They’ve brought to visibility a 6th unrecognised COVID death for every 5 that were by training an algorithm to recognise hospital COVID deaths & then finding similar deaths in other settings—at home; amidst poorer ppl; racialised ppl. I’m wondering if this study cd be described as a work of mourning

Ethics, Evidence and Policy Network, Wednesday 25 March, 2-3pm. Martyn Pickersgill talking "Novelty, Normativity, and the Neuro" and EthUcate on responsible science and ethics communication #STS #scicomm This promises to be very good. Sign up here: events.teams.microsoft.com/event/db0530...

Beyond The Frame: Network, Infrastructure and Vernacular in the Making of Environmental Visuals. Very excited to give @unipotsdam.bsky.social Code & Culture lecture next Mon 16/3 Arguing that online visuals cannot be understood in isolation from platform effects www.uni-potsdam.de/de/digital-h...

New in Big Data & Society 🗞️ Warren Pearce et al., examine how Google transformed knowledge infrastructure through computer vision, tracing a shift from ranking by authority to ranking by similarity in Google Images. 🔗 doi.org/10.1177/2053...

A rare thing: *four* three-year hums/soc-sci posts in animal studies, on the Multispecies Mutualisms project at UoSheffield - with @rosaleenduffy.bsky.social, me, Robert McKay and Alasdair Cochrane; see here for a video explainer: digitalmedia.sheffield.ac.uk/media/Multis...

Happening today - my talk on government, power and AI policy at 5pm Cambridge Judge Business School, Lecture Theatre 3. All welllcome!

"Spain’s defense minister, Margarita Robles, said on Monday that while there was an agreement with the United States on the use of the bases, Spain believed it only extended to use within the framework of international law." Spain views US war on Iran as illegal. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/w...

Under a new policy released Thursday, the Trump Administration will test conversion therapy on trans people in prisons. It explicitly states that it aims to help trans people “recover,” all the while forcibly detransitioning them both medically and socially. transitics.substack.com/p/the-trump-...

Yaye! We got our paper in @bigdatasoc.bsky.social from uvahumanities.bsky.social #DigitalMethods Initiative Summer School 2022. Gratitude owed to sheffielduni.bsky.social and the @wellcometrust.bsky.social for kindly co-funding my attendance! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... #InternetStudies

How Google Images, powered by computer vision AI, has transformed the way Google ranks its results, from ranking-by-authority to ranking-by-similarity. New @bigdatasoc.bsky.social by me, @maudbo.bsky.social @lauvra26.bsky.social + amazing team 😍 doi.org/10.1177/20539517261426452 #STS

Join me trying to make sense of this lot on the 1st Sounds Critical radio show on Swingdash, 5-7pm today. Meeting the moment by selecting bangers www.swingdash.live/schedule/not...

Joan Scott on why the attack on gender studies by powerful patriarchal men is not a coincidence, but an attempt to silence critique and analysis of their abusive behavior. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

U Glasgow has covered Jay Todd's @jaytoddgla.bsky.social & my critical paper on the 'Sullivan Review' rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Many social scientists whom Jay & I talk to are (still) unaware of the Sullivan Review and its potential implications. Our paper aims to change this

News coming through that @sheffielducu.bsky.social members have rejected their employer's blackmail threats. We need to urgently rush support to the branch! Invite speakers Raise (big) donations Sign petitions Send solidarity messages 👇

Excellent letter which highlights one of the many problems with Nurse and RS's stance that science exists in an asocial bubble.

Following coverage over the weekend of Sir Paul Nurse's comments that suggested that the only reason that a Fellow should be expelled from @royalsociety.org is scientific misconduct, I have written to him to explain the risks such an attitude poses of increasing sexual harassment in STEM.

Good work from @thierryaaron.bsky.social responding to this piece. One thing that is implicit in this though is the way in which natural scientific expertise is given broad scope to pontificate in areas (such as social science) where they lack the knowledge, theories and methods to explain.

And more job opportunities: @univie.ac.at aims to fill 40 (!) doctoral positions in the social sciences, humanities and cultural studies careers.univie.ac.at/en/praedoc/p...

I've been talking about both doctoral study (with academic jobs as the goal) AND tenure for YEARS in terms of RISK MANAGEMENT. It is a very calculated, and increasingly speculative, risk. You have to treat it that way. Faculty hate it when I do this. Especially about tenure.

i made a helpful reference

Is Joe Rogan really just a voice of the right? Our new @csmapnyu.org piece for @goodauth.bsky.social shows he’s just as much a space for the left and the center, too. A look inside today’s surprisingly complicated podcast information ecosystem. 🎙️ goodauthority.org/news/podcast...

As things wind down for the holidays, @sheffielducu.bsky.social members are facing a threat of 100% pay deductions from January, thanks to our Scrooge-like management. We’ve now set up a fundraiser to bolster our local solidarity fund. If you can spare some change, please do! gofund.me/ac2b3adcb

Our case is the ambiguity of categories obtained by community detection algorithms in networks. We offer an implementation of our ambiguity visualization method in Gephi Lite, which you can try online right now! lite.gephi.org

Day 15 of strike action at the Uni of Sheffield. 495 jobs already cut. Now they tell us another £50m will be cut from staff budget in coming year despite bar charts of coffers which look like this and a VC on a salary of nearly £400k. #SheffieldUCU

✊ It was an honour to join friends at Southampton Solent #UCU Branch (not on BSky) this pm to lobby their university's Board of Governors. The Governors were meeting to decide if to 'fire and rehire' staff using a subsidiary company, to deny staff a decent pension. #SouthamptonSolent @ucu.org.uk

Check out this post about our current situation from a colleague at another university. @sheffielducu.bsky.social

I need everyone, esp anyone working in education or tech (but really everyone) to WATCH THIS CLIP of @drtanksley.bsky.social discussing the technologies infiltrating our schools & psyches and how she is addressing it with our young people. youtu.be/5mtcSL4S3HQ

Day 3 Sheffield Uni UCU strike against threat of extensive redundancies. 400 academic staff gone. Nearly 100 more now confirmed. They want another £10m staff saving this year, despite being in a strong position financially. #SheffieldUCU @sheffielducu.bsky.social www.ucu.org.uk/article/1423...

Good rally today with @sheffielducu.bsky.social and Sheffield Hallam

Heading to picket line for day 1 of @sheffielducu.bsky.social strike against compulsory job losses ✊✊🏼✊🏾 www.ucu.org.uk/article/1423...

RED ALERT: the University of Nottingham is threatening to close its Department of American Studies, putting all staff at risk of redundancy, and ending any American specialist knowledge in the Faculty of Arts. Sign the petition here to save jobs: www.change.org/p/save-ameri...

crazy IG em_clarkson

Misinformation *is* central to democratic problems today, but the solution is *not* to correct such epistemic failures directly. Instead, we must address them at their roots, in social identity. Or so I argue in a new post for @apaphilosophy.bsky.social. blog.apaonline.org/2025/11/12/t...

Monday night's elite-level Clipse gig in Manchester. Almost all the new album and a back cat of certified bangers.

score one for "the pundits are projecting their own preoccupations onto the electorate"

Today I did something I should have done months ago. I went to an 'asylum seeker hotel protest' to speak to all involved. Protestors, live stream vlogger, police, counter-protestors. My main take away is that anyone wishing to understand this movement should do the same. Chat. Listen. Reflections🧵

Striking women! In or passing through Sheffield before 4 Nov? Get yourself to the _Winter Gardens_ to check out the wonderful comic and archives from Prof Anitha Sundari's work with Prof Ruth Pearson on the 1976 Grunwick Strike and 2005 Gate Gourmet dispute. sheffield.ac.uk/spir/news/ne...

I'm excited to finally have a preprint of this paper up, a few years in the making. In it we argue that industry-driven manipulation of social media research is well underway and that norms and institutions in the field are ill-prepared to resist tech's influence. arxiv.org/abs/2510.19894

Early train->Skegness (with some keen sunseekers ☀️ ) en route to York for the White Rose DTP Welcome Event Reconnecting with our fantastic students, hearing their hopes & fears for the coming year and unveiling our Digital Tech, Communication & AI training programme wrdtp.ac.uk/training/tra... 🤓

"We focus on Israel during 2023, a period marked by intense political polarization...We find that exposure to toxic behavior by ingroup members is the primary driver of contagious toxicity, compared to smaller, less consistent associations with outgroup toxicity."

Gillian Tett: is AI a cargo cult? www.ft.com/content/f202...

At #aoir2025 I’m presenting on what I term “platformed nostalgia”, which I explore via an analysis of Automattic-era Tumblr’s efforts to commercialise historical social media nostalgia in its marketing (particularly in response to the X-odus). I’m in the Memes panel at 9am tomorrow. Sneak peak 👀

Trailer for Synthetic Sincerity which I wrote , directed by Marc Isaacs which will have its world Premiere in competition at IDFA in November

Great evening of knowledge, wordplay and truths from Chuck D at Leeds International Festival. “They treating the masses like them asses” 🫡 #LIFI25

On way home from superb Cultural Climate Models meeting in Graz with @davidhiggins.bsky.social @caroschwegler.bsky.social et al. Looking forward to seeing in print the new approach to modelling from this truly interdisciplinary international collab gewi.uni-graz.at/en/unsere-fo...

Excellent analysis of the dilemmas presented to the IPCC by AI! The question of whether there should be an IPCC chatbot is crucial. Given close control over communication products in the past, an “official” chatbot would signal a v different attitude to risk.

New working paper out: "Four scenarios for an @ipcc.bsky.social navigating Artificial Intelligence" Led by @hollyjeanbuck.bsky.social, with @shinasayama.bsky.social and Oliver Geden Thread 🧵 1/13

How can the #IPCC navigate generative AI? What does it mean for scientific assessment more broadly? New working paper looks at scenarios for AI adoption & resistance, w/ @dralaaclimate.bsky.social @shinasayama.bsky.social and Oliver Geden Reflections welcome! www.swp-berlin.org/publications...

We need an associate lecturer in history of modern science @stsucl.bsky.social www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...