An Oregon State University instructor reportedly filed a bias report against a student for arguing that there are two biological sexes in a class assignment. The university says its Bias Response Team doesn’t punish protected speech, but you don’t have to punish students to silence them. The prospect of being subjected to vague “restorative processes,” or having your views documented in a university file, is chilling enough. And students are already reluctant to speak up. In FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings survey, 52% of Oregon State students reported at least occasionally self-censoring with professors, while 41% expressed discomfort disagreeing with professors on controversial issues in written assignments. Professors can grade students on their arguments, research, and understanding of course material. But reporting them for their personal views is another matter entirely, and teaches students a dangerous lesson: Keep your opinions to yourself. @OregonState must scrap its Bias Response Team.

Please share with the community. I'm looking for beta testers for CascadiaTools, an AI coding agent harness for ecological, wildlife, fisheries and conservation-genetic analysis. It is available as a @claudeai plugin. Our aims are to: (i) argue that the trust ecologists place in vetted R packages can be extended to analyses run by coding agents, if the agents call vetted code instead of writing it; (ii) state the design principles that make agent-produced analyses checkable; (iii) describe the architecture shared by all modules; (iv) report how each of 29 modules was built and independently verified, including the limits each verification exposed; (v) show how a researcher with no coding experience uses it, from question to publication figures; and (vi) outline how vetted libraries for coding agents could become a standard part of ecological practice. /1 cascadiawildlifelab.org/tool…

From a recent paper: "There is now overwhelming evidence for the destructive effects of the industrial model of agriculture on Earth’s life-support systems." What we all need to recognize is that ALL models of crop production that will actually feed us have these destructive effects - it's how crops are grown. The worst thing about agriculture is its use of land. Whether conventional, no-till, organic, or agroecological-regenerative, the biodiversity lost from initially clearing land for crops far outweighs any differences in farming systems. And what is a measure of land use efficiency? Yield. High yield=high land use efficiency for cropping.