I'm wondering how this gets counted in the productivity stats. Probably twice!

Interesting wee film about landscape woodland regeneration in Scotland. Applies to upland areas of Wales and England as well, of course. Another issue where land tax with variable rates could be an effective policy. www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuTV...

Being intelligent is primarily a matter of genetics and luck. There's no doubt good thinking habits make a difference to how you handle information but only within those contraints.

Now this👇IS rocket science. I don't have a useful answer, do you?

Remarkable, the way some on the left are leaning into this as an opportunity to destroy the BBC. Excellent perspective from @iandunt.bsky.social I genuinely think if the BBC is lost, we're all lost. Just have to look west to see that.

Haven't read the report, yet, from Peter Hyman and Shuab Gamote, but one thing I'm sure of: if we're worried about young people being influenced by SM, we should be 💩-ing ourselves about older people getting sucked in by FB algorithms and Daily Mail Online. peterhyman21.substack.com/p/its-time-t...

For as long as both the hard left and hard right continue to disparage the BBC as irretrievably biased, I'm going to think they're about as good as it gets.

Found Slaughterhouse Five a bit meh, tbh. But definitely an interesting human.

I appreciate it's possible to be a specialist without much in the way of common sense but I wouldn't let this guy anywhere near my prostate, that's for sure. Does the word "insurance" not give the game away? Relates to my earlier post, ofc.

A colleague just shared this with me. I suppose it may just be serendipitous that it's chiming with half-a-dozen things I've been thinking about or working with recently. There are ideas I love and ideas I hate. It's an exceptional piece of writing. webspace.royalroads.ca/llefevre/wp-...

I understand the political difficulty but Council Tax really is a boil that needs to be lanced. It just felt like a rushed sticking plaster when it was slapped on the end of the Poll Tax debacle 30 years ago.

I think it probably behoves us, as science teachers, to have a bit of a handle on the whole double-helix thing. www.nature.com/articles/d41... Was Franklin's work exceptional and essential - yes. Was it appropriately acknowledged in the Watson & Crick (1953) paper - no.

I was vaguely wondering what happened after all those adverts for something straight out of Banks' The Culture series. arthursnell.substack.com/p/neom-was-n...

Nice 👇 This isn't exactly GenAI covering itself in glory, but I think it says more about how science has changed in three-quarters of a century than anything else.

@didau.bsky.social is spot on here: It’s not that teachers are talking too much... but that students are doing too little with what is said. substack.com/home/post/p-...

This is not how you win hearts and minds.

It's not promoted by an algorithm, but here is just the same as Twitter, as in: "I've got this idea I'm excited about. What do you think?" "I think you're a nincompoop. How could you be so dumb?" Plus sometimes, "I'm an expert. Have some vitriol. Here's something I wrote."

Oh, dear @komoot.bsky.social New interface on laptop is classic enshittification. Looks a bit 'fresher'; much worse UX. Basically, the panels make it very difficult to see enough of the map. It's okay on a large screen but awful on a laptop.

Here’s something really graphic for Halloween:

Not shedding any tears for the top 10% here, but this is quite a shocker.

Cameron did double that and gave us Brexit, a crumbling public realm, 5 year waits for jury trials, extended waits for civil justice, record waits for NHS treatment, aircraft carriers with no planes and the smallest army ever and local government that just does social care. Where do I sign?

I am so p****d off with the hassle cancelling auto-renew on insurance policies. For example, the AA don't allow you to remove auto-renew until after you've taken out a policy and they've stored your card details. OneCall / OneProtect you have to fill in details and then sit in a chat Q for ages.

There can be only one?

I've seen previous SE work suggest Montessori is above average effective. Seem to remember @profcoe.bsky.social saying this amongst others. Same again here 👇 Also relatively cheap (win-win). Doesn't affect the finding or possible policy implications but...

This is well worth reading 👇 A tiny bit of extrapolation around level of guidance, I think, but 98% spot on (and much better than I could manage).

Some of this is El Niño but there's no doubt CO2 is still going up, and still going up fast. Decarbonisation, renenwable electricity generation, etc. is making it less bad but I think +1.5°C is long gone, +2.0°C via net zero is a fantasy, and unless...

Interesting paper here academic.oup.com/jeea/advance... Looks like full marks to Chile for genuine evidence-based decision-making. Seems to indicate a substantial downside to an attempt to level the university-admission playing field for low-SES students.

"I have a decent fluency in LLMs, and they have utility, but the absurd degree of over-hype, the way they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value."

kids teacher just sent this home as part of an assignment he's doing and i want to smash every computer at the school

Huge dinosaur trackway - Oxfordshire. www.bbc.co.uk/news/resourc...

Sometimes different perspectives still surprise me. Not having to wash for a whole week (other than swimming in the river) was one of the many great things about Scout camp through my teenage years. Might even have been a fortnight, come to think of it.

Yes, please. Maybe with a New Town on some of them?

Encourage reading the whole post, which is admirably measured. TL;DR: We don’t fully understand what’s behind the jump in US pedestrian deaths, but car bloat seems to be an important factor.

If the current (or any future) US (or Chinese) administration manages to coerce big AI players into training their models to reflecting their world view, that would be very bad. What we want is bland and factual. The opposite to what SM algorithms promote. But also...

Interesting suggestion at the end of this youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/french-pm-... by the always interesting and often innovative @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com

This won't be everyone's experience, but for me, the financial bottleneck in buying is scraping together enough cash to pay all the bills on the day you get the keys. Even if 100% of the SDLT goes onto the price, that's £5k you don't have to find on the day.

See also the drop-off in apprenticeships for 16-18 year olds in general since 2018/19, and the subsequent proliferation of business and management level apprenticeships at Level 6 and 7 for people already in work who, frankly, don't really need them. Guess who was in charge?

A paper in Nature Communication reports on a new method to produce strong, biodegradable plastic from bamboo. The bioplastic resembles oil-based plastics in strength, shapeability, and thermal stability but can biodegrade in soil within 50 days. go.nature.com/4h1xv0X 🧪

Massive changes to some ITT bursaries. getintoteaching.education.gov.uk/funding-and-... Biology and Geog £26k --> £5k

Intriguing post about eliminating aeroplane contrails by @hannahritchie.bsky.social I was aware they caused radiative forcing (both ways), but had no idea they were avoidable by minor re-routing. www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/eliminatin...

It will be handy for astronomers if you can see all the interstellar object labels when looking at them from Mars.

We need 1000s of these in UK. There's a few, some of which have design issues to iron out, but it's the way forward in lots of places, I think.

"The best way for Labour politicians to appear authentic is to avoid saying things they don’t believe" 💯👇

But that is not what the Tories have done here. Instead they’ve said ‘climate change is real, it demands a response, we’re just not going to tell you what we’d do about it’. Just tragically unserious.

There are no more urgent technological challenges in the world at this time, than finding a reliable way to tell if a baked potato is cooked without cutting it open. I guess I could live with a formula for cooking time, if you have one.

ok this breakdown of AI writing indicators is incredible. Huge shout-out to the Wikipedia community for this

More importantly, mentions Stoke 👇

There are not many sports officials who are more famous than the players in their sport, but Dickie Bird, who died last week aged 92, arguably was. Discuss Dickie's remarkable life or have a wider discussion about being a top official as a route into elite sport. bit.ly/TutorGroupThink

TBF, this is mentioned in footnote 1.

I don't understand latest @emollick.bsky.social post on AI agents and the replication crisis. May be different in economics but in the areas I touch on the issue is replicating the *experiments* not the data analysis.