Paul Nation's regular section in The Language Teacher and the expositions section in JALT Journal are excellent. Short, digestible, and making research palatable for language teachers 👏 jalt-publications.org

Copilot built into Outlook is making my life so much easier. Finding emails, summarising, checking if I am close to any deadlines, etc.

'He's so GOATed it's insane' First time I've heard GOAT used as an adjective, but apparently it's a thing

Writing the discussion section always involves using the most brain power 🧠🤯

Honoured to be invited to speak at the JALT Vocab SIG symposium in Fukuoka (26 Sept.). Prof. Atsushi Mizumoto is the invited discussant this year. There is also a call for presentations/posters out until 30 June. docs.google.com/forms/d/1E0p...

It's great when conferences share videos of talks online for free, this is one from University of Cambridge sites.google.com/cam.ac.uk/wr... This talk was good: Stefano Bannò (Cambridge) Exploiting the English Vocabulary Profile for L2 word-level vocabulary assessment with LLMs.

When interests collide in a venn diagram: Mike Skinner being interviewed about brutalist architecture wepresent.wetransfer.com/stories/the-...

Is 39 comments too many to write in a peer review? Asking for a friend 😬

Looks interesting... Translation norms for English and Japanese translation pairs: Translation ambiguity, proficiency, and production errors link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Several useful datasets here: huggingface.co/ALTACambridge

Preparing for ICAME in Koblenz Germany from 26 May

I used to use Google Slides for this kind of drag and drop activity, but now I can just ask Claude to make something in HTML and put it directly into Moodle 👏

A little sad to be leaving Rikkyo University after 6 years (the longest that I've worked anywhere), but looking forward to getting started in the School of Commerce at Waseda University...so many books to buy to fill those empty shelves.

"That way a fat-finger mistake almost certainly hits an invalid code rather than a real one." Nice use of the term "fat-finger", Claude

Number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

I like these "Spin the Wheel" things for warm up questions at the start of the semester, but most sites that make them have some kind of paywall eventually (or ads), Claude offered to help me make one and here it is, just copied the code into Moodle and it works really well.

📚🔎 The Adam Kilgarriff Prize is open for applications. If you created a dictionary, corpus, or language tool, consider applying or sharing the opportunity. #lexicography #NLP kilgarriff.co.uk/prize/

Submitted 🫠...now we wait😬

"instead of needing to already commit to a certain sample size, a researcher can simply keep going untill a certain evidence threshold (for either hypothesis) is reached." johnnydoorn.github.io/BayesBookQua...

Concise introduction to Bayesian Inference: johnnydoorn.github.io/BayesBookQua...

Claude: "Off the top of my head..." ...but you don't have a head

youtu.be/iitq4Zrphdk?... Hannah Fry: "there are certain situations where AI can do superhuman things but you know so can forklifts you know what I mean like we built tools that can do things that humans can't do for a really long time doesn't mean that they're godlike"

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... "For researchers and practitioners, there seems to be an interesting blend of excitement to experiment and publish and fear of missing out on the waves of GenAI." - nice way to put this, FOMO in GenAI research

For doing things like searching for articles from one particular journal: github.com/fabiobatalha...

野菜の詰め放題、ごぼうはまだまだいけた

Yorkshire puddings. Definitely the first time I've made them in My 16 years in Japan, and maybe first time ever

Happy Pancake Day and Happy Chinese New Year. According to Claude it's the first time the 2 have aligned since 1953. The next time they align will be 2029.

If this works well in practice, sounds like an amazing tool: Hu, N., Lu, X. & Hu, R. Developing fine-grained sense-aware lexical sophistication indices based on the CEFR levels of word senses. Behav Res 57, 226 (2025). doi.org/10.3758/s134... GitHub too: github.com/fulan233/cef...

If you're in and around Tokyo and interested in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), my department is hosting this event with featured speakers Prof. Makoto Ikeda and Dr. Barry Kavanagh. There will also be 10 CLIL-related poster presentations www.rikkyo.ac.jp/events/2026/...

I used an activity in class today that I learned in my first intensive TEFL course, but had never used before. It was swilling around for 17 years and I finally found a use for it.

Getting my new slides in shape. I have it on good authority that the typeface I have chosen is "woke" (aka sans serif)

Some songs I've been listening to over the last 3 months, not necessarily released or discovered by me in the last 3 months... music.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Always doing academic writing with the ghosts of reviewers past on my shoulders... 👻

Some light winter reading...

University of Hong Kong professor steps down from associate deanship after AI-generated references scandal hongkongfp.com/2025/12/18/u...

Maybe these ChatGPT adverts on social media don't give us the full insight into what the models are most useful for

It’s been fun while it lasted: “Purdue University will begin requiring that all of its undergraduate students demonstrate basic competency in artificial intelligence starting with freshmen who enter the university in 2026.” www.forbes.com/sites/michae...

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

www.podbean.com/ew/pb-7dir8-... On this week’s Lost in Citations podcast, I am pleased to share my conversation with Dr. Akira Murakami from the University of Birmingham, who is an expert in #corpuslinguistics, statistics, and quantitative methodology. (1/3)

[Strong Message Here] AI Hallucinations (with Stewart Lee and Sarah Wynn-Williams) #strongMessageHere podcastaddict.com/strong-messa... via @PodcastAddict

www.podbean.com/ew/pb-7dir8-... On this week’s Lost in Citations podcast, I am pleased to share my conversation with Dr. Akira Murakami from the University of Birmingham, who is an expert in #corpuslinguistics, statistics, and quantitative methodology. (1/3)

www.podbean.com/ew/pb-dvscn-... Delighted to share this podcast that I recorded with Prof. Susan Hunston, expert in #corpuslinguistics, English grammar, and former senior grammarian. We talked about the paper “Coming to Terms with Success” (1/3)

From its Monty Python origins to its dominance in the age of AI. Yes, we're talking about Python. 🐍 We sat down with creator Guido van Rossum to discuss its incredible trajectory in the 2025 Octoverse report. 📊 Learn how community and stability shaped a global powerhouse. 🚀 https://gh.io/AAyvkm9

Really enjoyed listening to this episode of #LostInCitations with Professor Susan Hunston, hosted by @coopersensei.bsky.social Before discussing the paper, they talk about Susan’s career and work in general (including her involvement in the COBUILD project), and briefly her recent open access book😊

www.podbean.com/ew/pb-dvscn-... Delighted to share this podcast that I recorded with Prof. Susan Hunston, expert in #corpuslinguistics, English grammar, and former senior grammarian. We talked about the paper “Coming to Terms with Success” (1/3)

Stephen Fry and the Godfather of AI | BBC News youtu.be/ZKRY827SCew?...

Enjoyed attending #jalt2025 for the first time in 6 years, here are the slides from my presentation about using Python and R in research www.researchgate.net/publication/...

We are deeply saddened by the loss of Greg Newby, who led Project Gutenberg ( @gutenberg.org ) with passion and purpose. Greg’s belief in free and open access to knowledge continues to inspire us and so many others working to preserve our shared culture online. gutenberg.org/about/newby....

I've just been using the Write & Improve Corpus, I didn't know that there was a Speak and Improve Corpus too: englishlanguageitutoring.com/datasets/spe...