#neutral-evaluation-conference

#neutral-evaluation-conference

Modern scientific societies are increasingly vulnerable due to their dependence on membership fees and journal subscriptions, which are being challenged by the rise of virtual networking and open-access publishing.

The format has ginormous link cards at the bottom of the AI summary, which include a thumbnail of no apparent value, the site name, favicon, description, and title.

The first event is a roundtable on "Zhuangzi: Fate, Desires, Transformation" on April 6th at 9:00am Beijing time.

Computer programs that check mathematical arguments have existed for decades, but translating a human-written proof into the strict programming language of a computer is extremely time-consuming, often taking months or even years.

Google AI mode has added an 'Ask about this' option above the sources where all URLs are displayed. Clicking on 'Ask about' here automatically pulled a new prompt into the search box.

Librarians have been actively collaborating and talking about it almost every day, whether it's creating tutorials and digital learning objectives or thinking about the conversations to have with instructors. It can feel like cognitive dissonance to be actively working with AI on a regular basis and also saying we're constantly thinking about the harms and the biases.

I'm less interested in topics than in questions, and I'm less interested in publishing than I am in curation. When I've testified before Congress or dealt with an appropriations bill or a budget negotiation, this question, of what is the return on investments when you're doing R&D, comes up quite often. It's been asked by economists in very formal ways since at least the 1950s, but the data and the methods that were available were really not very strong.

Some clinicians have an uncanny quality. A colleague describes herself and others with this instinct as "witchy"-a capacity to know things about patients they haven't said yet, to follow a stray association to a song lyric or a half-remembered cultural reference and arrive, reliably, at something the patient urgently needed to say but couldn't reach on their own. We see with artificial intelligence these intriguing possibilities for discovery, especially as connections that human beings never would see pop out of apparently unrelated data.

Many colleges and universities have made cuts in these programs, often bolstering STEM programs at their expense. It's a situation that has sparked no small amount of impassioned editorials. The headline of a recent article at The Guardian by Alice Speri referenced an 'existential crisis at U.S. universities,' and Speri's reporting features numerous examples of undergraduate and graduate programs facing cuts or outright elimination.

If you don't know it, Ecclesiastes is a collection of Old Testament verses in which the eponymous title character discourses on the apparent meaninglessness of pleasure, accomplishment, wealth, politics, and life itself in the face of the infinitude of the universe and the absolute perfection of God. It is the source of many of our most cliched phrases, such as there is a time for everything and there is nothing new under the sun.

A professional philosopher outside the academy walls can act as a popularizer (the goal here is to make philosophy more accessible to the general public), an applied ethicist (the major task is to offer an analysis of various specific moral issues that arise within a society), and a public intellectual (I limit this role to questions that have political connotation). Of course, there are overlaps between these roles and they certainly do not exhaust all possible forms of public engagement of a professional philosopher.

Consistent with the general trend of incorporating artificial intelligence into nearly every field, researchers and politicians are increasingly using AI models trained on scientific data to infer answers to scientific questions. But can AI ultimately replace scientists? The Trump administration signed an executive order on Nov. 24, 2025, that announced the Genesis Mission, an initiative to build and train a series of AI agents on federal scientific datasets "to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs."

In 2023, Australia abandoned its expensive and bureaucratic scholar-led research-assessment programme. New Zealand followed suit soon after. The hope, according to a transition plan unveiled by the Australian federal government's Department of Education and the research sector, was to find a "more modern, data-driven approach". In the United Kingdom, where financial pressures on universities are especially acute, there are similar calls to reform the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the country's performance-based research-funding system.

They were well represented among the awards focused on workforce training but were shut out when it came to addressing larger social issues. To be fair, FIPSE wasn't alone in ignoring community colleges. As Karen Stout pointed out this weekend, The Chronicle 's quarter-century forecast drew on 50 experts from across higher education to talk about emerging trends; only one was from a community college.

We argue that "faculty members could hold strong viewpoints and yet act in accordance with the highest professional standards." We state emphatically that "it is not possible to make faculty experts refrain from articulating any political viewpoint" while adding that "it is possible to require that they limit the viewpoints expressed in classes to those that are academically justifiable and germane, and to create a space in class where other defensible positions can be expressed."

Just before winter break, news broke that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill plans to close its centers for African, Asian, European, Middle Eastern, Latin American and Slavic, Eurasian and East European studies. Though UNC administrators said in a statement that decisions on closures are not finalized, they confirmed they are evaluating centers and institutes as part of a budget-cutting effort in response to state and federal funding changes.