Dave Vanness

If the Democrats are wondering why more people aren’t donating to the party organizations, it’s because of spinelessness like this.

Following Governor’s Order, Oklahoma Lawmakers Move to Block Tenure Statewide The legislative session is underway in dozens of states, and higher education is very much on the agenda. Here’s the latest.

Remember the Oklahoma EO to "phase out" tenure at regional institutions and community colleges? This bill would extend that directive, meaning no hires with tenure at U. of Oklahoma or Oklahoma State U. after Jan. 1, 2027 - renewable contracts instead.

www.chronicle.com/article/stat...

!!!

Small town police chief and auto parts worker.

Literal or figurative lottery?

Benjamin Gompertz b #OTD 1779 (d 14 Jul 1865) FRS, self-taught mathematician & founder member of the Royal Statistical Society 1834. Although originally developed for actuarial purposes, his Gompertz curve is most often used for modelling vertebrate age-specific growth & mortality

They're the same guy.

I too really liked the elegance (and real-life analogs - e.g., if you don't have a stapler, paper clips might do) of using surrogate splits. I haven't kept up on the literature enough to learn that they don't work well (or perhaps don't work well as currently implemented).

Delays in awards and funding calls worry NIH-funded researchers Many programs may be pushed into the next fiscal year, and some could face funding gaps

“Since Trump took office 13 months ago, NIH has posted only 84 NOFOs, down from 787 in the previous year. Many more are in limbo. NIH has 323 opportunities listed as ‘forecasted.’ “

Seems like an innovative and exciting research environment for early career folks!

www.science.org/content/arti...

😬

You might want to double check to make sure it didn't turn some titles / journals / authors into what it *thinks* the right titles / journals / authors should be.

An infographic with weighing scales showing that the majority of universities not on X outweigh those still using the platform

If you are part of a university or UK facing research organisation, publisher, funder, learned society and they are still posting on X - they're in a rather uncomfortable minority now. Perhaps point them to the eXit.

My piece for the @lseimpactblog.bsky.social

blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...
1/3

'Department of Major Combat Operations' rebranding incoming in 3...2...1...

I'm sorry, if you're going to make a big show about how you've got a Department of WAR helmed by a Secretary of WAR and staffed by WARfighters, it's totally inane to then claim that your massive bombing of a foreign country constitutes something other than a war.

China no longer buys US exports. Drawing the right lessons for the next Trump-Xi deal

MY LATEST [1/6]

👉 www.piie.com/blogs/realti...

I think I'm in the same boat. I'm definitely not in alignment, but I don't have strong arguments against his points. The entire vision is plausible, and that level of rapid transformation is very hard to confront. Is this how monks in the scriptoria felt when the printing press was invented?

Scenes from a personalist regime

Frontiers of Knowledge Award for Incorporating Uncertainty Into Public Policy Evaluation The BBVA Foundation has awarded the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management to Charles Manski for his pioneering contributions to the measurement of uncertainty in economic research and its application to public policy analysis. His work has influenced the fields of education, health, labor markets, industrial policy, and social programs

Congratulations, Chuck Manski! Well earned
www.bbva.com/en/economy-a...

Screenshot of the "Does that use a lot of energy?" online app

Hannah Ritchie has built a fun little tool where you can compare energy usage of various products and activities.

This is super helpful imho, because it's so hard to develop intuitions even just about the scales involved here.

hannahritchie.substack.com/p/does-that-...

I have to say the Post chose a hell of a moment to lay off all their foreign correspondents

Some very interesting clustering structures in your data. Have you looked at any unsupervised machine learning (clustering/mapping) to try to find structure?

Ahhh. So this is why Putin has been so muted...

This beats wall anchors...

Anthropics team was relieved to hear that the government would be willing to remove those words, but one big problem remained: On Friday afternoon, Anthropic learned that the Pentagon still wanted to use the company's AI to analyze bulk data collected from Americans. That could include information such as the questions you ask your favorite chatbot, your Google search history, your GPS-tracked movements, and your credit-card transactions, all of which could be cross-referenced with other details about your life. Anthropics leadership told Hegseth's team that was a bridge too far, and the deal fell apart. Soon after, Hegseth

And I was told this was propaganda.

Tech execs provide their kids with liberal arts education to ensure their futures—-all while many state schools are becoming all STEM. www.wsj.com/lifestyle/ca...

Putin slams killing of Iran's Khamenei but offers little beyond condolences so far Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday condemned the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a "cynical" murder but he offered little in public to Moscow's ally beyond condolen...

So, Putin's response is pretty muted. Did he know/approve in advance? Did Trump offer anything in exchange? www.reuters.com/world/middle...

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

UNC-CH Will ‘Scrap’ New Recording Policy, Chancellor Says The move comes less than three weeks after the controversial rules were enacted.

Congrats to @ncaaup.bsky.social & all who fought against this surveillance policy that would've allowed admin to hijack microphones in the classroom for secret recordings.

This move would've chilled classroom discussion & suppressed students' willingness to ask questions & take intellectual risks.

I'm confused. Why do we need a resolution to enforce a law that's already a law?

Awesome!!