jjvenky
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jjvenky
@jjvenky.bsky.social
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jjvenky.bsky.social
jjvenky @jjvenky.bsky.social · May 14
After many decades, the Wool Gee Pig ( #Waterloo #Laurier Graduate Program in #Geography, W-LGPIG) is dead.

#cdnpse

jjvenky.github.io/articles/202...
A (Not Really) New Graduate Program
After many decades, the Wool Gee Pig (Waterloo-Laurier Graduate Program in Geography, W-LGPIG) is dead.
jjvenky.github.io
Reposted by jjvenky
courtneymilan.com
Just a thing about this: a common statement in writing is that you can fix crap, but you can't fix a blank page.

I have heard AI apologists claim that this is why it's fine to generate a first draft.

Now, to be clear, fuck this.

But also: an AI draft is a fucking blank page.
courtneymilan.com Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 1d
I know I don’t talk about writing much. It is because I am writing so slowly.

But I want you to know that I am taking a part of this story that absolutely sucked and took me months to produce four of the worst chapters I have ever written and in the edit I figured out how to fix it.
December 24, 2025 at 3:55 AM
Reposted by jjvenky
carlbergstrom.com
I've often wondered why so many academic scientists want large labs (i.e., numerous graduate students, postdocs, etc).

Today it occurred to me that we learn how to run a lab from our own advisors and statistically, at least, tend model our labs on theirs.

(1/2)
December 21, 2025 at 9:09 PM
Reposted by jjvenky
tompepinsky.com
Journal editors: I suggest manually clicking on DOI links in the references section of submitted manuscripts. You may be surprised by what you see.

Gen AI has lots of uses, and one of them is generating fraudulent citations.
December 21, 2025 at 4:41 PM
Reposted by jjvenky
shawnmicallef.bsky.social
One of Canada’s great bldns (despite de-brutalizing reno) - exposed aggregate should be the symbol of Canada. This is my weird cause I will quietly push until I fade into obscurity.
jamestaite.bsky.social James Taite @jamestaite.bsky.social · 12d
National Arts Centre, Ottawa, 1965-9, Affleck, Desbarats, Dimakopoulos, Lebensold, Sise
December 13, 2025 at 2:39 PM
Reposted by jjvenky
jacquelyngill.bsky.social
The #BEASTLab won second place in the departmental holiday decoration contest!
A glass ball containing a clear liquid hanging from a red ribbon. There is an NFPA hazard label with a Santa hat and a white label saying DANGER Hydrofluoric Acid 50%.
December 12, 2025 at 10:57 PM
Reposted by jjvenky
planetdr.bsky.social
It’s really demoralizing how many colleagues are using AI.

Your job is literally to use your brain- your extremely unique, highly trained brain 😭
December 11, 2025 at 6:15 PM
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thelabandfield.bsky.social
Some food for thought on the CERC chairs from my analysis in 2013.
December 11, 2025 at 10:18 PM
Reposted by jjvenky
cghlewis.bsky.social
Not sure where to start when creating a data dictionary for your project dataset?

I've got a simple template available that provides examples of fields you may want to include. It also includes an example completed data dictionary for reference.

osf.io/e5g6t/files/...
December 11, 2025 at 3:27 PM
Reposted by jjvenky
stephaniecarvin.bsky.social
LOL. No.
News story from The Register from July 2025 which says “Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty Under oath in French Senate, exec says it would be compelled – however unlikely – to pass local customer info to US admin”
December 9, 2025 at 11:15 AM
Reposted by jjvenky
hushuo.bsky.social
I finally got around to reading this. You should read it too.

"We are exporting the very labor of teaching and learning—the slow work of wrestling with ideas, the enduring of discomfort, doubt and confusion, the struggle of finding one’s own voice."

www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...
AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.
www.currentaffairs.org
December 4, 2025 at 1:52 PM
Reposted by jjvenky
lindsaytedds.bsky.social
Geneviève Bergeron, 21
Hélène Colgan, 23
Nathalie Croteau, 23
Barbara Daigneault, 22
Anne-Marie Edward, 21
Maud Haviernick, 29
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, 31
Maryse Laganière, 25
Maryse Leclair, 23
Anne-Marie Lemay, 22
Sonia Pelletier, 28
Michèle Richard, 21
Annie St-Arneault, 23
Annie Turcotte, 20
December 6, 2025 at 9:39 AM
Reposted by jjvenky
aplante.com
hey!! i got to talk to the winnipeg free press, and then i got them to talk to my friends too! this is a great article thanks so much gabby!!
December 6, 2025 at 12:14 AM
Reposted by jjvenky
ellearmageddon.bsky.social
“i asked chatgpt”

yeah, well i asked my kitten, but she was too busy making biscuits to care, and i think her priorities are correct tbh
December 6, 2025 at 5:24 AM
Reposted by jjvenky
brandontbishop.bsky.social
11 days until the AGU Fall Meeting in New Orleans.
noturtlesoup17.bsky.social amanda moore 🐢 @noturtlesoup17.bsky.social · 21d
Commander Greg Bovino led a group of Border Patrol agents on walk around the French Quarter in New Orleans this afternoon.
December 4, 2025 at 7:30 AM
Reposted by jjvenky
harrywallop.co.uk
Great culture can save lives. Literally.

Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard
December 2, 2025 at 8:48 AM
Reposted by jjvenky
stressrelated.bsky.social
I just saw that Brunton is having a 20% off sale from now until Dec 20. (It's a small business and the owner is a friend and former colleague of mine.) Orange and yellow and purple transits! All kinds of gear re-designed to make field geology easier!

www.brunton.com
Professional Transits & Compasses | Navigation Tools | Brunton
Our professional transits and compasses set the industry standard for performance and reliability. We have been building the finest navigation tools and equipment since 1894.
www.brunton.com
November 28, 2025 at 7:07 PM
Reposted by jjvenky
epiellie.bsky.social
My hot take is that in the era of easily-generated AI nonsense papers journals that want to ensure high quality will need to start hiring full-time professional editors and reviewers instead of relying on volunteer labor from overworked academics.
erikangner.com Erik Angner @erikangner.com · 27d
UPDATE: The publisher intends to retract the paper, but insists it went through two rounds of review from two independent peer reviewers: nobreakthroughs.substack.com/p/riding-the... by @jacksonwryan.com. No word on how they will make sure this sort of thing never happens again.
Riding the Autism Bicycle to Retraction Town
Does anyone *really* know their Factor Fexcectorn?
nobreakthroughs.substack.com
November 28, 2025 at 3:23 PM
Reposted by jjvenky
socarxiv.bsky.social
In light of record submission rates and a large volume of AI-generated slop, SocArXiv recently implemented a policy requiring ORCIDs linked in the OSF profile of submitting authors, and narrowing our focus to social science subjects. Today we are taking two more steps:
/1
November 27, 2025 at 2:54 PM
Reposted by jjvenky
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 jjvenky
weatherfox64.bsky.social
#OTD in Weather History, 48 years ago, on November 10, 1975, the ore freighter SS EDMUND FITZGERALD was lost with all hands in a severe storm on Lake Superior.

She is perhaps the best known shipwreck on the Great Lakes, and today we remember her loss. 1/
A bow on view of the SS EDMUND FITZGERALD afloat on the Great Lakes in calm seas under a partly cloudy sky. Image source is Wikipedia
November 11, 2023 at 12:23 AM
Reposted by jjvenky
cmdr-hadfield.bsky.social
When asteroids slam into Earth they create a warm, wet local environment. These 3 guys dug through 78-million-year-old core samples to show how quickly life moves into the hellscape, to understand Earth history. news.westernu.ca/2025/09/life...
@westernu.ca @linneuni.bsky.social Canada & Sweden
November 10, 2025 at 2:39 PM
Reposted by jjvenky
brittanytrang.com
A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death.

Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written."

Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating.
🧪🧬🧫
James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers
James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA who died Thursday at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers.
www.statnews.com
November 8, 2025 at 1:39 PM
Reposted by jjvenky
stephenbheard.bsky.social
Excellent thread. I'm 100% with Timothée here, and admiring his approach to grading.
ctrlalttim.com Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · Nov 7
A student wrote to me after the midterm, and they said they should have gotten a lower grade. I think this is important, because I fundamentally disagree with this student, and it took me a while to articulate why. This is my rough draft. 🧵
November 7, 2025 at 10:16 PM
Reposted by jjvenky
moebiusstripper.bsky.social
I am responding to the extremely polished multi-paragraph student emails with two-line invitations to visit me during office hours, which in 2025 means that I'm putting at least as much work into crafting a reply as the student put into putting together the original message.
November 6, 2025 at 3:40 PM
Reposted by jjvenky
cghlewis.bsky.social
I was writing some code using #rstats dplyr to check some hand calculated values and then I was like, what am I doing? I'm not lame. I'm using genzplyr! 💅
library(genzplyr) # genzplyr loaded fr fr 💅 # Your data wrangling is about to be bussin no cap library(dplyr) #for across() df # A tibble: 3 × 5 id q1_scored q2_scored q3_scored total_score <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> 1 200 1 0 1 2 2 201 0 0 0 0 3 202 1 0 0 2 # Check hand calculated "total_score" variable has accurate values - spoiler alert, it does not df |> glow_up(temp_score = rowSums(across(ends_with("_scored")))) |> vibe_check(temp_score, total_score) |> yeet(temp_score != total_score) # A tibble: 1 × 2 temp_score total_score <dbl> <dbl> 1 1 2
November 7, 2025 at 8:15 PM