Jeff Watson

@lifeat78rpm.com

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Professor, Dept. of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Gonzaga University. Dodgers fan, father, music lover, writer to name a few others in no particular order. All opinions are mine, not my employer's.

Posts Replies Media

Happy Father’s Day to me! Looking forward to my vacation read, @mikechenwriter.bsky.social

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Jeff Watson

Keep saying it loud and often: generative "AI" is not intelligent, it is riddled with inescapable errors, it is structurally incapable of ever doing half the things its hypers claim it will do, most of it is snake oil in search of a mark to scam, and it's environmentally destructive to boot.

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Jeff Watson

June is #PRIDE month, where it's fun to convince homophobes and transphobes that light is actually gay and every time they open their eyes, they now are also "a gay". 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ Also, let them know that Jupiter is proudly Trans and won't be taking any questions. 📸 Jupiter pic: NASA/ESA/HUBBLE/Judy Schmidt

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Jeff Watson

Reply to

c0nc0rdance

The implications for life on other planets: water + radiation may be all that's needed to create the 'food' that microbes like this need. They have an elaborate genome, capable of fixing ammonia into usable nitrogen & forming endospores for long dormancy periods to survive. Read more here:

Life Without the Sunastrobiology.nasa.gov An ecosystem discovered 2.8 kilometers underground in the Mponeng Gold Mine near Johannesburg, South Africa two years ago has now been shown to comprise only a single species of...

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Jeff Watson

My past week

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Jeff Watson

Reply to

Sarah Parcak, Book Writing Madness

It seems like the universities see professors as elite and valuable resources when it comes to demanding you do a bunch of unpaid labor but when it comes to professors taking any sort of controversial stand you're mere laborers to be beaten down by the Pinkertons for mouthing off to management.

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Jeff Watson

Real and implied species. Support my Patreon for extra content: www.patreon.com/birdandmoon

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Jeff Watson

Speaking as college faculty...no. Rather, it is precisely **because** college students are forming strong bonds of community, interaction, and care that all of this is even possible. It's much of the rest of the US that's forgotten how to do that, and so looks on in terror.

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Jeff Watson

Every single one of these prohibited activities happens all over the @UF campus on football game days, except instead of “protesting” they call it “tailgating”.

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Jeff Watson

that's right.

The university is the kids and the profs. The university is not the donors or the administration.

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Jeff Watson

‘“Shit, if only they’d have moved like that when my son was being murdered,” the father of a murdered Uvalde child tweeted above footage of Texas DPS officers in riot gear storming toward unarmed students at UT Austin.’

"These escalations against students are a choice. Police can be patient, even passive. The Texas DPS proved that when they loitered outside the ongoing slaughter of grade-schoolers." www.momleft.com/p/the-kids-t...

The Kids The Guns Are Forwww.momleft.com The same police force that failed Uvalde children is arresting peaceful student protesters at UT Austin. It's not about safety. It's about order.

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Jeff Watson

Universities are claiming they can manage tens of thousands of people (many drunk) moving across campus for sports & commencement, but they need a violent police response to 150 students peacefully camping on the quad. 🤔

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Jeff Watson

Reply to

Hipster Viking Amy

As God is my witness. One team I work with had a person quit earlier this year, and they’re all being lovely wonderful people who want to do extra work to help out until she gets replaced, and you know what’s gonna happen if they do? She won’t get replaced.

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Jeff Watson

columbia university achieving the daring dream of a no-student no-faculty all administration university

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Jeff Watson

Police are being exceptionally rough on NYU faculty being arrested now. Solidarity with my comrades.

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Jeff Watson

Worth pointing out that Voyager 1 is over 15 billion miles away and the tech it's using was launched into space a week before the Atari 2600 came out. A private corporation would have written this thing off years ago. FUND NASA.

HOLY SHIT THEY FIXED VOYAGER I …!!! blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024...

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Jeff Watson

My latest New Scientist cartoon. #science #discoveries

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Jeff Watson

HOLY SHIT THEY FIXED VOYAGER I …!!! blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024...

Wow… if you are any kind of fan of great writing and great audiobook narration, this is a must have deal. All three books are outstanding AND some of the best narrators in the business.

Holy crap each audiobook of the Kingston Cycle is 3.99 as a chirp deal!

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Jeff Watson

You know what? I’m starting to think that *maybe* grades aren’t a totally valid, reliable, impartial measure of learning 🤔

An analysis by University of Michigan researchers of more than 30 million grading records from U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades. This is due to sequential grading biases and the default order of students' submissions in Canvas. #AcademicSky #EduSky #Bias

Researchers find lower grades given to students with surnames that come later in alphabetical orderphys.org Knowing your ABCs is essential to academic success, but having a last name starting with A, B or C might also help make the grade.

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really upsetting to see former Wikimedia Foundation director and CEO Katherine Maher getting targeted by the rightwing outrage machine in her new role as NPR CEO. she's wonderful, and NPR is lucky to have her. i hope they stand behind her.

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Jeff Watson

"More than 40% of provosts... agreed or strongly agreed that their institutions should cut their # of academic pgms by the end of next academic year... Around 2/3... said their institutions were seeing higher-than-usual turnover rates for staff specifically. 35% said the same of faculty members."

Provosts’ survey shows need for AI policies, speech worrieswww.insidehighered.com Many institutions are not yet prepared to help their faculty members and students navigate artificial intelligence. That’s just one of multiple findings from Inside Higher Ed’s annual survey of chief ...

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Jeff Watson

Yeah, but like, the fear of crime is up 723%.

Homicides in major US cities falling at ‘one of fastest rates ever’ – report

Homicides in major US cities falling at ‘one of fastest rates ever’ – reportwww.theguardian.com Nearly all crime, including violent and property offenses, was down ‘a considerable amount’ in 2023 compared with 2022

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Jeff Watson

"This 'burnout' that secure scholars are feeling is phantom pain where their colleagues should be. Or, to use a term that every other normal worker in the US uses to describe their workplace under these conditions: you are suffering from the effects of intentional systemic understaffing."

A Profession, If You Can Keep Itcontingentmagazine.org Imagined meritocracies mean little to extractive institutions.

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Jeff Watson

This is the text of the keynote speech I gave today at the annual Jack Williamson Lecture at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico. marthawells.dreamwidth.org/649804.html

Captcha Checkmarthawells.dreamwidth.org

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Jeff Watson

🧪Hello science friends! Looking to speak with scientists who are caregivers, particularly if you are caring for a spouse or relative. It's for an upcoming piece in Nature. Please spread the word and RT!

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Jeff Watson

Just wanna quietly note that if you’re a tech worker at a company where this gentleman sits on the board, I’d be happy to send you a copy of YOU DESERVE A TECH UNION. Drop me a line.

kind of incredible to see a VC come on twitter and admit that he thinks "the correct response" to unionizing would be federal crimes

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Jeff Watson

Guys, it is proper bananas that the size of the Moon and the distance to the Sun are so perfectly matched. It's one of the absolutely coolest things about the sky, and I say this as a person who discovers whole new planets.