This is presumably a consequence of relaxing the eligibility criteria for starting grants, effectively allowing every Tom, Dick, and German PhD candidate to apply; a frankly stupid decision. However, failing in two successive applications seems like a strong signal: research is not for everyone.

If you park your police car on the tram tracks to investigate a minor shop-lifting incident, I will politely insist that you move it immediately as a tram is approaching. My partner – perhaps more used to London policing – will loudly imply that you are an idiot. The tram will – naturally – be full.

Please share - Trinity Geography is hiring for a tenure track position of Assistant Professor in Human Geography with a focus on Historical/Cultural Geography Job details can be found here jobsireland.ie/en-US/job-De...

the end of scrutopia

this Helen DeWitt post about explaining literature to the industry is an all timer: 'The problem is not that I am speaking from a position of ignorance. I am speaking from a position of knowledge to people who don't know what knowledge would look like'. paperpools.blogspot.com/2007/08/corm...

I have a hypothesis that bivariate choropleth maps are confusing to most people, but I don’t work in HCI / human factors / perception etc. Who wants to do the research with me? Is Cynthia Brewer on Bluesky?

The Cellar / Cinderella rhyme in “Each Peach Pear Plum” is very difficult for Papa on a number of levels. We have much to thank the Ahlbergs for, but not this.

You can tell he wrote this himself because half the paragraphs begin with the phrase “For example …”, to say nothing of the examples that follow. Even the first-gen LLMs wouldn’t do that.

This thread of replies from Lee (whom I do not know, but whose work I know quite well) demonstrates a degree of politeness and generosity that is wholly unwarranted given the degree of uncollegial lashing out and intellectual dishonesty on display.

New, from me.

Zohran is doing James Connolly shoutouts hahahaha this is incredible

The structuralist thesis about AI (as constructive realization of subjectless minds) was already put forward in 1994 by Jean-Pierre Dupuy in his book about cybernetics and cognitive science.

[quietly, to an audience of about four people] this percepta thing seems like it might be a big deal

Writing an apoplectic screed to the author of “Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes” demanding to know where the “There was one little baby who was born on the ice” page is supposed to take place; the baby has a penguin friend, but penguins do not live anywhere with a human population.

I saw an interesting comment from an academic elsewhere regarding the word “train” – they insisted that their PhDs and postdocs were advisees. I love this because even though we don’t really use that term in Europe (ime), I loathe the term “train”. That’s not what’s going on.

“The ePub version of Don DeLillo’s unacknowledged 1980 hockey romp is available on Anna’s Archive” is quite the thing to find oneself murmuring.

I really enjoy the degree to which galleries indulge the evident peccadilloes of male painters. “Like his idol Degas, Bonnard was well-known for his depiction of the female toilette, which he painted hundreds of times.”

Just a Guy with a Research Chair floridly speculating about the intentions of states. “They’re doing this to prevent anyone being held accountable. The regime will just be transferred.” Is posting engagement bait and epistemic trespass on social media part of your ethical commitment to non-violence?

If I may be permitted a small observation about British politics, I hugely enjoy the fact that MG appears to be perennially glum. A man whose access to joy has been severed by his own actions. The protagonist in an abandoned first draft of an early modern play.

This Revive Active™ has me feeling like a 24-year-old San Francisco “data scientist”. Have you guys heard of Nick Land?

Another enjoyable Dublin City Cycling Experience™ as I am almost run off the road *in a bus and bike lane* by a swerving driver. Angrily confronted they said they didn’t see me. Very good! I might have been annoyed had you admitted trying to kill me with your car.

Mistook this for something we were going to buy for the child on Vinted for €7. Apologies Jonathan, I was not familiar with your game.

Why isn’t the title of this paper “Failing to detect evidence of style transfer by frontier LLMs in scientific publications”? Do we just not want to talk about it?

“It was first published in 1926 […] as a method of constructing an efficient electricity network for Moravia.” yes, of course. Naturally.

More and more, I hear that if you wish to see the Aleph, you no longer have to go down into the cellar under the dining room, immerse yourself – immobile – in utter darkness, and perform a certain ocular adjustment, focusing on the nineteenth step. But Ed Zitron says that’s not true.

I have mixed feelings about the UCL settlement (I don’t work there, but I used to). On the one hand, academic and teaching staff worked very hard. On the other hand, we know that online teaching everywhere during the pandemic was generally mediocre in spite of this, for a variety of reasons.

Is it a bad sign that it hurts to stir the Lemsip

What is going on over at @csoireland.bsky.social

"their metaphysical commitments to an unbreachable depth of human meaning and volition opposed to a machinic non-sense leaves their project ill equipped to address the harms they accurately identify". 🤌

Could someone have a word with the “social data scientist with too many questions” and let her know that the dogs on the street can tell that Claude is writing her Substack posts? Dozens of instances of “It isn’t x. it’s y” and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Utter contempt for the reader.

Child’s outfit today – a gunmetal quilted judo Gi, but make it Petit Bateau (thank you, Vinted), striped polo neck underneath – is immeasurably more chic than anything I have ever worn, and not for lack of trying.

My daughter has begun walking and simultaneously decided that naps are to be treated as a rare delicacy henceforth, with the immediate consequence that her parents’ lives have fallen apart and chaos reigns.

Nobody show this to the more-than-human geographers or they’re going to have to spend the rest of the day breathing into paper bags.

@leaflet.pub Is there any reason I shouldn’t be able to publish a Looseleaf? I’ve finished editing my text but clicking the “Publish as Looseleaf” link doesn’t do anything (only a “Viewport argument key “interactive-widget” not recognized and ignored.” error in the console, on Safari).

Hello from Eurosky.

I think the Aer Lingus CTA ID rule change is the thing that is finally going to drive me to become as insane as the rest of the people on this site. They’re claiming that it’s because the CTA is just an “agreement” and not based on legislation? No, no. This won’t do. Something has gone on here.

I'd be interested to know which flood relief schemes Jack Chambers was referring to when he cited judicial review as a barrier to their delivery. Anyway, not to worry; the thousands of young people our research project has helped to educate about flooding will make their voices heard in a few years.

It’s that time again.

Cited in Lancet. You know what that means [I am about to be unmasked as a charlatan whose fraudulent research findings will directly contribute to the deaths of millions]

Open Science Guys: preregister your research to increase transparency and reduce bias in your findings! Jonathan Schooler [holding torch under chin]: but most importantly, to deter the moon ghosts OSG: why are you holding…? JS: moon ghosts

Having watched a few of the early episodes of The Crocodile Hunter over Christmas, the baby's bath-time growling routine now routinely prompts an enquiry as to whether she is a "salty" or a "freshy". She has yet to declare herself.

If you aren't totally confident about writing numerically-stable floating-point expressions in Rust, I've finally (after nearly 11 years) resurrected herbie-lint as a Dylint plugin: github.com/urschrei/her....

Can someone explain why ~1200 lines of code and an aggressive IP policy that comprise a product that doesn't do what it's supposed to needs a big office in central London. I feel like I'm on drugs. Who are those people? What do they do?

Inspired by a nameless mutual's post, key texts for understanding two of the major topics in this place are: Eco's 1995 "Ur-Fascism" (subject obvious) (theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umbe...), and James Hague's 2012 "The Silent Majority of Experts (prog21.dadgum.com/143.html) (LLM use).

If you use Claude Code, you've been able to use it to search your local Zotero library and analyse the results using my pyzotero API client and a skill I wrote for it. Now, that skill can also query Semantic Scholar for gap analysis and related papers. github.com/urschrei/zot...

[desperately trying to rile up everyone on Bluesky] This is how every white-collar job is going to end up.

The new office affords an excellent view of the apparently spectral tour guides. The living are but the latest casualty of university cost savings.