Not for academics it isn’t. You learn by reading and by following citation chains and talking to other people in the field. Letting the AI do the summary is abdicating your job.

Do not cite an academic paper unless you’ve read it

Michelle Mone's company PPE Medpro has been wound up without repaying the £122m it owes for ripping off the NHS. But luckily, she gets to keep the private jet and the superyacht.

As was true with the translators I heard from in an earlier edition, copywriters never felt that they were being replaced because the AI's work was better. It was almost always worse. It was simply cheaper and faster, and deemed "good enough" by clients.

The right are never happy, especially not when they get what they want. This is precisely why it’s pointless to try to please them.

This is so disgusting.

Pleased to discover that slightly misnaming the national chess championship you won as a school child is a much more serious offence than repeatedly racially abusing your fellow pupils and telling them they should go to the gas chamber

Budget 2025: This is how you lose the world iandunt.substack.com/p/budget-202...

They think they can balance the country being totally hostile to a relatively small number of asylum seekers; marginally hostile to migrants needed to fill work in key sectors (health, care etc) and international students; and very attractive to high skilled migrants in high pay sectors. They can't.

“She is doing things that I think are letting this country down". Labour peer Alf Dubs, who arrived in the UK on the Kindertransport, tells @nicolakellywrites.bsky.social that he is deeply disappointed in Shabana Mahmood and Keir Starmer's betrayal of child refugees bylinetimes.com/2025/11/28/a...

The removal of individual institutions’ student number caps was a disaster.

🚨The Petition calling for a public inquiry into Russian influence on UK politics & democracy has now rocketed past 55,000 signatures! Let’s get it to 100,000. If a petition is what it’s going to take let’s get this done! petition.parliament.uk/petitions/74...

It is time for universities — not just staff and student unions, but the senior management too — to admit out loud that this government is actively trying to make universities fail. We *all* need to come together and collectively try to fight their attempts to loot and pillage.

Lumping them together as “AI” gives readers the impression that a single class of tool is discerning novel protein structures, teasing subtle patterns out of mountains of LHC data, writing a student’s History 101 paper, and arguing a ketamine-addled billionaire could post up Shaq in his prime. No.

RMA statement on the proposed suspension of recruitment to all UG music programmes at the University of Nottingham: www.rma.ac.uk/2025/11/17/s...

I’ve written a piece on the curious lack of media and political interest in the issues faced by our national @britishlibrary.bsky.social. This is strange given we live in a world where ideas, knowledge and research are a long-term source of innovation and insight www.cityam.com/the-british-...

Your regular reminder that there is absolutely nothing "hard" or "tough" about targeting the poorest, most vulnerable, and least able to defend themselves groups of people on the entire planet

I think that Vicky is, on the whole, the better dancer, but the dance-off just wasn't her day. #strictly

No, I'd say it's racists and those pandering to them.

This is how you do flags on lamp posts. Thank you, Oxford.

This perfectly encapsulates why we need the BBC

The fact that the BBC has made serious culpable errors does not negate the point that there is a real and concerted right-wing media campaign to destroy it. Both points can be true at the same time and the campaign would not end even if the errors did.

Maybe Keir should demand the heads of major US news networks any time they imply Britain is on the brink of civil war or that we live under sharia law. Or does it not work both ways?

Be clear, the American far right are coming for British democracy.

So what's next? Cancel "Blue Planet" because David Attenburgh is concerned about climate change, "Strictly come dancing" because it's too rainbow, or "More or less" because they spread facts?! www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cd...

Just nuts. Caving in to Trump that easily doesn't bode well for Britain in general.

This is awful news to come out of Nottingham. MedRen-ers will be aware that Nottingham has hosted three MedRens in 2012, 1985, and the first ever MedRen in 1972. Do consider signing the petition in the next post. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

... and Leicester... Languages, History... It's so easy to destroy, so hard to create. So much talent. So many lives. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Nottingham to suspend music and modern foreign language degrees, warning international fee levy will wipe out income from domestic fee rise. Some nursing, theology, education, microbiology and agriculture degrees hit too www.timeshighereducation.com/news/notting... via @julietterowsell.bsky.social

One of our students has created a petition. Please sign and share: www.change.org/p/stop-the-s...

Heartbroken to share the news that recruitment to Undergraduate Music courses at the University of Nottingham has been suspended. Please do contact us on [email protected] if you would like to support us.

Yes this is awful. The BBC News has, however, become the live action version of the Daily Mail. Crime stories are guaranteed coverage if the culprit is an asylum seeker. Viewers may not realise attention to these specific offenders is disproportionate. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I hope it is now obvious why pillars of democracy like universities, the law, public broadcasting should be funded so that they are beyond the reach of financial coercion by hostile agents.

Man with stubble, "Small boats arrivals are 37,000. There are over 4 million kids in child poverty. And 4.5 million who can't get a dentist appointment" #BBCQT "We spend 90% of the media discourse on the 37,000. How much more could we achieve if we put that effort into the 4.5 million?"

Nobody had even heard of Katie Lam outside of Westminster until about two weeks ago. Literally all it takes to be considered "brilliant" and a "rising star" on the right of British politics now is just a willingness to say something slightly more racist than all of your competitors

Robinson, Musk and Badenoch are all part of an industry of grievance, a machine designed to spread hate which now operates across the British right – from respectable print outlets to wild-eyed online fascists inews.co.uk/opinion/dont...

I am so tired of 24 hour news about small boats. I simply don’t care how many migrants arrive in the UK any more. No matter how many, they’ll never be as big a threat to British values, our way of life, or indeed women‘s safety, as the bigots who make yelling about migrants their entire personality.

The hypocrisy of Reform going on TV to allege that certain groups are constantly over represented on TV is truly epic.

That scene of the Welsh BBC correspondent being the only person interviewing Caerphilly's new Plaid AM while the rest of the media interviewed Reform's loser in the background was far too on the nose.

Almost nobody in the Cons Party or beyond it had noticed that the Shadow Home Secretary with two other frontbenchers and 5 backbenchers tabled a bill in May to deport 3 million people - stripping almost every pensioner, parent or nurse who did not take out citizenship of their right to live here

I hope that Caerphilly will be a lessson for #Labour that they cannot win by letting Reform set the agenda. But I fear they don't want to learn, because populism is so much more fun than grown-up politics. BBC News - www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cl...

I hate to pull the immigrant card, but as an immigrant, it feels awful when elected MPs say I ‘need to go home’ and propose stripping me and all other immigrants of all our legal rights to live here. No, anywhere immigrants move is their home. The UK is my home.

If Labour cannot denounce mass deportation of permanent residents, Idi Amin style, what is the point of them?

Reeves: "The UK's productivity challenge has been compounded by the way in which the UK left the European Union." No. The UK has been damaged by the fact that it left the EU. There was no way to make leaving the EU "work" for the UK. #Brexit

I've received an 'exclusive' invite to try Nature's new 'research assistant', which will burn down a forest to provide a 'summary of the paper' I'm reading and I have SUCH exciting news for them, that's called an 'abstract' and the actual authors already wrote it for me, no forest-burning required.

Reform, everyone must speak English. Also Reform, we're going to stop people learning English. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Absolutely colossal night of success for the Lib Dems. In the 10 byelections, the LDs have gained from the CONs, GRNs, INDs and LAB, with a narrow loss to REF by 31 votes in Babergh. Scoreboard: LD 7, REF 1, CON 1, IND 1. I assume the media will cover this as breathlessly as every opinion poll?

For reasons, it would be v. helpful to have information from a broad range of academic and non-academic (incl. GLAM) users of the BBC Written Archives OTHER THAN historians, briefly on: 1) What you've used it for and 2) How the proposed changes would impact on your research. Reposts welcomed.

How is this repeatedly made into a policy issue - by *all* parties - when the blunt fact of the matter is that grown adults who are obliged to pay for their own education, and relentlessly pursued to repay their loans, should be able to study whatever the fuck they want.