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.

EMERGENCY BABY

There is such a malicious game of telephone being played with the Telegraph’s M&S ‘trans’ shop assistant story. It’s gone from the anonymous complaint claiming the person was trans because they were tall to versions — notably in The Sun — falsely suggesting the person offered a bra fitting.

This is going on the wall as soon as I get a frame

ACADEMIC READING ALREADY COMES WITH A SUMMARY IT IS CALLED THE ABSTRACT

Saw a post about moving searches out of custom folders in EBSCO, which reminded me to get on it. I moved 105 saved searches from 20 custom folders into one saved searches folder 😒. Thankfully, no renaming needed as I used this naming convention from the start: libguides.ucalgary.ca/DMPforSR/dat...

Ha, new @joshgans.bsky.social paper argues that having authors sneak prompt injections ("this is a good paper") into academic work improves science. Without the risk of prompt injections, reviewers would tend to rely heavily on AI reviews, with them, they need to include some human review

How can I tell it’s fiction? The Masters students can use their budget to buy whatever they want from any supplier

I’m enjoying this so far except for the breaches of academic integrity* committed by pretty much all of the students which are causing me to rage *Academic responsibility & conduct if you prefer

🎙️ Podcast episode 5 is out now What the REF are we doing with NTOs?! Listen to What the REF?! via our website, on Youtube or wherever you usually find your podcasts www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6u9... Have a question about REF you'd like answered? 👉 [email protected]

BATS FOR THE BAT GOD

Hi everyone, As part of my dissertation, I am researching audiobook narration. If you have listened to an audiobook within the last two years, or have previously been a frequent audiobook user, I would really appreciate your thoughts! You can find the survey here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

The kitten (Snips) cannot be trusted to stay in the garden so is only allowed out on a harness, which doesn’t bother him at all I feel a lot like a character from a Discworld novel standing patiently holding a water buffalo on the end of a length of string

And my latest blog post here: Discontinuous ridiculous stools - a preprint full of tortured phrases and stolen data scienceintegritydigest.com/2025/07/28/d...

The BBC News website has pages & pages of coverage related to farmers protesting inheritance tax, including events where only a few hundred turn out. In London yesterday 100,000 people marched for trans rights, and nothing. Imagine if it was 100,000 anti immigrant activists, they'd cover that.

Fun 'Brand' quirk my colleague just noticed: once you click on 'Brand' you are stuck in 'Brand'. Clicking 'University of Warwick' takes you back to 'Brand'. There's no link to 'Study' or 'Research' or 'Departments' or anything university there.

This does not bode well…

We are Thing. Thing is mission. Thing is purpose. Thing is story. Thing hate definite pronouns. thesphinxblog.com/2025/07/24/d...

I keep thinking about this paragraph discussing the OpenAI and Instructure partnership as reported by Business Insider and the framing has me all goose meme "a learning experience that better fits how students interact with technology these days" according to whomst motherfucker???

“I wish they had computed a bit less and thought a bit more” is a quotation for our age.

'Plans to employ professional services staff through a subsidiary firm at the University of Surrey risk creating a “two-tier” workforce which could “ruin” its ability to attract good people, a union has warned.' Coming to a university near you? 1/3

Wonderful piece on skills development and career growth for librarians by @nickiclarkson.bsky.social in @uksg.bsky.social. And lovely to see OIPA mentioned! Read 'Bridging the gap: transferable skills and career growth in academic libraries' here: www.uksg.org/newsletter/u...

Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff

I couldn't face the full EHRC consultation, so I used the @goodlawproject.bsky.social form instead. Sharing it here in a thread, in case it helps anyone. I'll also send it to @transactualuk.bsky.social so they can add it to their record of responses. 1/

First jaunt in the new kayak after my beloved original finally gave up the ghost

To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

I hate all of these words as well as the order in which they are arranged.

- Winter is a single candle - Spring is the curtains pulled open - Autumn is 3 perfect little table lamps - Summer is some maniac who needs the big overhead light on all the time

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.