students at College Unbound are AMAZING! Check out this #PressRelease about how they led the way in developing our #GenAI institutional policy! So cool to get to play a part in this!
So I just learnt that J Physiol requires figures to be made with Biorender (https://www.biorender.com/), a VC backed subscription SaaS extend and extinguish of scientists drawing pictures!
Is this a thing now!? Complete privatisation of the publication workflow!?
Am I the only one enraged by this!? Pictures? We could have just made our own shared repository of useful graphics. Our own open source software. Uggghhh!
Bizarre, yes, but as I said in the original thread, it seems well designed to trick researchers into thinking that it’s a standard that they may as well just use like MS Word.
A relatively tech illiterate lab leader will often just tell their students to use it in the same way they do everything else to please the journals. Because as far as they know illustration already works like documents and MS Word.
@maegul @NicoleCRust@academicchatter
I find all the bad PowerPoint illustrations in biology charming, but I personally take great pride in my illustrations in my work (probably wont be doing biology for the forseeable future) and it makes me sad when people dont, whether that be because they are pressed for time or bc they dont see communicating ideas visually as part of the task of science.
I have tried to introduce diagramming markup like mermaid or graphviz/dot ti my lab to limited success, they are just used to PowerPoint I guess. My cracked copy of illustrator 2019 is basically always open. Turning figure design into some drag and drop biorender task (in addition to the platform capture element as u say) is sad to me bc it feels like the final flattening of illustration as a proud tradition in biology.
Nothing says "We care about accessibility and equity for disabled people in STEM like 'Go to Google and let their AI handle it"" #Ableism#DisabledAndSTEM
Research-based tips for professors and administrators:
> Set norms and expectations about the conversation, not just rules
> Allow students to tell their stories, when they first heard about the issue and how it affected them
> Encourage curiosity by posing non-threatening questions
> Find out the root of the disagreement
> Find cooperative projects for students to act on
> Offer students a safe space after debates to talk and feel reassured https://theconversation.com/6-ways-to-foster-political-discourse-on-college-campuses-230365 @academicchatter
In a fieldnote shared by Teresa Cremer on S-AND.org you can meet Salim Ali Mohamed of the Malindi Beach Management Unit in Kenya. To him, sand indexes a healthy ocean. Poetically, Salim considers the ecological work of sand as cleansing respirations. What do receding shorelines, an unwanted effect of urban development, say about ownership, access, and practices of more-than-human care?
Read the full fieldnote here: https://s-and.org/blog/sand-the-ocean-breather
#Journals | Security and Safety "Secure and efficient Covert Communication for blockchain-integrated SAGINs"
Weijia Li, Yuan Zhang, Xinyu He and Yaqing Song
Migrations #conference starts today! See the attachment for a list of free public events - I'll be moderating the film keynote on Friday. Come on out and sit in the a/c - escape the heat dome AND learn ;)
Have you ever thought about how dinosaurs lived on a warm, swampy Earth and how we live on one that’s cold enough to keep pretty much the entirety of Greenland and Antarctica buried under kilometers-thick sheets of solid ice and wondered, hmm, how did we get from there to here? The short answer is that it took 50 million years of declining atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and dropping temperatures, not to mention building an ice sheet or two. For the longer story of the last 50 million years of climate change, including some of the reasons why, catch this episode of our podcast with Dr De La Rocha! You’ll hear about plate tectonics and continental drift, silicate weathering, carbonate sedimentation, and the spectacular effects the growth of Earth’s ice sheets have had on Earth’s climate. There are also lessons here for where anthropogenic global warming is going and whether or not its effects have permanently disrupted the climate system. Fun fact: the total amount of climate change between 50 million years ago and now dwarfs what we’re driving by burning fossil fuels, and yet, what we’re doing is more terrifying, in that it’s unfolding millions of times faster.
!!Nerd alert!! If you're interested in the primary scientific literature on the subject, these four papers are a great place to start:
-Dutkiewicz et al (2019) Sequestration and subduction of deep-sea carbonate in the global ocean since the Early Cretaceous. Geology 47:91-94.
-Müller et al (2022) Evolution of Earth’s plate tectonic conveyor belt. Nature 605:629–639.
-Rae et al (2021) Atmospheric CO2 over the last 66 million years from marine archives. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 49:609-641.
-Westerfeld et al (2020) An astronomically dated record of Earth’s climate and its predictability over the last 66 million years. Science 369: 1383–1387.
#CFP for "Symposium on Black Methods in Science, Technology, and Innovation Research in Canada and Beyond" closing today -- there's still time to submit!