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"Students across the province are protesting recent changes to the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) — the post-secondary financial aid system will go from a majority grant structure to a majority loan structure in the new school year."
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/... #OnPoli
Our institute is hiring
1. an assistant professor (with TT) for Social Psychology (focus: environmental psychology)
ohws.prospective.ch/public/v1/jo...
2. an assistant lecturer (with TT) for Experimental Personality Psychology
ohws.prospective.ch/public/v1/jo...
One hundred accounts are behind the majority of conspiracy theory content in Canada. "In 2025, Canada’s National Observer reported that Meta accepted $300K from The Epoch Times in ads targeting Canadians under a series of false names..." #cdnpoli
www.nationalobserver.com/2026/02/25/n...
If so, the volume of that low-hanging fruit is overwhelming. Studies using hypothetical mate choice designs (e.g., viewing and selecting dating profiles) dominate the literature and they continue to be generated, published, and cited, particularly in ev psych journals.
In the chapter on ev psych and gender roles:
"This vision comes from the minds of (male) academics of the mid-twentieth century who closed their eyes, leaned back, and imagined a natural state of the human condition that looked a lot like their own home life".
This book is so good OMG.
I've been collaborating with Paul for a decade, yet I'm learning so many new personal tidbits from this book.
Paul, you were an avid 8-bit Nintendo player in the early 90s??
"Evolutionary psychologists had developed a robust science around what people *say* they would do or *say* they would be attracted to. But natural selection does not act on what people say they would do in a hypothetical scenario." 🔥🔥🔥
There's a non-trivial percentage of people - including those in positions of power and influence - who fundamentally don't get what education is for.
Aside from the bonkers horse analogy, this argument belies an unfortunately common perspective that the reason why teachers and professors assign homework is because it somehow benefits us for that work to get done.
"Bonded by Evolution" book next to Mango the toy poodle.
We're all very excited around here to read @pauleastwick.bsky.social's new book!
New post! "Valuing the Process vs. the Product in Research," in which I try to describe some of the tensions around using GenAI/LLMs in scientific research, and why it can be so difficult to have productive conversations on the topic. getsyeducated.substack.com/p/valuing-th...
I'm teaching research methods, and up until this year we had a research term paper. My plan is to break it into its components - choosing and refining a research question, doing a lit review, reading and interpreting original papers, etc - and assessing each piece separately.
Mimicking AI's default gimmicky writing style gives me special pleasure in a "turnabout is fair play" kinda way.
This isn't scholarship—it's mimicry.
Not science—a performance.
When the "writer" understands syntactic patterns but not the underlying meaning, the product loses its soul. Sure, it's in APA format. But under the hood? Slop.
Scientific writing isn't just ritual. It's where true creativity resides.
We have neither the tools nor the resources to police this stuff, and it's just going to get increasingly sophisticated. Our only options are either A) accept that a large portion of the submissions we receive from students are AI-generated, or B) bring back old school evaluation methods.
Next semester, I'm moving to an in-class only evaluation format. No more term papers, no more take-home assignments. All assignments completed entirely in a computer lab with TAs present. I'm convinced it's the only way to ensure the integrity of the evaluations.
We extended the deadline of our machine learning competition by a few weeks until mid March! Still time to participate. We currently have 233 participants with 111 total submissions (some of them will be test submissions etc).
My dog shows up for bedtime the way a lot of people show up for international flights.
Paper on statistical power necessary for interaction effects
doi.org/10.1177/2515...
I like this take.
In the parlance of our time: we are so cooked.
I read your post. And then, I had this realization.
It's not just funny, it's relatable.
Not just accurate, but poignant.
When you're perfectly able to satirize an LLM, you don't just identity its flaws — you embody them. And that's a skill worth appreciating.
This is worth reading for those in higher ed:
www.insidehighered.com/opinion/care...
It's because seeking knowledge is not the point of conspiracy theories. The point is to feel like a chaotic and unpredictable world is actually orderly, enjoying a sense of belonging to a cliquey in-group, and feeling smarter than other people
This sounds extremely fun in principle. But in practice, we know that you would spend most of your time at any given university learning how to use its bespoke yet antiquated administrative systems.
Editors already grade the quality of reviews at a lot of journals. It would be important that low-quality reviews do not improve the ratio.
Of course this wouldn't apply to new scholars who aren't asked to review. You would have to decline a certain number before this kicks in. Low-quality reviews also should not improve the ratio.
Notably, journals already keep track of all these things (submissions, invites, declines, review quality)
I would be in favor of journals keeping track of the ratio of articles a given researcher submits versus reviews. When the ratio reaches a certain threshold, you can't submit any more articles to that journal as an author until you fix the ratio by reviewing. Seems very fair.
Started a blog! One of my first posts walks through how to prep your data to use the CATAcode #rpackage (with code + diagrams). With CATAcode, you can easily summarize and visualize responses from choose-all-that-apply questions:
catchingsplinters.wordpress.com/2026/01/27/u...
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