Tootfinder

Quotas for scholarship recipients: an efficient race-neutral alternative to affirmative action?
Louis Gleyo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17191 https://arxiv.…

Quotas for scholarship recipients: an efficient race-neutral alternative to affirmative action?
Since 2018, France's centralized higher education platform, Parcoursup, has implemented quotas for scholarship recipients, with program-specific thresholds based on the applicant's composition. Using difference-in-differences methods, I find these quotas enabled scholarship students to access more selective programs, though intention-to-treat effects remain modest (maximum 0.10 SD). Matching methods reveal that the policy improved the scholarship students' waiting list positions relative to tho…

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science
requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.
-- Robert Heinlein

At least people across academic disciplines are selling themselves out to "AI" bullshit.
Here: Let's get some software make wrong autocompletions of Latin texts and call it scholarship, while probably poisoning our knowledge corpus for years to come…
https://archive.ph/U0ePh

Fabulous move by Keith Urban
https://countrytown.com/news/keith-urban-tamworth-country-music-festival-launch-rising-star-scholarship/IUSfNTQ3Njk/19-08-25

Keith Urban & Tamworth Country Music Festival Launch Rising Star Scholarship
Attention all emerging Aussie country artists, this one’s for you! Keith Urban has teamed up with the Tamworth Country Music Festival to launch a life-changing scholarship that could catapult your career straight to Nashville.

A Fisher's exact test justification of the TF-IDF term-weighting scheme
Paul Sheridan, Zeyad Ahmed, Aitazaz A. Farooque
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15742

A Fisher's exact test justification of the TF-IDF term-weighting scheme
Term frequency-inverse document frequency, or TF-IDF for short, is arguably the most celebrated mathematical expression in the history of information retrieval. Conceived as a simple heuristic quantifying the extent to which a given term's occurrences are concentrated in any one given document out of many, TF-IDF and its many variants are routinely used as term-weighting schemes in diverse text analysis applications. There is a growing body of scholarship dedicated to placing TF-IDF on a sound …

I was most interested in how A.I.
— one of whose many superpowers is the ability to inhale large amounts of text in an instant and offer credible summaries of it
— might transform the way history is written.
https://www.…

A.I. Is Poised to Rewrite History. Literally.
The technology’s ability to read and summarize text is already making it a useful tool for scholarship. How will it change the stories we tell about the past?

The Rest is Silence: Leveraging Unseen Species Models for Computational Musicology
Fabian C. Moss, Jan Haji\v{c} jr., Adrian Nachtwey, Laurent Pugin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14638

The Rest is Silence: Leveraging Unseen Species Models for Computational Musicology
For many decades, musicologists have engaged in creating large databases serving different purposes for musicological research and scholarship. With the rise of fields like music information retrieval and digital musicology, there is now a constant and growing influx of musicologically relevant datasets and corpora. In historical or observational settings, however, these datasets are necessarily incomplete, and the true extent of a collection of interest remains unknown -- silent. Here, we appl…

Thank you, @roopikarisam.bsky.social, for your closing words for #DH2025: 'the future of DH requires access grounded in accountability; repair sustained by care; scholarship driven by solidarity'
And also, 'hope and strategy are very important things to hold onto right now'

Congratulations to Barbara Hof, currently postdoc in my SNSF project, for being awarded the 2025 IUPAP Early Career Prize in the History of Physics!
https://www.iuchpp.org/prize/prize-2025

I’m so proud of my little brother.
I just spoke to him in his dorm room at a top 30 college here in the US, he just arrived for freshman orientation.
He got in on a full ride - tuition, housing, food, books, travel, stipend for daily expenses. Won a competitive scholarship to do so.
More than that, he’s had a tougher road than most to get there:
- he had to suddenly move away from Manila, Philippines (where he grew up) in middle school because of COVID restrictions that didn’t let kids go outside (2020)
- then, just as he adjusted to school and a different language in our home country, Ukraine, Russia invaded (2022)
- he stayed in Greece for a month while I was calling our congressional representative here in NY and negotiating with the US embassy to get them a visa ASAP to enter the US and be with me and my husband. There were no paths for Ukrainian refugees yet, we just wanted them with us temporarily for a few months to figure out what options they even had next.
- he had to wait, not going to school, with no clue where they’d move next, until TPS became available to Ukrainians and they got to stay here in the US
- then he had to continue high school in yet another system, yet another country, amidst news of bombings and destruction back home
- my mother wasn’t allowed to work for months while their documents were pending, so we had to raise money with a public GoFundMe campaign and my husband and I maxed out our credit cards to help them get by
- they shared a one-room cottage for the first year, graciously hosted for free by an elderly local couple
- he saw a therapist who also graciously took him in for free while they didn’t have insurance
- he had to graduate high school amidst news of other immigrant students getting arrested, detained, and deported at their own graduations around the country
- he wasn’t sure if he would even make it to college as this administration publicly considered canceling TPS for Ukrainians and cutting off their pathway to maintaining legal status.
We don’t know what tomorrow holds. But he’s there. He’s on campus. He got to go to college.
I love him so much.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law school has
💥paused a full-tuition scholarship program named for its first Black graduate
❌ and plans to close its office of “equal opportunity and engagement” this month.
The changes come as m Donald Trump’s administration pushes for an end to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at universities nationwide.
⭐️The White House has threatened to pull federal funding from those that do not comply.
Penn Carey Law in 2021 …

Penn’s law school pauses scholarship honoring its first Black female graduate, plans to close equal opportunity office
Penn’s law school pauses scholarship honoring its first Black female graduate, plans to close equal opportunity office. Alumni expressed concern.

"Ultimately, engaging the public enriches our scholarship. It pushes us to think more carefully about clarity, ethics, and relevance. It also ensures that the knowledge we produce contributes to a wider societal good, affirming the role of the university not just as a place of knowledge production, but also of public service."
#OpenScience
https://social.edu.nl/@Bibliothecaris/114833640819292319

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge:
We must protect and cultivate the ecosystem of human knowledge. AI models can mimic the appearance of scholarly work, but they are (by construction) unconcerned with truth—the result is a torrential outpouring of unchecked but convincing-sounding “information”. At best, such output is accidentally true, but generally citationless, divorced from human reasoning and the web of scholarship that it steals from. At worst, it is confidently wrong. Bot…

Nothing makes for a relaxing start to a holiday like news that Typepad is closing in a month! Mournfully looking at British Library blogs and posts on the Internet Archive https://web.archive.org/web/sitemap/https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/

Peer Review as Structured Commentary: Immutable Identity, Public Dialogue, and Reproducible Scholarship
Craig Steven Wright
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22497

Peer Review as Structured Commentary: Immutable Identity, Public Dialogue, and Reproducible Scholarship
This paper reconceptualises peer review as structured public commentary. Traditional academic validation is hindered by anonymity, latency, and gatekeeping. We propose a transparent, identity-linked, and reproducible system of scholarly evaluation anchored in open commentary. Leveraging blockchain for immutable audit trails and AI for iterative synthesis, we design a framework that incentivises intellectual contribution, captures epistemic evolution, and enables traceable reputational dynamics.…

How Easterners and Westerners perceive ADHD differently
Xing-Chan Lin (Department of Computer Science,Psychology, University of Cyprus,Open University of Cyprus)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10549

How Easterners and Westerners perceive ADHD differently
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder has traditionally been conceptualized as a neurodevelopmental condition associated with deficits such as inattention, impulsivity, and poor time management. Such perspectives often emphasize pathology and functional limitations. More recent scholarship, however, has begun to reconceptualize ADHD by identifying potential adaptive characteristics, including heightened energy, periods of hyperfocus, and advanced cognitive flexibility. A growing body of qual…

Civil Servants as Builders: Enabling Non-IT Staff to Develop Secure Python and R Tools
Prashant Sharma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07203 https://arxiv.org/p…

Civil Servants as Builders: Enabling Non-IT Staff to Develop Secure Python and R Tools
Current digital government literature focuses on professional in-house IT teams, specialized digital service teams, vendor-developed systems, or proprietary low-code/no-code tools. Almost no scholarship addresses a growing middle ground: technically skilled civil servants outside formal IT roles who can write real code but lack a sanctioned, secure path to deploy their work. This paper introduces a limits-aware, open-source and replicable platform that enables such public servants to develop, p…

Lovely to give the keynote 'On Epistemic Humility: storytelling, positionalities, and just survival in/through research', for the Higher Degree Research Forum, University of South Australia.
I draw on post-colonial, Black, and Indigenous scholarship to problematise what we know and how we know.
#HigherEducation

Exploring the Technical Knowledge Interaction of Global Digital Humanities: Three-decade Evidence from Bibliometric-based perspectives
Jiayi Li, Chengxi Yan, Yurong Zeng, Zhichao Fang, Huiru Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08347

Exploring the Technical Knowledge Interaction of Global Digital Humanities: Three-decade Evidence from Bibliometric-based perspectives
Digital Humanities (DH) is an interdisciplinary field that integrates computational methods with humanities scholarship to investigate innovative topics. Each academic discipline follows a unique developmental path shaped by the topics researchers investigate and the methods they employ. With the help of bibliometric analysis, most of previous studies have examined DH across multiple dimensions such as research hotspots, co-author networks, and institutional rankings. However, these studies hav…

Energy Experience Design
Brian Sutherland
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05869 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05869

Energy Experience Design
The material footprint of information and communications technology (ICT) systems is both significant and growing, inspiring a variety of conversations around sustainability and climate justice. In part this effort has been catalysed by past scholarship and analysis from the LIMITS community. This paper examines energy storage systems for computing, particularly batteries -- which are discarded at the rate of 15 billion a year worldwide. The International Energy Agency (IEA) is now referring to…

Gregorian melody, modality, and memory: Segmenting chant with Bayesian nonparametrics
Vojt\v{e}ch Lanz, Jan Haji\v{c} jr
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00380 h…

Gregorian melody, modality, and memory: Segmenting chant with Bayesian nonparametrics
The idea that Gregorian melodies are constructed from some vocabulary of segments has long been a part of chant scholarship. This so-called "centonisation" theory has received much musicological criticism, but frequent re-use of certain melodic segments has been observed in chant melodies, and the intractable number of possible segmentations allowed the option that some undiscovered segmentation exists that will yet prove the value of centonisation, and recent empirical results have shown that …

Members of the British Library's Digital Research team will be at #DH2025 in Lisbon, July 15-18! Find out what we're presenting https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarshi

From Literature to ReWA: Discussing Reproductive Well-being in HCI
Hafsah Mahzabin Chowdhury, Sharifa Sultana
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01121 https://

From Literature to ReWA: Discussing Reproductive Well-being in HCI
Reproductive well-being is shaped by intersecting cultural, religious, gendered, and political contexts, yet current technologies often reflect narrow, Western-centric assumptions. In this literature review, we synthesize findings from 147 peer-reviewed papers published between 2015 and 2025 across HCI, CSCW and social computing, ICTD, digital and public health, and AI for well-being scholarship to map the evolving reproductive well-being landscape. We identify three thematic waves that focused…

Computational Detection of Intertextual Parallels in Biblical Hebrew: A Benchmark Study Using Transformer-Based Language Models
David M. Smiley
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.24117

Computational Detection of Intertextual Parallels in Biblical Hebrew: A Benchmark Study Using Transformer-Based Language Models
Identifying parallel passages in biblical Hebrew is foundational in biblical scholarship for uncovering intertextual relationships. Traditional methods rely on manual comparison, which is labor-intensive and prone to human error. This study evaluates the potential of pre-trained transformer-based language models, including E5, AlephBERT, MPNet, and LaBSE, for detecting textual parallels in the Hebrew Bible. Focusing on known parallels between the books of Samuel/Kings and Chronicles, I assessed…

FX-constrained growth: Fundamentalists, chartists and the dynamic trade-multiplier
Marwil J. Davila-Fernandez, Serena Sordi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02252 https://

FX-constrained growth: Fundamentalists, chartists and the dynamic trade-multiplier
Behavioural finance offers a valuable framework for examining foreign exchange (FX) market dynamics, including puzzles such as excess volatility and fat-tailed distributions. Yet, when it comes to their interaction with the `real' side of the economy, existing scholarship has overlooked a critical feature of developing countries. They cannot trade in their national currencies and need US dollars to access modern production techniques as well as maintain consumption patterns similar to those of …

Theories of "Sexuality" in Natural Language Processing Bias Research
Jacob Hobbs
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22481 https://a…

Theories of "Sexuality" in Natural Language Processing Bias Research
In recent years, significant advancements in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) have positioned commercialized language models as wide-reaching, highly useful tools. In tandem, there has been an explosion of multidisciplinary research examining how NLP tasks reflect, perpetuate, and amplify social biases such as gender and racial bias. A significant gap in this scholarship is a detailed analysis of how queer sexualities are encoded and (mis)represented by both NLP systems and practi…

Poor example to introduce the `disabled` HTML attribute:
Lesson: Don't use the same/similar name as the concept being introduced.
```html
<label>
<input type="checkbox" name="ch-box" value="disabled" disabled />
disabled
</label>
```
#writing #scholarship #examples #technicalWriting

Countering Privacy Nihilism
Severin Engelmann, Helen Nissenbaum
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18253 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18253

Countering Privacy Nihilism
Of growing concern in privacy scholarship is artificial intelligence (AI), as a powerful producer of inferences. Taken to its limits, AI may be presumed capable of inferring "everything from everything," thereby making untenable any normative scheme, including privacy theory and privacy regulation, which rests on protecting privacy based on categories of data - sensitive versus non-sensitive, private versus public. Discarding data categories as a normative anchoring in privacy and data protecti…