Lessons for academics from @Jason's "How to Say "No": Five Templates to Turn Down Opportunities Gracefully" bit.ly/2o1KU31 1. THANK people for their interest/ideas/connection 2. Know what YOUR OPPORTUNITIES look like 3. Know your "DON'T DOs" 4. Be on DEADLINE
1/10
1. Thank people for reaching out: A great way to acknowledge someone has an idea/opportunity for you. E.g., "Thank you for thinking of me for the editoral board of your <predatory> journal, but I must decline." Bonus points for early replies. 2/10
2. Know what opportunities look like for you. For ECRs the chance to speak on a keynote panel at a workshop can be great. I know more senior academics who refuse all the panels. Being clear with what is an opportunity looks like for you helps you to say no.... 3/10
e.g., "Thank you for inviting me to your workshop. I have to decline all workshop invitations that are outside of the key area of my research at the moment." 4/10
3. Know your 'I don't dos': I don't do reviewing for-profit publishers. I just don't on principle. I also don't donate my time to corporates -- there's too much other work to be done with my service time helping university presses, nonprofit publishers & community groups. 5/10
(Don't get me started on the last time I spoke for free at a conference that charged $10,000 a pop for a ticket. Never again.) 6/10
Your 'don't dos' will vary over your career. That's ok. Knowing them will make saying no easier. No judgements. 7/10
4. We are all on deadline. ALL👏THE👏TIME. Right now I'm on book deadline. Last month I was on grant deadline. The deadlines never end in our business. It gives us a gracious way to say no. 8/10
E.g., "Until April 2020 I am on deadline for my next book and cannot take on new opportunities until then." 9/10
I would love to hear how you all say no - What works for for you? 10/10.
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A key Mu3k theory made it into the @nytimes opinion pages this week. Touted and burnished by a professor at a top university WITHOUT transparency that Musk funded him for $10 Million for the research. How? 🧵
Humanity is collapsing from population decline. Sound familiar? It's the pet theory of ultra-rich Western white guys like Musk. He funded the center run by the author of this @nytimes op-ed with a $10 million grant. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
What I find EXTRAORDINARY that this funding is not listed on website for the center, the Population Wellbeing Institute, nor did the author say in his op-ed bio that he leads PWI. But Bloomberg broke this story last month about Musk's donation to PWI. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
"If you do not have symptoms, you must not seek a test, as the scientific evidence shows that the test may not be able to detect whether you have the virus."
How in hell are we going into a second wave with this as the NHS messaging?
I say this having returned from a US state (KY) with free, rapid, on demand testing. Waste a test? Nobody wants to do nasal swab tests for fun. I flew back to the UK knowing I wasn't putting my family at risk (neg.)
And now I sit in 14 days legally mandated quarantine because I actually follow the rules.
The best minds in AI ethics are not even one step removed from this mess.
The goals here were clear: preserve standardisation in unprecedented times. But public trust? Fairness? Equity? People in charge ranked those goals lower than that of standardising marks across schools. But absence of 'ground truth' here -- 2020 individual exam results --> FAIL.
We need instead to understand how these systems are rolled out in practice -- not just open the so-called black box but what's around that box: who built it, who is using it, what are they doing with it, who do they think it is for, what do people know/THINK they know about it.
Data are for 2017 and cover the whole year. Of course we've only had 6 months of Covid data in 2020 (Feb-Aug), but already it it is the third top cause of death in the US. cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr…