The error rate is growing exponentially. Why? Every enshitified output becomes part of the source material. Current #LLM models have no way of countering this as there is no effective "truth-valuing" process involved. The #Shatbot function will always espouse nonsense with seeming confidence!

I maintain that generative AI is very much inherently bad, and extremely useful for the worst, most toxic applications A system that convincingly fabricates content with no designed drive towrads accuracy or ethics of humanity is not "useless". You can use it for lying, fakery, cheating, abuse

“It’s just common sense!” Bertrand Russell:

Think I'm coming to the end of my journal article writing so delighted that my last effort - 'Still getting away with murder: the failures of Corporate Manslaughter law in the UK' - is open access in the wonderful Justice, Power & Resistance @europeangroup.bsky.social @brisunipress.bsky.social

Carole Cadwalladr on why appointing Matt Brittin as director general could be a huge mistake for the BBC

@uniofnottingham.bsky.social in the news again today, this time for dropping publishing deals with Taylor & Francis, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Wiley, significantly harming support for researchers at #Nottingham University.

Your episodic reminder in #criminology #LieDetection is a con. Whether it be polygraphy or biometric scanning its a con, on top of junk science, on top of unjustified assumptions. Advocates are either marks or huxters. #AI lie detection will just be the latest version of this con! #CJS

"Chipped teeth, broken noses, facial injuries, head injuries, scars..." Our Legal Director, Gemma Abbott, details the injuries we hear young people sustaining from use of force in prison in our Spotlights webinar. Catch up here: https://howardleague.org/spotlights/

Nearly half of our universities are forecasting deficits. Institutions across the country are closing departments and issuing redundancy notices. The government don’t yet consider this a crisis. How many more jobs must be lost before ministers act?

Feels so strange to have lived through the time where Google actually worked Anything you’d want to find or just a quick search away Now it feels impossible to find anything Even articles I know exist, that I have read before do not show up

Registration for Conspiracy Theories & Pseudolaw, the QMUL School of Law Criminal Justice Centre's annual conference, is now open. 📅 Thursday 18 June (online) 📅 Friday 19 June (in person/online) at QM LIF London. Program and registration links here: tinyurl.com/55yrx627 Please share!

All talk, no action? The persistent problem of racism in criminal justice @crimeandjustice.bsky.social event: In-person in London and online via Zoom 3 June 2026, 18:00 - 19:00 www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/all-talk-no-...

Interesting reflection on the policy successes of previius youth justice reforms. But is the evidence base for early intervention as strong as the new White Paper claims?

I wonder what happened in 2016 and then in 2020 to affect london's #economy and #QualityOfLife so badly??

Jade Levell examines child death records to show that knife crime prevention frequently comes too late. Her analysis argues that vulnerable children are repeatedly failed by fragmented systems that miss or overlook early experiences of violence. #KnifeCrimeAwarenessWeek https://ow.ly/Om2750Z1FGy

My article has been published in Theory, Culture and Society. New Westoxication: Retrieving Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s Cultural Critique The article aims to situate a reconceptualised notion of “westoxication” within the vocabulary of postcolonial social theory. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Good to see MOJ look at age of crim responsibility which at 10(!) is far too young. It assumed, as Glanville Williams claimed, that young people are better off "sensibly managed" within CJS than diverted. This has been discredited by decades of evidence of harm contact with CJS has for children.

"hallucinated references disproportionately assign credit to already prominent and male scholars, suggesting that LLM-generated errors may reinforce existing inequities in scientific recognition" arxiv.org/abs/2605.07723

"This in-depth study of Argentina’s military during that country’s era of coups and forced disappearances found that low performers — whom they refer to as “career-pressured” individuals — filled the ranks of the secret police" #AcademicSky #argentina

New post on our book - with Aine Mangaoang and Lucy Cathcart Froden - #Sound and #Detention. Useful for #Research, #Teaching and practice on #Arts and #Music in #Prison. Lots of resources helpfully linked in one place: sensorycriminology.com/2026/05/17/s...

I have a piece in press — not sure why it’s not out—about this phenomenon, the logic of triage, racial immunologics in the west African Ebola outbreak

One for #Criminology where we see the intersection of #gambling, #CorporateCrime, and #StateCrime. The great game continues ... “Don't talk rot, Whitney," said Rainsford. "You're a big-game hunter, not a philosopher. Who cares how a jaguar feels?” ― Connell, R. (1924) The Most Dangerous Game

"Fake citations have turned into a nightmare for research librarians, who by some estimates are wasting up to 15 percent of their work hours responding to requests for nonexistent records that ChatGPT or Google Gemini alluded to." open access link: archive.ph/qt59c 2/🧵

🎭The Rule of Wonder: Prison Theatre and the Governance of Participation in China with Dr Xiaoye Zhang. Wed 27 May, 4pm UK time, Online. 👉 Register www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1989813576...

This. It should also be built into #TEF that if you hold an #academic title, then you are required to teach, regardless of position and wider duties. If not, then your university scores lower* * Not that any of these metrics (including #REF & #KEF too) have any actual value to #HigherEducation

'Last week’s report from the House of Commons’ Education Select Committee recommended that the government should work with the higher education sector to devise a scheme that would see part of the pay of universities’ senior leaders only paid out once they finish the job.' 1/3

Two fundamental problems in this headline: 1. It presents the issue as a problem with #HigherEducation rather than the labour market/broader economy. 2. It also, and once more, commits a category error by conflating the purpose of higher learning with the sating of wage slavers. #Academia

The #University, #HEIs more broadly, tend to be #AnchorInstitutions in more ways than just localised economies. There are a broad spectrum of core knowledges that are developed, communicated, and taught in the #HigherEducation sector that our societies are absolutely dependent upon. #StopTheCuts

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed throughout this commencement speech at the University of Arizona for his praise of AI. This comes just a week after another commencement speaker who mentioned AI was booed at a school in Florida. Read more: www.404media.co/ucf-ai-comme...

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

Immigration make Britain brilliant

If your average VC were either (1) completely incompetent, but meant well and believed in the purpose of universities, or (2) they were completely corrupt but very clever at navigating economic and political realities, UK HE would probably still be doing ok. Sadly neither is the case.

This week an "at risk of redundancy" notice and then just now realised two students were watching me dancing (badly) in the office to this ... www.youtube.com/watch?v=iykv... Time to call this week quits me thinks!! #Criminology

So this week at the UoNottingham has been shit! An act of utter ideological vandalism wrapped up as fiscal pragmatism. Morale shot. Collegiality undermined. Frontline staff distressed and immiserated. Hugs (where appropriate) to all fellow staff. #Academia #HigherEducation @ucu.org.uk

I was watching a crime drama last night when the detectives mentioned using forensic gait analysis. Victorian police detectives used to visit prisons to study the gait of known offenders and there were cases where they identified a suspect by the way in which they walked. Everything has a history!

I like this. If the paper contains hallucinated references, how can we trust anything else in it? By the way, I'll present our experience developing and using the hallucinator tool next week at MetaCrisp (co-located with IEEE S&P)! 📄 seclab.bu.edu/people/gianl... 💾 github.com/gianlucasb/h...

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

I imagine those staff taking part in mock-REFs in the next few years will have subterranean levels of motivation never before seen in UK academia. Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic doesn't even come close as a description of where we are.

'Hallucinated citations are more prevalent in work authored by researchers with little pre-2022 publication history. When fake citations occur, they disproportionately credit already established, highly cited, often male authors, the study found.' 2/2 arxiv.org/abs/2605.07723

"Biometric technologies, presented as neutral tools for verification, do the work of producing 'truths' about bodies, often overriding people’s own assertions of self, and enforcing the state’s gaze upon those arbitrarily coded as deviant, unauthorized, or criminal."

We desperately need to get away from arguments for the humanities that elevate them because of what they do for technology. The humanities should not be understood as service disciplines. They are an extension of us, and that is enough.

This is crazy - Clare is amazing, and the whole physics and astronomy group at Nottingham is incredibly strong. Just disastrously short-sighted from the university leadership. Please do sign!

Nottingham job cuts ‘pose systemic risks to research’, union warns. Research-intensive university told it risks “intellectual stagnation” as 2,700 staff put at risk of redundancy. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

Oof. Missed this the other day. By our measure Nottingham is the UK big city most reliant on the universities for local 'knowledge' jobs. One in four of all of these high skilled jobs in the city are academic and non academic staff in higher education. Could be a big blow

🗣️"The sector has become a hybrid institution caught between public expectations and market imperatives, governed by leaders rewarded for financial agility, rather than intellectual integrity" #AcademicSky

Apropos ... #HigherEducation #Academia

Yesterday Kier Starmer announced Labour will nationalise British Steel, and save 2700 jobs. Today, the Uni of Nottingham put 2700 staff at risk of redundancy. This is just one university. Across the UK 15,000 higher education jobs need saving. Where is the rescue package for our universities?

2,700 in limbo for months, with more than 600 expected to lose their jobs. Having been at risk of redundancy last year, I can’t imagine the impact of so many feeling so insecure and devalued. Cruel and destructive. Solidarity to all.

Particularly galling is that most of the senior architects of this mess are not among those under threat of losing their jobs, since they have ridden the senior-management employment roundabout and skipped off to well-paid jobs elsewhere before the inevitable happened. 3/3