to re-up 2 ideas: Every time an MP/peer stands to speak or ask a question in either house their relevant outside interests should appear on screens in the house and on TV/online. AND MPs/peers should be required to say what the specific conflict of interest is, not vaguely nod to the register.

One final thought, though: Charles Mackay, the guy who basically invented the story of Tulip Mania, said “Men, it has been well said, think in herds. It will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly and one by one”

119 years ago today, that most prestigious of journals Nature published Francis Galton’s account of a visit to the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition at Plymouth. You may know the story... 🧵

No second jobs for MPs. This is not "serving the people".

In this current harsh world, let's warm a few hearts remembering the events of 7-8 March 1991, when the 90,000 people of Brindisi woke up to find 25,000 Albanians roaming the streets of their town. For perspective, that's roughly equivalent to 25k people suddenly landing in Hastings [Thread] >> 1

While Russians paraded under their flag to the sporting world’s cheers, their missiles murdered a 13 year old girl in Kharkiv. Shame on the IOC!

I know a commitment to evidence in policy and practice sounds rather quaint in today’s world, but well done to @evidenceaction.bsky.social for evaluating their intervention on chlorine dispensers, finding it was not as good as they thought and publishing this www.evidenceaction.org/insights/fol...

Lol. No. No more listening to tech CEOs. They do not have our interests at heart.

VC B'ham Uni fails to spot over half a century of open access at @openuniversity.bsky.social. Claims students without A levels 'are not really capable of graduating'. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Yet another criminology article with hallucinated references published in an @elsevierconnect.bsky.social journal. I reported it over a month ago to the journal, but the paper is still online and not retracted www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Happy Friday. Don’t skip school.

TIL there a statue dedicated to HMRC in Trago Mills. The statue is title: Loot and Extortion en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extortion Is HMRC only gov dept with a statue dedicated to it!?

Interesting reports on an experiment conducted on X in 2023, in which users were randomly assigned to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed significantly shifted political opinions in a pro-Republican direction. cepr.org/voxeu/column...

Omg my daughter Flo has gone and released a new single WITH A VIDEO!! youtu.be/VytNsdTkoAI?... She would like to thank you for attention to this matter.... Enjoy!

Last year when I was checking into a hotel, the desk person was wearing Meta glasses. I kindly asked them to take them off. They were annoyed. I said, “I do not consent to you looking at my credit card and ID with Meta glasses on.” My instincts were correct: www.bbc.com/news/article...

We’re excited to introduce The Journal of Policy Implementation & Evaluation (JPIE), a new journal from APPAM launching in early 2027. We are currently accepting letters of interest from prospective editors through Wednesday, Apr 1. Learn more: https://ow.ly/YLNb50YpNiO

Unintended consequence of using AI for stuff... ....radical transparency

I don't really understand this. Most expats won't be within just a few days of falling UK tax resident. Even if they are, the obvious solution is: spend a few weeks in France, Italy, the US... anywhere at all except the UK. www.ft.com/content/80bf...

FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?

Exciting news, join us in Cambridge as Caius & Homerton are hiring for yet another Assistant/Associate Prof in Sociology🎉 www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQS875/a...

More evidence that maternal exposure to stress early on in pregnancy has consequences. In this case, higher mortality rates for male foetuses but lower sex selective abortion. It reminded me of your earthquake study in Chile @ftorche.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Glad people are settling on the term "pervert glasses". Bonus points if you also say it while posting a picture of Mark Zuckerberg or call them Mark Zuckerberg's pervert glasses.

Believe in your work. Stop ending papers with “More research is needed” and start concluding with “No more research on this topic is needed.”

I love how Ipsos show the margin of error on their charts. Should be industry standard!

If you go for longer records: coldest Jan day, hottest month, year, ever: the gap between hot & cold records is even more stark. @metoffice.gov.uk sometimes get challenged on why we “only report the hot records”. Well it’s because we’ve barely see any cold ones at least since I joined in Dec 2018

With very large numbers of n’s you don’t need randomization, and with LLM’s we can generate very large numbers of n’s, so I think all of science is solved by now. I don’t see any problems with this.

We are pleased to release `uk_address_matcher`, a free Python package for address matching and geocoding, developed by Tom Hepworth and me. The package has several aims: simplicity, speed and accuracy.

Watching pro and anti Dubai social media influencers crowd out actual news to give their 10 cents inch wide, inch deep takes re-enforcing their existing bias…

It's now an annual ritual for me. Waiting for the ALCS statement to see what I've earned in secondary and residual royalties from photocopies, libraries, etc. Lowest amount: £18. Largest amount: £1900. If you've got stuff published in the UK and aren't a member of ALCS, you're a chump.

A German court has ruled that it is legal to state that the man who runs the Müller (Rice) empire is a supporter of the far-right AfD. Müller repeatedly denied it, which says everything about how bad he knew that association could be for his business. I hope the boycotts intensify.

Good morning Bluesky #greysky

Evidence Reviewer role in my team. Part time 0.5 FTE

The international boycott of ChatGPT has absolutely exploded. 2.5M people have already joined, and this is just the beginning. Go to quitgpt.org. Cancel your subscription, delete your account. And tell at least one person why. My op-ed: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

"GDPR is ruining everything"

JOB: Lecturer in Criminology, University of Otago, New Zealand www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQS049/l...

What you're looking at is not a sunrise — it's the Russian LNG tanker ARCTIC METAGAZ (IMO 9243148) struck by a massive explosion in the Mediterranean this morning. Photographed by crew aboard a merchant vessel, via Vanguard Tech.

uh, here goes nothing

📢 We are hiring a Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology at SOFI, Stockholm University. Interested in research on the causes and consequences of social policy for individuals and society? Apply by 13 April 2026. More information and application: su.varbi.com/en/what:job/... #postdoc #sociology

MPs’ basic salary to rise to £110,000 by end of parliament, watchdog says. This should be accompanied by a total ban on second jobs, which in most cases is a corporate bribe. Must end all conflict of interests. Being a MP is a full time job. MPs must act exclusively as MPs.

Using this absolute howler in my causal inference classes like....forever.

Spent 5 days in India at short notice, helping my mum who's supporting her 95 y.o. mother. Sadly she's too frail to fly back with me as planned, so it turned into respite care trip... Here's a threaded timleline cleanse. First, A Short Film: fruit and vegetable sellers of Gujarat

Opening of overdose prevention centers in New York City was not associated with significant changes in neighborhood foot traffic or consumer spending, suggesting no observed economic harms near these #HarmReduction sites. ja.ma/403HXgS

The Nazis stopped Jewish doctors from practising, so thousands of them left the country (my great grandfather was one of them). So many left that this was a good natural experiment for estimating the causal effect of losing doctors on infant mortality (& thousands died)

Earlier today, the new Member of Parliament for Gorton and Denton, Hannah Spencer was sworn in.

Good evening

As of 2025, this analysis of privacy policies indicates that every major AI company uses your private conversations to train their models by default. Every prompt, file, photo, personal detail: all of it feeds directly into model training. arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05382

Violence Prevention and Monitoring Centers in Türkiye reduced intimate partner homicides and physical intimate partner violence by 20 percent, mainly by improving access to coordinated protection services, from Asik, Erten, Tekin, Tumen, and Ulucan www.nber.org/papers/w34886

A 7-year-old boy was brought to a hospital with a 3-month history of cognitive deterioration and seizures. He had contracted measles at 7 months of age while living in an area where the infection is endemic. Read the full case details: nej.md/4qY4Ihk #MedSky #NeuroSky #IDSky

Simple Streamlit app to view crime rates across London Parliamentary Constitencies for years between 2011 and 2025 ltcrimerateapp-ta3g7dc2n8ca3yn8d2lphf.streamlit.app