competitiveness, health and security of the United States. And of course, MIT abides by the law.
The document also includes principles with which we disagree, including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution. And fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.
In our view, America's leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.
As you know, MIT's record of service to the nation is long and enduring. Eight decades ago, MIT leaders helped invent a scientific partnership between America's research universities and the U.S. government that has delivered extraordinary benefits for the American people. We continue to believe in the power of this partnership to serve the nation.
Sincerely,
Sally Kornbluth

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Filipe Campante @filipecampante.bsky.social · 2d

From some of the reactions, I was right to assume it would be hard for people to appreciate the significance. This is not an “of course, two Nobel laureates” case. They’re huge field builders, Esther being still quite young. The kind of people who will attract many others, including young scholars.

Filipe Campante @filipecampante.bsky.social · 3d

It might be hard to convey to people outside economics just how seismic this is. The Trump effect has most certainly arrived to US academia.

Florian Scheuer @florianscheuer.bsky.social · 3d

I am delighted to share that Nobel laureates Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee will join our Department of Economics @econ.uzh.ch at the University of Zurich on July 1, 2026, as Lemann Foundation Professors of Economics.

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Joshua Weitz @joshuasweitz.bsky.social · 2d

I completed a PhD in Physics at MIT in '03. Even when the intensity seemed to be off-scale, there was one piece that I never doubted: the place had integrity, purpose, and passion.

It's clear the culture and drive of MIT remains.

MIT says no to the compact.

orgchart.mit.edu/letters/rega...

In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.

As you know, MIT’s record of service to the nation is long and enduring. Eight decades ago, MIT leaders helped invent a scientific partnership between America’s research universities and the U.S. government that has delivered extraordinary benefits for the American people. We continue to believe in the power of this partnership to serve the nation.

Sincerely,
Sally Kornbluth

https://orgchart.mit.edu/letters/regarding-compact

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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 2d

Question for the hive mind: Is this less or more likely if reviews and rebuttal are public?

Rebuttals currently aim primarily to sway one person (the editor). But if they are increasingly context for readers to judge the merits of criticism (eLife-type process), will they differ?

Elisa Fadda @elisafadda.bsky.social · 2d

What I abhor is the swamp of text in rebuttal (pages and pages on nothing) that does not address my query, but goes endlessly around it, to go to why 'I didn't do this because I can't care less about checking, about making my science accurate as I possibly can' 3/n

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Titus Brown @titus.idyll.org · 3d

This is fun. UC Davis moves student e-mails to @formerstudents.ucdavis.edu when they take a quarter off, and if they come back, ...deletes the formerstudents.ucdavis.edu address and @ucdavis.edu works again. Can't see that going awry in any way.

formerstudents.ucdavis.edu

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Standplaats Kraków @standplaatskrk.pl · 8d

Martha Kelly (@MarthaKelly3) onn twitter: "Under capitalism, it's normal to let children go hungry, let banks force people out of their homes, let sick people die for lack of access to healthcare. But the idea that billionaires could just be less rich - not poor, not struggling, just less rich, is considered insane."

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Andrew Iwaniuk @evoneuro.bsky.social · 3d

As I tell my students, if you arrived at a simple answer in biology you have done one of two things: arrived at the wrong answer or asked the wrong question

Claus Wilke @clauswilke.com · 5d

Biology is much more complicated than most non-biologists can imagine. And AI is not going to change this anytime soon.
blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/we-still-c...

We still can’t predict much of anything in biology

Biology is hard. Yes, even for AI.

blog.genesmindsmachines.com

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David Buchanan @retr0.id · 6d

how to deactivate torment nexus

torment nexus deactivation tutorial

torment nexus deactivation tutorial working 2025

deactivate torment nexus no survey

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Rebecca Bodenheimer @rmbodenheimer.bsky.social · 4d

Is this your evidence that Katie Porter is abusive?
Cuz she fired a staffer for breaching Covid protocol? As far as I can tell the other allegations are either from an allegedly abusive husband or are anonymous/unsubstantiated.

www.politico.com/newsletters/...

Katie Porter and the ‘bad boss’ problem

www.politico.com

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pyOpenSci @pyopensci.org · 4d

So much brilliant work never makes it into a paper.
The code, the data, the long nights helping others debug.
At pyOpenSci, we believe that code, data, and community are the pulse.
Research advances quickly when we build together & openly.
Join us. 💛 bit.ly/pyos-volunteer
#openscience #opensource

Get involved with pyOpenSci

pyOpenSci’s Website

bit.ly

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Rob Patro @robp.bsky.social · 4d

And it's posted! If you're interested and eligible, please consider applying through the UMD portal: umd.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/UMCP/j....

If you're a PI working in algorithmic genomics (& you can recommend my lab to your top graduating students ;P), please let them know!

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