Congratulations Mel!!

If the genocidal famine in Gaza makes you feel helpless, follow @thecynicist.bsky.social who regularly posts gofundme's from people she can vouch for, and give what you can. If you ever wondered what you'd have chosen and done during historic genocides, it's what you're doing right now.

I spent the half-year working on this investigation. Extraordinary influence of UPF lobby behind the scenes. 'UK government dropped health push after lobbying by ultra-processed food firms' 👇 www.theguardian.com/society/ng-i...

Big news this evening This EU ruling has been 7 years in the making www.iccl.ie/digital-data...

Email trail: UPF firms pressured Sunak gov't to withdraw recommendation that food promotions prioritise minimally processed foods. And current gov't accepted it. Not surprising - yet so disappointing Bravo to Soil Association for securing these via FOI

For those of you without access to X, here's Grok being manipulated to deliver answers with a particular political spin by its operator. Doesn't exactly do much to make us trust the neutrality of these platforms.

DSA - protection of minors "The draft guidelines are now open for public feedback until 10 June 2025. The Commission is seeking contributions from all stakeholders, including children, parents and guardians, national authorities, online platform providers, and experts." ec.europa.eu/commission/p...

Ilkka Tuomi has done the digging on this terrible AI in education "evidence" reproduction again over on LinkedIn if you want receipts www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Yet again a big "meta-analysis" of the effects of ChatGPT on "learning performance" - largely arguing there are big positive effects - is getting wildly and uncritically promoted by the usual big names and yet again it appears to be a review of seriously bad science...

So many different thoughts, ideas, feelings and art works pulled into a collage that gently reveals itself as a whole new thing entirely. Magic.

Was this my favourite episode of Podyssey? Probably. But all so far are all a beautiful meld of myth, music, movies, literature and piercing yet delicate insights about life - timeless and contemporary, personal and political.

Opinion from the FT's Editorial Board: 'The US and European countries that tout Israel as an ally that shares their values have issued barely a word of condemnation. They should be ashamed of their silence, and stop enabling Netanyahu to act with impunity.' www.ft.com/content/f5fd...

The problem we have about health is that it’s marketed as this personal thing & conceptualised as the result of what you do to yourself or what individually happens to you -your bad luck- But health is largely a collective expression of our environment & circumstances. This requires societal action.

Strongly recommend this thoughtful paper - much of it applies beyond the discipline of law

the problem with “tech journalism” is that we had 2 decades of mainly white men regurgitating press releases about new cell phones and usb ports on laptops who now are their own publishing platforms while being unable to grasp how the future became automated high frequency feudalism

This sums the whole situation up quite nicely.

Re: Kids+tech. @tpf.bsky.social is a pioneer in operationalizing risk assessment, w massively influential processes she invented for Google and Common Sense. Her recent work determined AI companions aren't safe for kids <18. So this news from Google is...interesting. techcrunch.com/2025/05/02/g...

"AI literacy" is set to become part of the OECD's international testing and ranking exercise. The assessment's not due until 2029 but the OECD is already preparing resources for schools to teach to the test and perform on the ranking. codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2025/04/30/p...

I know I’m harping on about this endlessly, but just imagine replacing the word ‘universities’ with any other, be it ‘businesses’ ‘schools’ ‘hospitals’ or ‘farms’. This is Labour’s very own “F$&# Business”

Labour's biggest issue is neither being too socially conserative or not socially conservative enough. It's cuts. People have had enough.

It is such a deeply narcissistic way of defining friendship. Someone who knows you. Who tells you what you want or need to hear to feel better. Whose very existence revolves around you. Not somebody you find interesting, you want to know more about, help, support, learn from. Dictators will love it.

Could the UK-EU Summit reset post-Brexit politics? New post on my Brexit & Beyond Blog. If framed as a major strategic announcement, the Summit could challenge the Farage insurgency far more effectively than Labour's 'make Brexit boring' approach: chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2025/05/coul...

The Association of Internet Researchers (@aoir.bsky.social) has released a crucial new guide on risky research—essential for anyone studying digital harms, disinfo, extremism, gender, race and sexuality, etc ... A must read as it's full of practical and actionable advice. aoir.org/wp-content/u...

The average American has 3 eggs, but has demand for 15. So here are 12 photographs of eggs. I am a business man.

It is a sign of the continuing degradation of our discourse that Zuckerberg’s argument - we will make up for your friendship deficit by deploying chatbots - is not met by the deafening sound of every living human being who is able to understand his words laughing derisively

With new junk food ad restrictions coming into force this October, adland is already finding ways to dodge them, borrowing tactics from Big Tobacco with sports sponsorships, social media stunts, and cryptic campaigns. Full story in Ad Nauseam in the new Private Eye, out now.

Newsletter: I am sick and god damn tired of everybody pretending that generative AI is the next big thing. The media is complicit in accepting fantastical nonsense - both in the numbers put out by OpenAI and the silly jobs created by Anthropic - and it has to stop. www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

[including disappearing Signal, WhatsApp msgs] anything you send may not disappear into the chat archive on a phone, but may be analyzed, indexed and stored by AI in an easily searchable database on a device you do not control www.forbes.com/sites/zakdof...

Student: Teacher, why do we learn? Socrates: For life! Freire: For liberation! Dewey: For democracy! Neoliberal EduWonks: To mitigate overhead costs for employers and increase future projections of GDP!

Europe will continue to struggle until it challenges the foundational assumptions the US tech industry is built on and stops trying to replicate it in Europe. Silicon Valley is not delivering widespread benefits. Europe needs to refocus on the public good, not what’s most valuable to shareholders.

People don’t need to “learn to use AI”. They need to learn how to think and make connections themselves and thus will facilitate their efficient use of whatever technology comes along. Crafting the right prompt for AI doesn’t take AI training, it takes liberal arts training.

"We are, in effect, guinea pigs in an information experiment in which the resilience of our societies is being put to the test. It now costs next to nothing to quickly and easily create a flood of convincing lies and hate, with minor human intervention." medium.com/we-the-peopl...

"If this judgment of the UK Supreme Court did nothing else, the complaint that there should be a set of criteria to measure women's behaviour against, to assess if they are sufficiently womanly, would make it an historically bad example of British Imperial thought"

Important implications I haven't seen discussed elsewhere: clash between CJEU and UK Supreme Court gender identity definitions, and why this matters for UK/GB (because of GDPR and the "adequacy" status the UK needs to retain)

📢 New paper This analysis of youth influencers’ YouTube accounts found that 2/3 of food cues presented were not permitted for marketing to children. @evawinzer.bksy.social @mimitgolden.bsky.social @magdalenamuc.bsky.social bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

This looks like a really interesting conference to consider submitting to... and/or attending for fun alongside learning :) Submissions portal opens in January 2025 Early bird for attendance £295 until 1 May

Exciting read arrived yesterday. The growth of play in universities is inspiring 😀

reading is the most important and valuable (i’d argue even more than writing, running experiments etc) aspect of doing research and now we have gen ai “read” and “summarise” scientific work… we are sleepwalking into mediocrity

interesting to watch evidence grow for food marketing exposure effects - this one in adults

Please Share! This is a FREE creative writing resource using stories and cartoons to teach writing on the theme of #ClimateChange. Based on years of school residencies in primary and secondary, the aim is emotional engagement rather than delivering facts. antaisceeeu.sharepoint.com/sites/CAPTea...

Interesting to know that people in seventeenth-century France (well, the Cardinal de Richelieu at any rate) were already complaining about too many people, especially the lower classes, going to university and studying the ‘wrong’ kind of subjects. Source: R J Knecht, Richelieu (1991), p. 154.

Emotional support

So Twitter is the Empire. We are the Resistance.

Looking forward to calmer knowledge sharing here! Workwise I'm interested in childhood/youth wellbeing relating to health, food, digital media, schooling - and fun :) Also here for politics, int relations, law, cyber and more

Dito. More important to me is that many of the highly insightful people I used to read on eX are now together again at a sane place.