OOOOH Researchfish Is going extinct 🐡🐟🐠 help.researchfish.com/en_US/resear...

Happy 6th "Large boulder the size of a small boulder" anniversary to those who celebrate! #Geology ⚒️

The New World asked me to speak to some British trans women about what life has been like for them over the past few years - here's what they had to say, in their own words: www.thenewworld.co.uk/marie-le-con...

I saw an academic unironically suggest that instead of assessing students’ understanding and competence through their writing of essays, arguments etc., we can assess the “quality” of their prompts, and I feel us slipping further and further into dystopia.

This whole🧵 Reduce online noise by replacing the meaningless term 'artificial intelligence' w/ the actual analytical approach(s) used + any design,dev & application info needed for a useful conversation. Alternatively, rather than solutionising describe the task/activity/procedure to be automated.

I think this post nails the actual problem, for researchers at least—AI hallucinations would simply not be a problem in academic work if we’d not normalized citation-as-signaling rather than actual engagement—you can only cite a fake paper if you’re not in the habit of reading the papers you cite

Don't steal pies this Christmas.

Final comedy gig of the year and the audience agreed with me that Die Hard IS a Christmas movie 🎄

You are ABSOLUTELY NOT going to regret listening to this bird:

Oh joy, another helpful AI infographic via LinkedIn. Off I go to my job as a liberaian, maybe to run some critical evaligane workshops and of course use New! Boulean! Logic!

Dressed very formally for a networking event

Happy Gazpacho Soup Day to all who celebrate

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

Laughed then cried

Every ad now

The UK Reproducibility Network: OER for Open Research oercommons.org/hubs/ukrn @ukrepro.bsky.social @oercommons.bsky.social

A reminder that this anti-trans panic is 100% bullshit and exactly none of our country’s problems are related to someone expressing their gender identity and everyone who isn’t a hate-filled weirdo knows it.

"If Grokipedia is getting things about me wrong, what else is it getting wrong in other articles, where I do not have the same level of domain knowledge?" - @scalzi.com

'New proposals by Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and Sage were sent to universities this week after their initial offers were decisively rejected by institutions in a sector-wide consultation run by Jisc,...negotiating jointly with Universities UK on behalf of universities.' 1/3

This is my favourite laptop sticker and I have no idea why I like it so much (I paid £1 for it at Southampton Pride)

Where do I work? Oh, just a totally normal university library

Initial success in my quest for house plants that Snips won’t eat

Just to say that teachers do an incredibly difficult job, with all the right intentions, and can be the defining influence on a young person's life. They are the exact opposite of poisoners because good teaching provides the antidote to so many dangers

💥New: Open educational resources should be central to the public mission of universities ✍️ @niamhtumelty.bsky.social & @heroicendeavour.bsky.social #OpenResearch #AcademicSky #HigherEducation (@lsepress.bsky.social)

This beautiful little menace (who featured in my comedy set at the uni Open Day this afternoon) has found a new way to get to my houseplants which does not bode well for them

Hwæt! 🐉 Ever wondered what the epic poem Beowulf sounds like spoken in Old English? #NationalPoetryDay

Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later. harpers.org/archive/1941...

Yep yep yep. I teach courses that are based on my expertise as a researcher and my work in the archives. Why on earth would I add a conservative pundit to one of those courses? What would they add?

Mordor on the Orient Express

OMG Peter @nickiclarkson.bsky.social you are genius

The whole series of #AHistoryOfEnglandIn25Poems is incredible. I was unfamiliar with most of the poems so it was a delight to discover them, and hear Catherine unwrap and explain the words and their context. The absolute best of audacious empathy

Discworld QOTD, from Eric “‘Multiple exclamation marks,’ he went on, shaking his head, ‘are a sure sign of a diseased mind.’”

A Labour government that does not fight back against the far right, racism and extremism fundamentally misunderstands the nature of its electoral support.

As a parent of a trans kid, the only ideology I know of is that people want to be allowed to be themselves and stay alive. It’s pretty minimalist as far as ideologies go. Shit is so dangerous right now.

My phone showed me this memory from 4 years ago

Something I didn't get to say yesterday: We heard over and over during the event about "human-centered" approaches to "AI". But if refusal is not on the table (at every level: individual students and teachers right up through UNESCO) then we have in fact centered the technology, not the people.

Discworld QOTD, from Men at Arms

The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what's more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural disposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain.

We Have AI Now www.youtube.com/shorts/8-lgJ...

It’s nice they’ve left a lot of space to fill in some extra words. I feel like we could cheer these up: Employ Capybaras We Are All British Up the Workers

Remember when prime ministers would lose their jobs for, like, leaving a mic on and saying something honest about a member of the public. God, the innocent, sweet days when anyone cared about anything and there were actual consequences and not just mush and horror.

This is why physical media is still so important.

Look how gleeful I am to be at Southampton Pride with the amazing Hannah from our Digital Scholarship team, using the team’s portable 3D printer

To be clear, we write and review stuff for all these publishers for free.

Why would you take a spreadsheet which can do hundreds of correct calculations near instantly and shove in some AI so now it can be slow and wrong? Put down the shiny thing and back away slowly.

Discworld QOTD, from Unseen Academicals “The Librarian was not familiar with love, which had always struck him as a bit ethereal and soppy, but kindness, on the other hand, was practical. You knew where you were with kindness, especially if you were holding a pie it had just given you.”

I really dislike how science has started calling almost any fancy computational technique AI. 🧪 The framing of this entire article makes it sound like a benevolent AI independently made these drugs. That is *pure fantasy*. Instead: a team of scientists made a machine learning model for a study.

The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what's more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural disposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain.

No pressure on this plant…

The University of Warwick has paid a lot of money, I'm guessing, for their internet banner ads on the Guardian and elsewhere. But they can't spell "curiosity". This isn't a US-UK variant. They just, genuinely, have a massive spelling error in their banner ads.