Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by merrick giles

dr. caitlin m. green @caitlinmoriah.bsky.social · 4d

michael?
peter.

Page from fox in socks by dr seuss. Drawing of weird little four legged bugs with faces.
Text reads:
What do you know about tweetle beetles?
Well
When tweetle beetles fight, it's called
a tweetle beetle battle.

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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 3d

totally couldn’t tell

Mark Rubin @markrubin.bsky.social · 11d

Report on Australian Higher Education finds:

🔹️ Council members have no lived experience of universities

🔹️ Council members have COIs with consultancy firms

🔹️ Council meetings are closed affairs that lack transparency

🔹️ Leaders' exorbitant salaries could not be justified

One submission said leaders’ salaries could not be “justified by the quality of executive decision-making, nor by the scope of executive duties. The core business of a university – teaching and research – is co-ordinated virtually entirely by ordinary non-executive staff”.

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The Louvre of Bluesky @thelouvreof.bsky.social · 4d

Reports indicate there has been a week-long gas leak at Bluesky HQ

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Andrew Perfors @andyperfors.bsky.social · 6d

Slight timeline cleanse maybe? I was interviewed about teaching and the article ended up being kind of sweet and full of bunnies so some of you may enjoy it 😊

Storytelling, stats, and helping everyone belong with Andy Perfors

about.unimelb.edu.au

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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 5d

i would like a future where psychological scientists could do their job without needing to be babysat by a chat bot

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 5d

New preprint 🌟 Psychology is core to cognitive science, and so it is vital we preserve it from harmful frames. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social & I use our psych and computer science expertise to analyse and craft:

Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

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Cover page of Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

Table 1 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

Table 2 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

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Danielle Navarro @djnavarro.net · 11d

A few words on survey weights, why I'm embarrassed to have forgotten to take them into account in the past, and how I got lucky because I personally didn't get burned. Not a mistake I intend to repeat in the future

blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2025-0...

Some notes on survey weights – Notes from a data witch

An area of statistics in which the author is not strong, and really needs to up her game

blog.djnavarro.net

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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 11d

Any institution that is *in any way* complicit in the "illegal occupation, segregation and apartheid, genocide and violations of the right to self-determination" is not leftist because leftists by definition oppose and resist these crimes.

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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 12d

Sorry to be obtuse… what do you mean by theoretical ambiguity? I’m very curious about this distinction

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Chelsea Parlett @chelseaparlett.bsky.social · 12d

Using Linda Evangelista’s

💅 “I won’t get out of bed for less than $10,000”

to explain smallest effect sizes of interest to people

Model Linda Evangelista with red short hair and a fancy beaded dress

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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 15d

And in my experience so far, every 'menial' or 'unimportant' 'don't need to learn' programming task has taught me something important. There is no work worth outsourcing at this stage of my scientific development.

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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 15d

One of the most depressing phd experiences is hearing of others' advisors (the ones that are supposed to train us into good scientists) encourage the use of chatbots in lieu of their students' development. thankfully mine don't.

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 18d

Getting close to 50k views and I'm wondering is it just everybody is scared to say this and pleased I did? Because if there's so many of us who agree, trust me I'd know if 1k people disagreed with me let alone 50k, why are we letting AI ruin our universities?

Together we can turn back the tide.

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · 20d

very cool. my only critique is that he said language doesn’t work like it does in arrival. single handedly destroying interest in the field

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Andrew Perfors @andyperfors.bsky.social · 20d

If you want a break from the horrors, check out this podcast about some cool science, featuring excellent friend and colleague Frank Mollica!

#unimelb

Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences @psychunimelb.bsky.social · Sep 8

How does language shape the way we think? While we can all see colours, different languages slice up the colour spectrum in unique ways. Some languages have far more words while others have just a handful.

Listen to the latest PsychTalks episode with Dr Frank Mollica here go.unimelb.edu.au/7axe

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Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics @mpi-nl.bsky.social · Sep 9

For decades, linguists assumed kids drive language change through ‘imperfect’ learning. New research by Raviv, Blasi & Kempe (Psychological Review) show that instead, adolescents and young adults are more likely to spread, normalize, and cement linguistic shifts. www.mpi.nl/news/young-c...

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Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science bot @oecs-bot.bsky.social · Sep 2

Information and Misinformation by Andrew Perfors: https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.a2555670

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CantlonLab @cantlonlab.bsky.social · Aug 20

Children build math skills on a “cognitive bridge” between space & number. But where does it come from? Our new study finds monkeys transfer learning and abstractions across geometry & numerosity, revealing the evolutionary roots of basic math development. 🧪🧠

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Cognitive bridge between geometric and numerical learning in monkeys | PNAS

Educational research highlights strong developmental links between numerical and spatial cognition in humans, often shaped by cultural tools like t...

www.pnas.org

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · Aug 19

1. The philosophy of science sometimes gets an unearned reputation as a purely academic exercise that offers little by way of concrete tools for advancing research.

This is wrong.

And today, as we grapple with how AI is changing the nature of scientific activity, it's desperately wrong.

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Ricard Solé @ricardsole.bsky.social · Aug 11

Do ant colonies work like liquid brains? Check this great paper in @pnas.org led by @ceabcsic.bsky.social Pol Fernandez and F.Bartumeus that shows how to explain collective foraging by modelling ants as neural agents @jordipinero.bsky.social @frazambelli.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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Manikya Alister @manikyaalister.bsky.social · Aug 10

We know that a consensus of opinions is persuasive, but how reliable is this effect across people and types of consensus, and are there any kinds of claims where people care less about what other people think? This is what we tested in our new(ish) paper in @psychscience.bsky.social

Screenshot of the article "How Convincing Is a Crowd? Quantifying the Persuasiveness of a Consensus for Different Individuals and Types of Claims"

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Rafe Meager (they/them) @economeager.bsky.social · Aug 8

Oh so it does have phd level intelligence

Victor Shammas @victorshammas.com · Aug 7

Google Gemini doesn’t appear to be doing too well:

‘"I am a disgrace to this planet. I am a disgrace to this universe. I am a disgrace to all universes . . . I am a disgrace to all possible and impossible universes and all that is not a universe," the bot continued.’

Google says it's working on a fix for Gemini's self-loathing 'I am a failure' comments

Google Gemini users said the bot is sharing self-loathing messages while attempting to solve tasks, including "I am a disgrace to this universe."

www.businessinsider.com

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merrick giles @merrickgiles.bsky.social · Jul 29

CogSci proceedings paper on the perceptual drivers of reference production — with Paula Rubio-Fernandez and Frank Mollica — is now out: escholarship.org/uc/item/4w25...

You can see my talk about it in the Perception 2 Session!

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katja heuer @k4tj4.bsky.social · Jul 27

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To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised!

🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

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Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · Jul 1

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

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Helen De Cruz @helendecruz.net · May 28

Latest post. Don’t know how many I have still in me

helendecruz.substack.com/p/cant-take-...

Can’t take it with you

I am in hospice care and reflecting a lot on what a good life is.

helendecruz.substack.com

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