I recently attended a workshop on research funding and what can be done to improve public funding of research. In this blog post, I share why I consider the political dynamics of research funding an increasingly important lens in understanding the influence of research funding on research itself. In its most basic form, research funding is a tool used for a variety of purposes.

In February 2024, I announced I took over as the administrator of the Mastodon server AkademieNL.social. It has been a pretty smooth ride since – there are a few signups, but not too many. Spam posts are what gets reported most often. It does not take up too much of my time – an hour every week or so. The monthly active users on the server sits around ~120 people. As an admin, the main and most regular thing I notice are the costs.

In my own attempt to be a productive part of the change towards European digital autonomy, I upskilled myself to manage and deploy services on European cloud infrastructure. As far as European cloud infrastructure goes, I did some research and there are several major players – OVHCloud, StackIt, and Open Telekom Cloud.

Over time, I gathered a bunch of helpful mental models to manage my work and motivate myself. These mental models can be applied in professional work, but also in private life at times. I often forget these are things I learned at some point, so I am writing them up for my Startup Therapy series as they come to me. Just in case they may prove helpful for someone at some point 😊 Today's mental model: Input tasks and output tasks.

I am a member of the Society for Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) – have been since 2017. I joined their yearly conferences every other year starting in 2017, but I will not be joining the 2025 conference in Budapest, Hungary. For me, the big selling point of SIPS are the people – the location choice for 2025 (unintentionally) signals that some people are less important.

In July, I got notified one of my passwords was available in a dark web data dump, alongside my email. I was able to pinpoint the breached service because I use unique passwords for each account. That service is Pensoft.

In the run up to the European elections, I received a moderation report for a post that contained misleading polling information on the Mastodon server I am responsible for. As a result, AkademieNL now has a new server rule, as formulated above. This blog post dives a bit into the need for this rule and how I came to it. The reported post contained misleading election information.

If you are not familiar with why calling your organization a family is problematic, here is a very brief recap. While plenty of people have fantastic family environments, family is not a positive experience for everyone.

The most common definition of anti-semitism is the racist treatment of Jewish people. ^[1] Even though when we talk about racism we often talk about white supremacist racism towards Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), racism can be directed to any group. ^[2] But that also means that if you have been learning about racism since Black Lives Matter, we can use that knowledge to understand anti-semitism better.

I want to recommit to writing, to recommit to actively and publicly think about what is happening. I want to recommit to the idea that thoughts are dynamic and never settled — that thinking in public helps move away from sharing only finalized arguments. Thoughts are produced and reproduced through the conversations we have, be it directly on the phone or indirectly through writing and reading.

The social media landscape is so different today from when I started participating around 2011. Things change, and that is okay — when the old dies, it becomes the compost for something new. For me, something new sprouted from Twitter's compost beyond just joining Mastodon: I am taking over as the admin for the Mastodon server akademienl.social.