Karl Schmid
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kjschmid.bsky.social
Karl Schmid
@kjschmid.bsky.social
1.4K followers 1.1K following 110 posts
Professor of Crop Diversity and Breeding Informatics, University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany
Website: https://evoplant.uni-hohenheim.de
Mastodon: https://fediscience.org/@kjschmid
Opinions are my own.
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kjschmid.bsky.social
Karl Schmid @kjschmid.bsky.social · Jun 25
New preprint led by our bioinformatician Mireia Vidal Villarejo on the demography of a maize fungal pathogen in Switzerland 🇨🇭.

Main finding: In a multiyear survey we observed a rapid replacement of established by exotic, tropical genetic lineages of the pathogen.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Figure of from research paper showing the dynamics of maize pathogen straints over time (years)
Reposted by Karl Schmid
sachlichepolitik.bsky.social
Statt auf dem Smartphone zu lesen oder zu spielen, kann man jetzt für die Fahrt Bücher leihen – fast direkt am U-Bahngleis. In Warschau entsteht eine analoge Gegenbewegung zum Smartphone-Trend: Die „Metroteka“ in einer U-Bahn-Station lädt zum Lesen echter Bücher ein."
Polen: Eine Bibliothek in der U-Bahn
Statt auf dem Smartphone zu lesen oder zu spielen, kann man jetzt für die Fahrt Bücher leihen – fast direkt am U-Bahngleis.
www.dw.com
November 25, 2025 at 9:53 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
pnas.org
Medieval agricultural and trade practices in southwestern Germany boosted plant diversity for centuries, with biodiversity peaking around 1000 CE and declining only when human activity contracted during the Black Death. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/Q6ca50XxIvC
Woodcut illustration to Michael Beuther’s Calendarium Historicum, published in Frankfurt by David Zephelius in 1557. Image shows a person pollarding a tree and another person sowing seeds. CREDIT: The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
November 25, 2025 at 7:01 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
plantevolution.bsky.social
We (Nordborg & Weigel labs) need input on the next generation of genome browsers & data download modes for the #Arabidopsis #1001GenomesPlus project. We have now a curated collection of over 500 long read genomes.

Please help us by filling out this questionnaire: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Next generation of 1001 Genomes Plus browser and data download
Please indicate all features you would like to see in a browser that displays features of completely sequenced Arabidopsis thaliana genomes
docs.google.com
November 24, 2025 at 2:49 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
hernanaburbano.bsky.social
Our new collaborative work led by @taliamycota.bsky.social
Jiajun Cui & Emma Caullireau between my lab @ucllifesciences.bsky.social @cloeucl.bsky.social & the Karasov Lab (tkarasovlab.org) @uofubiology.bsky.social
and collaborators: @plantricia.bsky.social et al.

tinyurl.com/5yx2wmz5

(1/n)
November 18, 2025 at 8:41 AM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
elisabethbik.bsky.social
Next: Geoff Cumming @thenewstats.bsky.social with 'Statistical significance and p values: The researcher’s heroin'
* p values are highly unrealiable - don't trust them, don't use them!
www.thenewstatistics.com
tiny.cc/osfsigroulette
#IRICSydney
Speaker at the pedestal wearing a t-short with the link to TheNewStatistics website. Title slide
November 18, 2025 at 12:16 AM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
carlbergstrom.com
Way back in 1947, Alan Turing had thoughts on how AI would influence the demand for skilled labor.

(via Matteo Pasquinelli 2023 _The Eye of the Master_)
Roughly speaking those who work in connection with the [automatic computing engine] will be divided into its masters and its servants. Its masters will plan out instruction tables for it, thinking up deeper and deeper ways of using it...The masters are liable to get replaced because as soon as any technique becomes at all stereotyped it becomes possible to devise a system of instruction tables which will enable the electronic computer to do it for itself. It may happen however that the masters will refuse to do this. They may be unwilling to let their jobs be stolen from them in this way. In that case they would surround the whole of their work with mystery and make excuses, couched in well chosen gibberish, whenever any dangerous suggestions were made. — Alan Turing (1947) Lecture on the Automatic Computing Engine
November 18, 2025 at 4:01 AM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
mads100tist.bsky.social
"Postdoc in the job market"
A headline: Scientists have discovered a 'third state' between life and death
November 16, 2025 at 7:52 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
nicolange.bsky.social
Für Millionen Menschen in der Ukraine ist es dunkel und kalt. Ab jetzt 16 Stunden täglich ohne Strom. Große Teile der Stromproduktion sind beschädigt oder zerstört, dazu ein Fünftel der Heizkapazitäten. Europa hat Russland gewähren lassen. 1/3
November 9, 2025 at 5:44 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
unihohenheim.bsky.social
#AgriPV: Wie lässt sich #Ackerbau und #Stromerzeugung auf einer Fläche optimal verbinden? Das untersuchen Forschende der #unihohenheim ab sofort auf einer neuen #Forschungsanlage in Renningen. Unterstützung dafür gab es vom MLR BaWü! Pressemitteilung: www.uni-hohenheim.de/pressemittei...
November 7, 2025 at 9:07 AM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
ctrlalttim.com
"The pupils do not learn the scribal craft" is the new "the midterm average was 62%"
lswisnom.bsky.social Dr Selena Wisnom @lswisnom.bsky.social · 23d
Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching
November 3, 2025 at 12:15 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
bachmannrudi.bsky.social
Um was ich die Contrarian Meinungsunternehmer etwas beneide, ist, dass sie am Ende immer gewinnen, egal ob bei Corona, Vakzine, Russland, Aufrüstung, Meinungsfreiheit, Klima, etc. Sie betreiben keine saubere analytische Arbeit, sondern warten ab, bis sich ein
November 1, 2025 at 7:29 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
arminwolf.at
Erstaunlicherweise erscheinen diese Bücher alle in sehr großen deutschen Verlagen und ihre Autor·innen werden von Talkshow zu Talkshow gereicht, um von ihren unterdrückten Meinungen zu erzählen.
Ev. sollte diesesPhänomen einen Namen kriegen: Precht-Paradox?
thzimmermann.bsky.social Thomas Zimmermann @thzimmermann.bsky.social · 27d
Wie viele solche Bücher braucht es noch, bis die Meinungsfreiheit gerettet und der Markt gesättigt ist?
November 2, 2025 at 8:30 AM
kjschmid.bsky.social
New preprint from our EU Horizon 2020 INVITE project (www.h2020-invite.eu):

"Integrating genomic prediction into crop DUS testing: new frameworks for Reference Collection management and Distinctness assessment"

www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...
Integrating genomic prediction into crop DUS testing: new frameworks for Reference Collection management and Distinctness assessment
High-performing crop varieties underpin food security. Due to the cost of developing varieties, systems have been established to provide breeders with legal protection for their varieties. In many cou...
www.researchsquare.com
October 30, 2025 at 7:01 PM
kjschmid.bsky.social
„Focus or die.“ Das war das Mantra eines sehr erfolgreichen früheren Chefs von mir.

Das Gleiche gilt für die Politik.

Lesenswert👇🏼
dieterschnaas.bsky.social dieter schnaas @dieterschnaas.bsky.social · Oct 26
Von Stadtbildern und Weltlagen: Und wieder sind zehn Tage rum, in denen Deutschland um seinen Bauchnabel kreiste - und einenWelt sich einfach weiter drehte, in der wir zB China dabei zusehen, wie es mit dem Wohlstand Europas spielt. #Tauchsieder @wiwo www.wiwo.de/politik/deut...
WirtschaftsWoche
www.wiwo.de
October 26, 2025 at 10:50 AM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
dxsrxxt.bsky.social
Feuerwehr benutzt in Satzung männliche & weibliche Bezeichnungen.

CDU: Verlangt via Antrag Festlegung auf ein Geschlecht + Ergänzung "umfasst alle geschlechtliche Formen"

Feuerwehr wählt rein weibliche Bezeichnung.

CDU: "Widerspricht Wertschätzung gegenüber allen Feuerwehrangehörigen."

🤡🤡🤡
Nur weibliche Formen: Gender-Zoff wegen Feuerwehr-Satzung in Friedrichsdorf
Streit um geschlechtergerechte Sprache: In Friedrichsdorf sorgt eine Feuerwehr-Satzung, die nur noch weibliche Amtsbezeichnungen kennt, für reichlich Zündstoff zwischen Bürgermeister und CDU-Fraktion.
www.hessenschau.de
October 25, 2025 at 9:43 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
unihohenheim.bsky.social
Demokratie-Monitor 2025 der #UniHohenheim: 17 % der Deutschen haben ein rechtspopulistisches Weltbild, in der #AfD-Wählerschaft sind dies sogar 84 %. Ein Viertel aller Befragten glaubt an geheime Mächte, ein Fünftel misstraut den Massenmedien.
Pressemitteilung: sohub.io/vgih
October 23, 2025 at 12:39 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
rmcelreath.bsky.social
Monty Python understood p-hacking
October 23, 2025 at 8:43 AM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social
Fruit flies are more than pests! Humans share 60% of their genome with them. @luisapallares.bsky.social busts myths about how these tiny creatures can tell us about human diseases. Watch Luisa's full video here: www.fml.tuebingen.mpg.de/71433/videos #BiologyMyths #Drosophila #Genomics
October 22, 2025 at 12:18 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
thegodpodcast.com
Spotify is running ICE ads. I went to cancel on mobile and saw that this isn’t allowed on mobile. They make you cancel on desktop. You think that’s gonna stop me, Spotify? I will erase you and forget you ever existed.

THOU SHALT CANCEL SPOTIFY!!!
October 19, 2025 at 5:03 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
greenrobust.de
Early Excellence in Science Award goes to GreenRobust PI @brittavelten.bsky.social. Congratulations!
uniheidelberg.bsky.social Universität Heidelberg @uniheidelberg.bsky.social · Oct 16
Auszeichnung für Heidelberger Datenwissenschaftlerin: Britta Velten wird für innovative Verfahren für die Analyse von komplexen Datensätzen aus den Lebenswissenschaften mit dem Early Excellence in Science Award ausgezeichnet www.uni-heidelberg.de/de/newsroom/...
#uniheidelberg #lifescience
October 16, 2025 at 4:00 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
wkhuber.bsky.social
My take: Engineering *is* important. Ideas are cheap. Novelty is overrated. "Hyperparameter tuning" is a cynically dismissive term for something that is in fact the real, difficult problem.
eugenevinitsky.bsky.social Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · Oct 9
Sometimes I’ll see a paper that implements an idea I’ve had but implements it poorly for engineering reasons. But then it’s hard to write a follow up paper because it’s not “novel” anymore
October 9, 2025 at 2:13 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
surtlab.bsky.social
As coding gets more plug and play, it becomes IMPERATIVE for us as educators to teach fundamentals about what the statistical tests are comparing and assumptions.

Students might not need to understand how to code things up, but they should understand what the snippets are doing and why
hormiga.bsky.social Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · Oct 9
Y'all. I just got ChatGPT to do everything in R for this manuscript. I mean EVERYTHING. And it's all legit and reproducible. I'm shook.

How are we mentoring our trainees in statistics now? Who needs to learn coding in R line by line, and who doesn't?

scienceforeveryone.science/statistics-i...
Statistics in the era of AI
How do we mentor, teach, and do stats when AI can do so much of the work?
scienceforeveryone.science
October 9, 2025 at 4:10 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
elvirarosert.bsky.social
Ich schlage zusätzlich zu allen genannten zwei weitere Verbote vor:

Kalter Hund (kein Hund; stattdessen: Butterkekse in fester Schokomasse)

Russisch Brot (nicht russisch und auch kein Brot; stattdessen: Kakao-Eiweiß-Gebäck in Buchstabenform).
October 8, 2025 at 7:57 PM