#‘make another research paper’

[anonymocha]

state of affairs

[funkle420]

a great way to combat genAI in the future would be educating kids (and teens and college students and all ppl) on art way more.

[fennthetalkingdog]

I don't know if I'm in the minority on this, but I love writing essays. The feeling of choosing something that seems fun, getting to research it, organizing what you've learned in a neat and tidy way, and now having a random pocket of knowledge that stays with you for the rest of your life is something that I can hardly ever replicate elsewise. Some of my favorite hyperfixations have come from essays and other research projects that I had to do for school (like when I learned about LSD for a biology project on cell communication, or when I wrote a speech on neopronouns for a public speaking class)! And I miss so much having a class where I can just... do what I love, for credit! I haven't had a research class since my first semester and I'm feeling it 😔 One of my friends asked me for advice about choosing a topic and I got so excited at just the mention of a research paper that I started happy stimming hard, lol. I really should just write a paper on my own time, but then I'd need some executives to function for once, *sigh*.

[e77y]

Trying to fix my resume ☝️🤓 Small problem: I sound like a loser no matter what

[fuck-em-up-your-grace]

Academia is so left-wing until you actually have to read research papers and then it’s just 20 different papers on why colonization was okay

[thelaststarfalling]

just once i'd like to complete one (1) bigger project that i can actually be proud of

[9w1ft]

Wait! Wait! No! I get it. Okay so. Toe WERE married. They divorced. Because remember she has a song about divorce? Then they got back together. And then he realized she's famous. And she dumped him. Sure. Makes sense.

😌

[waugh-bao]

*

[lelouch]

God that one lady's reaction is so insane. Acting like the reason people are getting upset at her for posting unsourced, bad claims is actually because they're angry at her for... Having sex? Her responses are genuinely unhinged 😭

Like. Please. I know that you're insane but can you please act like a normal person... She didn't even back down from the claim, just said if people wanted actual sources they should pay her. To source her own claim 😭😭😭

She keeps complaining about "tumblr virgins" that hate sex like... no one's attacking her for that lol

She also says that "her job is researching" so i'd guess shes pretty frustrated bc shes not good at her job 😔🙏🏼

[rustinged]

whats ur hw let us do it

ajksdfh 😽🤎

[lovelyisadora]

this presentation isn’t hard I just don’t want to do it 😤 I didn’t get to choose the topic and it’s a thirty minute lecture

[supercantaloupe]

bro i am straight up not having a good time

[hierneneuro]

when the sweet professor offers to let you read alternative titles to what's in the official reading list because he knows you're interested in quantitative research and the whole reading list is qualitative studies

[theedwardianwriter]

Thinking little thoughts about virality and infamy in the pre-internet age.

My Guy(tm) (a local personality of note circa 1920-1940) wrote this letter, probably having a terrible day, with a demonstrably bad take. From all the evidence I have about him, this take didn’t even align with his own opinions and was more an expression of frustration and rage in what was meant to be a private letter to a friend. He sent thousands of letters to correspondents across the country and probably even the world. Why would this one be any different?

Unfortunately, his “friend” was not so much one. Later that week the contents of said letter appeared, front page, in a local newspaper—the one that My Guy(tm) was subscribed to. It gave his full name and post office of residence, which in those days was enough to get a letter exactly where it needed to go.

Due to the outrageousness of the bad take, newspapers across the state picked up the story. Somebody even complained about it, without his name, to a national magazine.

I don’t know whether My Guy(tm) received anything in the mail, but based on the defensive tone of the 3 things he sent to the paper following the article, he did, and it wasn’t very kind. Granted, the take was a bad one, but not the kind that deserved almost six months of bad press and a serious blow to a pretty good reputation.

Privacy today is such a complicated topic, especially with the emergence of the internet and social media. Things shared are often assumed to not be in confidence, and we build public versions of ourselves to project to the greater world.

In many ways, though, things haven’t changed much at all.

[curlicuecal]

playing science telephone

Hi folks. Let's play a fun game today called "unravelling bad science communication back to its source."

Journey with me.

Saw a comment going around on a tumblr thread that "sometimes the life expectancy of autism is cited in the 30s"

That number seemed..... strange. The commenter DID go on to say that that was "situational on people being awful and not… anything autism actually does", but you know what? Still a strange number. I feel compelled to fact check.

Quick Google "autism life expectancy" pulls up quite a few websites bandying around the number 39. Which is ~technically~ within the 30s, but already higher than the tumblr factoid would suggest. But, guess what. This number still sounds strange to me.

Most of the websites presenting this factoid present themselves as official autism resources and organizations (for parents, etc), and most of them vaguely wave towards "studies."

Ex: "Above And Beyond Therapy" has a whole article on "Does Autism Affect Life Expectancy" and states:

The link implies that it will take you to the "research studies" being referenced, but it in fact takes you to another random autism resource group called.... Songbird Care?

And on that website we find the factoid again:

Ooh, look. Now they've added the word "some". The average lifespan for SOME autistic people. Which the next group erased from the fact. The message shifts further.

And we have slightly more information about the study! (Which has also shifted from "studies" to a singular "study"). And we have another link!

Wonderfully, this link actually takes us to the actual peer-reviewed 2020 study being discussed. [x]

And here, just by reading the abstract, we find the most important information of all.

This study followed a cohort of adolescent and adult autistic people across a 20 year time period. Within that time period, 6.4% of the cohort died. Within that 6.4%, the average age of death was 39 years.

So this number is VERY MUCH not the average age of death for autistic people, or even the average age of death for the cohort of autistic people in that study. It is the average age of death IF you died young and within the 20 year period of the study (n=26), and also we don't even know the average starting age of participants without digging into earlier papers, except that it was 10 or older. (If you're curious, the researchers in the study suggested reduced self-sufficiency to be among the biggest risk factors for the early mortality group.)

But the number in the study has been removed from it's context, gradually modified and spread around the web, and modified some more, until it is pretty much a nonsense number that everyone is citing from everyone else.

There ARE two other numbers that pop up semi-frequently:

One cites the life expectancy at 58. I will leave finding the context for that number as an exercise for the audience, since none of the places I saw it gave a direct citation for where they were getting it.

And then, probably the best and most relevant number floating around out there (and the least frequently cited) draws from a 2023 study of over 17,000 UK people with an autism diagnosis, across 30 years. [x] This study estimated life expectancies between 70 and 77 years, varying with sex and presence/absence of a learning disability. (As compared to the UK 80-83 average for the population as a whole.)

This is a set of numbers that makes way more sense and is backed by way better data, but isn't quite as snappy a soundbite to pass around the internet. I'm gonna pass it around anyway, because I feel bad about how many scared internet people I stumbled across while doing this search.

People on quora like "I'm autistic, can I live past 38"-- honey, YES. omg.

---

tl;dr, when someone gives you a number out of context, consider that the context is probably important

also, make an amateur fact checker's life easier and CITE YOUR SOURCES

[ms-demeanor]

Sometimes college professors like to hop on my posts lamenting the sorry state of syllabi these days and joke about how they haven't thought that far ahead in the course themselves, or talk about how they struggle to complete a schedule for their students.

With all due respect, that's your job. If you can't do your job, you should have a different job. If you need help, ask your colleagues or your department chair or *someone* because I know that professors aren't given a hell of a lot of education on how to educate, so you probably *need* help.

But every single time I make one of those posts I get anywhere from ten to thirty messages, replies, reblogs, and asks say "oh man, that's exactly why I had to drop out of school; I couldn't keep up with the assignments because I didn't know when they were due until the week they were due."

I have been a college student in three separate decades, and "not having a schedule of assignments in the syllabus" is new to my experience. That shit didn't fly in the 2000s or 2010s and I think it likely has to do with professors being overly reliant on apps.

AT A MINIMUM your syllabus should have:

Contact information (including preferred method of contact) for the professor

Office Hours

Grading Policy

Assignment schedule.

Your assignment schedule doesn't necessarily need to have the exact page numbers of every reading or a full assignment sheet for each project, but it should have things like:

December 1st - Major Project 3 second draft due December 9th - Quiz 10 December 12th - Major Project 3 final draft due December 15th - Final Exam

If you end up presenting a more thorough schedule with readings and homework later, that is acceptable to present a week or two into the semester but it is absolutely insane to me that students these days don't know what homework they're going to have to get done over Thanksgiving break during the first couple weeks of class.

If I had three professors at once who didn't give me a schedule, how on earth would I know if I was going to have to read three chapters of a novel, take a midterm and turn in two stats homework assignments, and complete a history research paper the same week that I'm planning to travel to see family? If I'm aware of this from the beginning of the semester I can make sure not to pick up extra shifts, or I can plan to leave a day later to accommodate the midterm, or I can start working on the paper early to complete it before the due date but if I don't know what's going to be due when, I'm going to have a big problem.

If you don't give your students a schedule you are communicating that you don't care about their schedule, and that you think it's their responsibility to contort their life (and their job, and their other classes) around your class, and honestly my advice to students in that situation is "drop in the first week and pick up another class". That's actually part of why I recommend signing up for one more class than you can really manage - if you get a professor whose class looks like it's going to be a disaster because they don't have a schedule, you can bail before the withdrawal period and get a refund for the class.

I'm only in one class this semester but the professor's response has fully dropped me into "Fuck it, I guess I'll fail" mode and I don't even know if I can pull myself out of my current D grade because I don't know how many assignments we have left in the semester.

This is a shitty way to run a class. If you can't do better than this, you shouldn't be running a class.