Not sure if I would advertise it widely that I had won a Noam Chomsky award

Anyone know what "academic article, criticising the use of randomised controlled trials in general" this piece is referring to? www.kcl.ac.uk/news/why-you...

"Quantum money would therefore have the self-custodial properties of physical cash". mail.blockworks.com/p/beam-me-up...

When will this crisis get any attention whatsoever!? A THOUSAND ACADEMIC STAFF AT ONE INSTITUTION SERVED REDUNDANCY RISK NOTICES! And that's not counting what's surely being visited on professional services staff too. This is an economic catastrophe, to say nothing of the intellectual catastrophe!

"As expected, the participants did not play randomly." www.psychologyofselling.pro/what-the-neu...

Nobody. I do not think you can eat chair

Meanwhile on Instagram www.instagram.com/p/DR4wqHWDQv...

Dani Rodrik about how and why he writes catherineeunicedevries.substack.com/p/etched-in-...

Does anyone want a survivorship bias shortbread

Handing back student work that’s been written by ChatGPT with a 0 followed by the comment “This essay will never stand in authentic wonder before the Beauty of God’s creation.”

Another one for my list of real world examples of the Winner's Curse...

A '2008 global financial crisis' hoodie that costs $180 is sold out www.businessinsider.com/2008-global-...

“The sudden appearance of something unexpected — Batman — disrupts the predictability of everyday life and forces people to be present, breaking free from autopilot,” www.zmescience.com/science/news...

"three members of the election committee act as independent trustees. (...) each trustee holds a third of the cryptographic key material needed to decrypt results. Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key" arstechnica.com/security/202...

"an AI tool he calls "an autonomous synthetic respondent,” which can answer survey questions and “demonstrated a near-flawless ability to bypass the full range” of “state-of-the-art” methods for detecting bots. " www.404media.co/a-researcher...

"when one looks at splatter paintings made by adults and young children through a fractal lens (...) the children’s work does bear a closer resemblance to Pollock’s than those of the adults. " arstechnica.com/science/2025...

"The recent Nobel Prize was awarded to three economists (two of whom are Fellows of the British Academy) whose work (...) showed that we should care about the research infrastructures if we care about prosperity" www.cityam.com/the-british-...

“Data centers are like warehouses filled with machines and cables, and there’s little need for workers,” restofworld.org/2025/data-ce...

"The key takeaway for future success, the scientists conclude, is clear: people who stop overanalysing the past may have a better chance at winning in the future." (if the world was run in endless games rock-paper-scissors...) www.tbsnews.net/offbeat/un-p...

"Google DeepMind’s Weather Lab (...) performed exceptionally well. By contrast, the Global Forecast System model, which is operated by the US National Weather Service, is based on traditional physics (...) performed abysmally." arstechnica.com/science/2025...

I'm only allowed a limited percentage of the total grade for the module I am currently teaching to be determined by in-class test. So I have to run a take home version. Average grade 81/100 (in the UK, where everything over 70/100 gets the top mark, a first).

Amid many a silly “free speech” panic, here is a genuinely chilling case … Sheffield Hallam professor accuses the institution of negotiating “directly with a foreign intelligence service to trade my academic freedom for access to the Chinese student market” www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Cass Sunstein lists his favourite colleagues casssunstein.substack.com/p/some-perso...

I find the finding out 'whether it’s better to receive assistance even before disaster strikes' more interesting than the 'ai prediction of floods' bit but I guess the AI is better at predicting restofworld.org/2025/google-...

Wish I had more time to read books. This looks fascinating. archive.ph/RWbAp

Immigrant Nobel Prize winners exiting the United States

From @privateeyenews.bsky.social

I wouldn’t normally endorse AI prompts but these are indeed essential for all academics.

*jazz hands* Tyler Cowen!

I cannot imagine anyone I know in academia letting this happen. It's utterly appalling. Glasgow uni failed to record the grade he had in fact earned, then refused him a degree, then abandoned him to kill himself. For utter, enduring shame.

"Those are conditions that can make almost any stock-picking strategy look smart." arstechnica.com/information-...

"The researchers found that teams who were prompted to select a leader were 38% more likely to finish than those who were not. " hbr.org/2025/09/rese...

"In the Choice System, food banks receive shares in proportion to their goal factor – Feeding America’s measure of need – but once they have these shares, food banks can spend them however they choose exclusively through twice-daily online auctions." www.worksinprogress.news/p/how-market...

This sounds like it could be an interesting historical economic case study, about the river Fleet here in London in the early 1700's "the water soon silted up again and under private ownership the canal fell into disrepair." diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/08/flee...

Just in time for the start of my behavioural economics module this year (this is one of my favourite examples of people not being 'rational' and not calculating/figuring out their 'utility maximizing' commute)

Big fan of John Finnemore. Sadly his radioshow the Souvenir Programme is now just a yearly thing but the 2025 edition opens with a great sketch about research design... www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

let's not forget the key fact here which is that British higher education is still the envy of the world, and the brilliant students who flock here are bringing youthful energy and prosperity to cities all over the UK" The absolute mind-melt it takes to NOT do that is unimaginable.

Are you young, highly educated and driven, and want to contribute to our stagnant economy with its aging population and low productivity? Well out you go

A Happy New Year to everyone who's spent too much of their life working in education

And the winner is …. UCL that increased its u/g offers by 65%. Where are you going to put all these students, UCL?!

Preparing slides for a talk on Marxism in the 21st century I asked an AI programme to give Marx a contemporary hairstyle. I’m sure he served me once at a craft beer place in Shoreditch.

I can NOT believe that our new academic year is already starting again this week. 🤯

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.

Thought I'd share this again, cost me the better part of an afternoon to research and write...

Jarvis Cocker sings about economics in A Sunset, one of the tracks on Pulp's new album. I fact-checked his claims blog.jorisgillet.nl/2025/08/fact...

I love reading stories about successful self-regulating systems like this case study of queueing Taylor Swift fans archive.ph/eU6Fv