Source

Source

every time I see some bigshot scientist revealed as a fraud my knee-jerk reaction is "hell yeah elisabeth bik got 'em good" AND IM RIGHT

SHE NEVER QUITS!!!!

ICONIC!!!!

> Elisabeth Bik is on patreon <

She is not directly paid for her work to vet papers, she has been hit with legal action & death threats by scientists who hate that she's exposing them and their financial fraud, and she keeps at it every single day, combing through thousands of papers to make science more fair. Please consider supporting her!

Astrology doesn't seem to work.

if I've learned anything from grad school it's to check your sources, and this has proven invaluable in the dozens of instances when I've had an MBA-type try to tell me something about finances or leadership. Case in point:

Firefox serves me clickbaity articles through Pocket, which is fine because I like Firefox. But sometimes an article makes me curious. I'm pretty anal about my finances, and I wondered if this article was, as I suspected, total horseshit, or could potentially benefit me and help me get my spending under control. So let's check the article in question.

It mostly seems like common sense. "...track expenses and income for at least a month before setting a budget...How much money do I have or earn? How much do I want to save?" Basic shit like that. But then I get to this section:

This sounds fucking made up to me. And thankfully, they've provided a source to their claim that "research has repeatedly shown" that writing things down changes behavior. First mistake. What research is this?

Forbes, naturally, my #1 source for absolute dogshit fart-sniffing financial schlock. Forbes is the type of website that guy from high school who constantly posts on linkedin trawls daily for little articles like this that make him feel better about refusing to pay for a decent package for his employees' healthcare (I'm from the United States, a barbaric, conflict-ridden country in the throes of civil unrest, so obsessed with violence that its warlords prioritize weapons over universal medical coverage. I digress). Forbes constantly posts shit like this, and I constantly spend my time at leadership seminars debunking poor consultants who get paid to read these claims credulously. Look at this highlighted text. Does it make sense to you that simply writing your financial goals down would result in a 10x increase in your income? Because if it does, let me make you an offer on this sick ass bridge.

Thankfully, Forbes also makes the mistake of citing their sources. Let's check to see where this hyperlink goes:

SidSavara. I've never heard of this site, but the About section tells me that Sid is "a technology leader who empowers teams to grow into their best selves. He is a life-long learner enjoys developing software, leading teams in delivering mission critical projects, playing guitar and watching football and basketball."

That doesn't mean anything. What are his LinkedIn credentials? With the caveat that anyone can lie on Linkedin, Mr. Savara appears to be a Software Engineer. Which is fine! I'm glad software engineers exist! But Sid's got nothing in his professional history which suggests he knows shit about finance. So I'm already pretty skeptical of his website, which is increasingly looking like a personal fart-huffing blog.

The article itself repeats the credulous claim made in the Forbes story earlier, but this time, provides no link for the 3% story. Mr. Savara is smarter than his colleages at Forbes, it's much wiser to just make shit up.

HOWEVER. I am not the first person to have followed this rabbit hole. Because at the very top of this article, there is a disclaimer.

Uh oh!

Sid's been called out before, and in the follow up to this article, he reveals the truth.

You can guess where this is going.

So to go back to the VERY beginning of this post, both Pocket/Good Housekeeping and Forbes failed to do even the most basic of research, taking the wild claim that writing down your budget may increase your income by 10x on good faith and the word of a(n admittedly honest about his shortcomings) software engineer.

Why did I spend 30 minutes to make a tumblr post about this? Mostly to show off how smart I am, but also to remind folks of just how flimsy any claim on the internet can be. Click those links, follow those sources, and when the sources stop linking, ask why.

The 2024 Gender Census is now open!

[ Link to survey ]

The 11th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th June 2024.

It’s short and easy, about 5 minutes probably.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 40,000 responses last year.

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

For the curious, you can also spy on some graphs and demographic data for the incoming responses here.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

Image credit: Malachite and rhodochrosite.

Pssst if you have ublock: https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist

I'm not going to discuss the Somerton response video in detail, but I wanted to make one quick point. About his explanation that his failure to cite derives from memory issues. Let's take that explanation at face value for a moment.

Memory issues (either of the diagnosable or undiagnosable variety) are very common in academia. I have a pretty terrible memory myself, also exacerbated by a serious head injury. And even a moment's reflection will reveal that academia is also chock full of old people. A poor memory in academia is not a novel thing at all.

So, how do you cite responsibly if your memory isn't perfect?

You don't rely on your memory to cite.

Even if you have a pretty good memory all things considered, trying to cite from memory is a suckers' game and it will betray you someday. You'll get two dates mixed up and then your argument is nonsense. You'll forget where you heard something and assume you came up with it. You'll miss some crucial detail when trying to reconstruct a claim you read three weeks ago and accidentally say the opposite. Your memory is not a good tool for this purpose.

So use a better tool. Take notes as you're reading. Whenever you're looking at something pertinent to your next project, you'd better be a) writing down what the source is and where to find it and b) what the key point you've found in it is.

Thankfully, we live in the 21st century and this is now a very easy thing to do. There are programs that will do most of the tedious author-date work for you and automatically pop up a little spot to write down your key points (I use Zotero, but there are other citation managers of similar quality out there). Then, before it's time to write, you can sit down, look at a convenient list of everything you've read with the key points all ready for you, and be very sure that you're not making any mistakes or plagiarizing anyone. The other bonus of using a citation manager program is that when it's time to construct the biliography, you just press a button and it's all there. I can't recommend these programs enough to anyone who is doing academic work of any kind.

There's an ask that's been sitting in my inbox that prompts me to talk about the 'lay academia' of sites like tumblr and youtube. I've been thinking about it for a while, and I will eventually write a big long piece on it, but the short version is that I think that lay academia is great. I love that tumblr is basically a collection hub for the research interests of thousands of scholars, and that there are more people who want to be scholars than I could possibly have imagined. My good dead friend Aristotle once said that 'all men* by nature desire to know' and buddy, you bet they do. And I also see a lot of these lay academics rediscovering the citation techniques of the real academe, which is great.

But when you've got a lay academia that hasn't been trained in the methods that professionals use, that lay academia can produce misinformation and model bad scholarly habits. Somerton is showing us that right now. If what he's saying about his memory is true and exculpatory (which we are assuming right now) then he should never have been trying to write public essays by memory. That's undergrad behaviour. That's a mistake you make when you haven't learned better the hard way yet. It's a clear sign that he was never prepared to do scholarly work on a public stage. It's cool that these websites have democratized the academy, but the consequence is that you can get very big without being very good. Or even knowing how to be good.

So, if you're reading this and thinking 'oh, but my memory-' well, this is your sign. If you have a tool you know doesn't work that well don't keep trying to use it. Find a strategy that will let you do good work without relying on that tool. You can't learn anything from Somerton. So at least try to learn from his mistakes.

And for the record, my concern here isn't whether what Somerton said is a 'good excuse' or not. That's something you may judge for yourself.

I'm not trying to participate in a pile-on, I'm trying to use this moment when the whole internet is talking about plagiarism to try to help people learn something. It would be nice if something good came out if it - and a more principled understanding of plagiarism and scholarship amongst people who hadn't had a chance to speak frankly about it before is maybe something good.

I love this post. May I add another suggestion as a professional academic with fairly frustrating memory failure? When I am drafting pieces formally, I often write with vague little notations to myself about things I am extremely sure of to go do some formal hunting and find out about this later. Then, when I am staring at my draft and writhing before its hideous form and just need to be touching it, I go hunting for all the places I've put in [REF] as a placeholder and I go hunting for references like I'm totally new for the field. If I can't find a reference to support my claim, out it goes and I have to find a new one. (When I am writing, I sometimes also search the literature as I'm going and check myself as I'm going, but I find it's better to just put in the placeholder if I'm certain it's there. If I'm pretty sure I know where it is, I'll add a notation about where I think it's hiding--rowe & houle, cotton?, something like that--and come back to it later.)

Before the reference is allowed to stand, I always check the paper to make sure it's saying what I say it does. Even if I know it really well. The moment it goes into the draft as a citation, I scan it real quick to make sure it's saying what I think it is. I do not ever rely on my memory to fill in for this. Bluntly, it's too full of holes. So I use other pathways to account for memory loss and messy brain. My fallible human mind stands in a structure I have built that allows fallen citations and absent files to be noticed, picked up, examined, and then reincorporated into the work of scholarship I'm building.

(This is also, by the way, why I have an asks build up right now: there are some great questions in my inbox I don't know the answer to right now, and I am waiting until I have slightly more breathing room than I do right now for scholarly thought disconnected from my day job to dig into 'em.)

I also really encourage lay academic researchers to try to find out how we know some piece of information that seems self evident and foundational to their fields, by the way. It's an exercise in trailing citations and it will show you one of the great reasons for citation trails to exist: it allows you to follow knowledge to its roots, examining how things that seem obvious and self evident come to be foundational, and it will also show you how knowledge shifts and changes as more people examine it and interrogate the topic together. All you have to do is follow the citation trail: you find someone making the claim, you see what they cite to justify it, and you find that piece and read it. If they cite someone else, you read that too. You keep going until you wind up either finding that the claim is new (either based on observed experimental data, a synthesis of new information), or based--terrible to find--on someone who cites someone that isn't saying what the writer says it is, at which point you can throw yourself to the ground and scream a lot.

Also, the frustration inherent in the exercise makes you care really deeply about not being the reason that a textbook example's fundamental behavioral observations end in a dead 1996 paper that sources the same goddamn claim to personal observation. By acting like a scholar, you can find out when errata and hearsay have accidentally embedded themselves in our understanding of knowledge, and you can really feel self-righteous when you throw your tantrum about how sloppy past scholars can be about rigorously citing their work.

Have you experienced shifts in your identity after transitioning? You may be eligible for a study conducted by a team of LGBTQ researchers.

Participants must meet the following eligibility criteria: 

-aged 16 and older

-living in the United States or Canada

-have ever discontinued a gender transition* or detransitioned

-desiring to detransition but feel unable to take steps

*We define gender transition as social, legal, and/or medical interventions used to affirm a trans/nonbinary identity. People who have desisted are eligible to take the survey.

The survey is available at:  thedarestudy.com

Blazed and tagged with #twospirit.

What the fuck

lead author kinnon mackinnon's work and quotes were pivotal to this reuters report from december 2022 pushing the narrative that detransitioners are being silenced by trans people but that detransition is on the rise, particularly among those with 'complex mental health', feat. the usual suspects (laura edwards-leeper, kc miller, chloe cole, &c) and gesturing toward the idea that transition ought to be more gatekept and delayed, particularly for minors, in order to 'protect' vulnerable people

detransition and retransition and non-linear transition do all happen and there's nothing wrong with that or with talking about it. however, i would be extremely cautious about engaging with any project or study led by mackinnon specifically, given that he seems to have no compunction about his work being used to bolster reactionary fear and disgust about trans people (someone might change their body in a way they later feel differently about! oh my god the horror!) and right-wingers' consequent attempts to restrict access to transition healthcare

Funny how that works

I am so pleased at how many notes are some version of “I don’t fear the science, I fear the corporations who control it” because that is EXACTLY the attitude you should have. GMOs can save us. Monsanto will kill us.

what people fear about GMO- ‘theyre gonna make frankencarrots that crave human flesh and cause diarrhea ’ what GMO actually is- ‘we made rice crop that is both drought resistant and flood resistant which will prevent about 20% of major famine disasters, also it now makes vitamin A because vitamin A deficiency in poverty stricken areas is a major killer of kids as most vitamin A rich foods dont grow there’ what people SHOULD be upset about- ‘i made all crops sterile so all farmers have to buy the seed from me in perpetuity and i will sue anyone who tries to go back to crops that produce their own seed’

[ID: Reddit thread in r/science posted by MAC-n-CHZ which says: “The more biotech science you know, the less you fear GMO crops, study finds | Genetic Literacy Project”. ell20 commented, “The more you understand science, the less you’re afraid of the products of science. Who knew.” DeathLeopard replies, “With computer software it’s the other way around.” End ID]

this leaves out the most crucial tip you'll ever need:

-site:pinterest.*

excludes the entirety of pinterest's evil domainverse from image search

Reblogging for the Pinterest addition

The new Hbomberguy video is really good. I feel like I have the opposite problem of a lot of the people in this video. I love research. There have been multiple times where my editor has literally begged me to stop doing research on a topic so we could move on to the next section.

See, the trick is that if you spend all day reading, and not writing, you still had a productive day. Plus, the more research you do, the easier it is to be comically arrogant on the internet.

One of my coworkers was telling me that they had seen these really cute trilobite plushies at another gift shop and recommended them to the store manager at our museum, which lead to us scrolling through the manufacturer's website together on shift today and SHRIEKING with laughter at the exact same moment when we simultaneously noticed that they sell a giant $100 eurypterid body pillow

Now THIS is what I like to see!!

one lives on my lab couch and 10/10 can confirm best thing to spoon with

#they released these at a conference i was at in 2019#i was working a table right next to the pri#people went CRAZY#they sold out in 10 min#and all these grisled old phds were carrying around 5 foot long eurypterids the rest of the day (@barrysjumpsuit)

Hello thank you for the most critical supplemental information I’ve ever received on a post.

@linddzz

Hey, y'all remember this post? Well the institution that makes these delightful pillows and stuffed creatures is hurting right now. Unfortunately, a major set of donations never went through, and the institution has been working its butt off to keep running. The efforts of the staff are amazing, but unfortunately it's a very small nonprofit organization so it can only get so far on hard work and dedication.

In spite of all this! Through some amazing marketing and philanthropy work, you can help them out right now! You can make a difference! They managed to get a lovely donor to agree to a match challenge for up to $50,000!!! So if they raise $50,000 they'll actually get $100,000. The match challenge ends on December 31st 2023, and they're already at $26,4448.10 which means they're halfway there!! Please spread the word, if you can't donate then a reblog to someone who can will help.

If the link above doesn't work, you can find the donation page here:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-22/food-plant-solutions-malnutrition-farming-edible-plants/12580732

https://fms.cmsvr.com/fmi/webd/Food_Plants_World

This guy is my new hero. I LOVE learning about native food plants that just grow everywhere without human help.

The database is a little clunky to use (especially on a phone), but still loads of excellent information.

Here’s their website - Food Plant Solutions - and they can use volunteers! And $ of course. What they really need help with is connecting with NGOs/groups on the ground already working in countries, to get them access to the database. They also need help from formally trained agronomists, people good with website stuff, and people good at marketing / getting the word out about their project.

EDIT: The survey is now closed for the time being. Please see my reblogs on this post.

I don't want to spam these tags, but I am starting to get a little desperate...I need about 100 more participants for my dissertation study looking at the impact of non-affirming christianity on lgbt sexuality, would anyone in these communities be willing to participate? I'd really, really appreciate it, and it would really help forward understanding of how religion can impact people, especially queer people!

You must be 18 and have been sexually active to participate. There is an Amazon gift card raffle you can enter.

You can contact me at [email protected] with any questions.

This survey has now been reactivated, and can be found here:

Link here: https://baseline.campuslabs.com/liu/religionlgbt