Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Titus Brown

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 44m

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

Kathleen Clark @kathleenclark.bsky.social · 1h

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

1 56 180

Reposted by Titus Brown

Filipe Campante @filipecampante.bsky.social · 59m

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 · 3h

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 · 7h

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.

🧵 1/7

1 4 12

Reposted by Titus Brown

Joshua Weitz @joshuasweitz.bsky.social · 2h

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

4 24 140

Reposted by Titus Brown

Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 2h

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 · 3h

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

2 3 5

Titus Brown @titus.idyll.org · 16h

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

2 3

Reposted by Titus Brown

Standplaats Kraków @standplaatskrk.pl · 5d

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."

3 430 1K

Reposted by Titus Brown

Andrew Iwaniuk @evoneuro.bsky.social · 1d

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 · 2d

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

2 17 46

Reposted by Titus Brown

David Buchanan @retr0.id · 3d

how to deactivate torment nexus

torment nexus deactivation tutorial

torment nexus deactivation tutorial working 2025

deactivate torment nexus no survey

77 1.5K 5.3K

Reposted by Titus Brown

Rebecca Bodenheimer @rmbodenheimer.bsky.social · 1d

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

1 1

Reposted by Titus Brown

pyOpenSci @pyopensci.org · 1d

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

4 5

Reposted by Titus Brown

Rob Patro @robp.bsky.social · 1d

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!

16 17

Reposted by Titus Brown

Gail Drakes @gaildrakes.bsky.social · 2d

Are you a non-Black person pissed at Bluesky leadership and feeling a little jealous of all the good vibes coming from Blacksky?

There are Blacksky adjacent options for you! Here’s info from the Blacksky migration guide!

docs.blacksky.community/migrating-to...

Screengrab from Blacksky migration guide:

blacksky algorithms

A Warning: Anyone else using a blacksky.app handle will receive a warning at first and then a suspension.

Alternative PDSs for Everyone
Blacksky Algorithms also operates two other
PDSs that are open to anyone:
• myatproto.social - Open to all
• cryptoanarchy.network - Open to all

These servers run on the same infrastructure as blacksky.app and are maintained by the same team, but are available for anyone to use regardless of background.

38 300 720

Reposted by Titus Brown

James Tauber @jtauber.com · 2d

still LOTS more to do before it's usable but I've started a repo template for publishing Obsidian vaults using Ryland: github.com/jtauber/ryla...

GitHub - jtauber/ryland-obsidian-template: a template for publishing an Obsidian vault using Ryland

a template for publishing an Obsidian vault using Ryland - jtauber/ryland-obsidian-template

github.com

1 3 13

Titus Brown @titus.idyll.org · 2d

all the work of Mostafa (first author), I believe!

1

Titus Brown @titus.idyll.org · 2d

A new paper from the lab! Work led by
@drtamermansour.bsky.social and others not here on bsky. "We propose the Great Genotyper, a population-scale genotyping workflow to address the N+1 problem."

The Great Genotyper: a graph-based method for population genotyping of small and structural variants

Long-read sequencing (LRS) enables high-quality structural variant (SV) discovery. SV genotypers utilize these precise call sets to improve the recall and precision of genotyping in short-read sequenc...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

1 4 18

Titus Brown @titus.idyll.org · 2d

huh. Maybe mention solid state physics...

1

Titus Brown @titus.idyll.org · 2d

Coming from my perspective of trying to write general purpose bioinformatics software, you do a really nice job of explaining why my job is so hard 😅. One reason the sourmash issue tracker is full of "we think this generally works, but here are reasons why it is still tricky dep on question!"

4

Titus Brown @titus.idyll.org · 2d

It's not complicated to explain why, but I agree that making an argument that non-experts will believe / trust is harder to achieve :)

1

Titus Brown @titus.idyll.org · 2d

Really good post!

Claus Wilke @clauswilke.com · 2d

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

1 1 11

Reposted by Titus Brown

Claus Wilke @clauswilke.com · 2d

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

5 58 150

Reposted by Titus Brown

Tyler @electriceden92.bsky.social · 2d

My blood pressure can't take another one of these pieces, but anyone who bit: is this satire or deadly earnest and what does the robot Asian girl with the ax have to do with it

From NYMag: 'The Techno Optimist's Guide to Futureproofing Your Child: AI has killed the old achievement track. What should we raise our kids to do instead?' by Benjamin Wallace

1 3 8

Reposted by Titus Brown

Micah @rincewind.run · 3d

erin is back, which is good, and I do think the “this was a mod error based off people brigading and reporting erin’s post in bad faith” explanation is likely correct

but honestly at this point I don’t understand why there isn’t an extra layer of review for prominent accounts because of optics

Rick Caruso’s Private Fire Crew @amandasmith.bsky.social · 3d

The all-knowing bsky mods gave Erin Biba a 24 hour suspension for a months-old skeet about Christian Zionism, and I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that this happened when she’s been vocally criticizing Jay

22 120 1.2K

Reposted by Titus Brown

Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 3d

Sounds like Republicans ought to get all the Republicans who form the Republican majorities in the Republican-led House and the Republican-led Senate together to pass the budget that Republicans wrote with the Republican White House and that Republicans now insist absolutely must be passed.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 3d

Sean Duffy says the safety of the air traffic control system will start being impacted next Sunday if the shutdown continues

110 1.6K 5.6K

Reposted by Titus Brown

Rick Caruso’s Private Fire Crew @amandasmith.bsky.social · 3d

Update: @erinbiba.bsky.social is back!
bsky.app/profile/aman...

Rick Caruso’s Private Fire Crew @amandasmith.bsky.social · 3d

Suspending Erin Biba, a Jewish woman for this skeet is nasty work. Between this and intentionally misreading Link’s use of a meme as a threat, bsky mods are more than willing to ban based on the Spirit Of The Law for *some* posters but never Jesse Singal.

bsky.app/profile/aman...

"All the Jews have to die or convert to trigger the rapture. Then our dead bodies surround Jerusalem and they climb over us to reach Jesus, who will bring them to heaven. It's why they're all Zionists obsessed with Israel.
Cause they need Jews to go there so we can die"

9 69 530

Titus Brown @titus.idyll.org · 3d

techcrunch.com/2025/10/05/w...

The moderation team is ... I don't actually know what they are doing. But they've banned some people for reasons that are quite sus.

1