"Ultimately, learning requires friction. It requires the uncomfortable sensation of not knowing, the strain of recall, and the cognitive demand that tech companies are seeking to eliminate."

The UK drinks less, smokes less, is better informed, more highly educated, more likely to survive serious diseases... than ever ever before. Holiday thought: snap out of the gloom guys.

Look at crime fall and fall and fall and fall. There's unlikely to have been much of a a safer time in English and Welsh history.

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

See @jamiecummins.bsky.social 's work

Yes, there are ethical and useful applications of AI: quick scans of large text files; protein folding, routine coding, all that. But in current higher ed they are MASSIVELY outweighed by the harms: students using “Chat” to skip reading, writing, thinking. And admins are determined to deny that.

www.businessinsider.com/ai-didnt-bre... "AI doesn't threaten to dehumanize higher education. It reveals how thoroughly we've already dehumanized it — and offers us one last chance to recover what we've lost."

Providing access to already public data for public interest research on systemic risks under DSA 40/12 is the bare minimum and has nothing to do with censorship. The fact that X tries to prevent even that lower bound of transparency, gives me the impression that we are on the right track.

Don't let anyone tell you that the Commission's DSA enforcement against X is about speech or censorship. That would, indeed, be interesting. But this is just the EU enforcing some normal, boring laws that would get bipartisan support in the U.S. (I bet similar bills *have* had that support.) 1/

Yikes. www.404media.co/a-researcher...

Trump shreds USAID ➡️ global child deaths dramatically rise Yes, Trump / MAGA / Congressional Republicans are personally responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of children around the world. www.wsj.com/health/for-f... #USAID

If you have only one thing to read today... "Universities are being retrofitted as fulfillment centers of cognitive convenience." www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

Labour bearing down on immigration will fix this any day now.

Potential risks of GenAI on medical education ebm.bmj.com/content/30/6...

Kristi Noem: "Sir, you made it through hurricane season without a hurricane. You kept the hurricanes away. We appreciate that."

If the entire Trump administration doesn't realize that this would guarantee that the Trump pardons they're all banking on will also be declared invalid by a future president, nobody tell them.

We kept the receipts. These comments, taken together, paint a picture of the man he is today.

Want to make nice graphs with me, starting next year? I'm hiring for a position at the University of Witten/Herdecke. uni-wh.softgarden.io/job/61280592...

"The corporate legal leaders from five sectors [...] overwhelmingly (83%) said that they believed that “doing the right thing” came secondary to profit in business decision-making within their organisation." www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

"According to his running club, the man, who is a U.S. citizen, was returning from a team run when agents pulled him out of his vehicle, tackled him to the ground and kneeled on top of him, allegedly breaking six ribs and causing internal bleeding"

We'll all have our favourite bits of the White Paper. Mine include the shocking revelation that 'some' universities 'link research performance to promotion opportunities and pay progression' (page 49, top paragraph). Of all the 'perverse incentives' to offer university research staff....

I'm struggling to find anything inspiring about this vision of HE, where universities are turned into mere training centres. It totally fails to understand that they're essential for democracy and the White Paper risks undermining this crucial role. Post-16 white paper: share.google/iJelQxcEOt22...

Trump is no longer even pretending to have any kind of argument that his murdering of people in the Caribbean Sea has any kind of statutory validity. Just straight up declaring that he has quasi-unlimited power to execute people based on (nominal) suspicion.

President Donald Trump threatened to relocate World Cup matches set to be played next year in suburban Boston, after suggesting that parts of the city had been “taken over” by unrest. https://cnn.it/4901Nze

“A clarinet player was arrested after playing her instrument to the tune of the ‘Ghostbusters’ theme song outside of a Portland ICE facility…”

This is an old formula used by authoritarian regimes. Stoke chaos and blame scapegoats to justify the use of force.

The Dawit Isaak Library in Malmö is releasing a special edition of Orwell’s 1984. The book cannot be read, on account of having two spines. The “double bind” is a protest against censorship across the world: malmo.se/boundbookspr...

🌟 New preprint 🌟, by @olivia.science and me: 📝 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025). *Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists*. lnkd.in/ewajedAe 🧪

Now, we tackle in turn the issues we outlined in the abstract: First, the displacement of human participants, tracing the history of technologies to recruit real people, we end up forgetting the whole point: gathering — not fabricating! — human data. More at section 3: doi.org/10.31234/osf... 5/

Second, if we uncritically adopt AI in psychology, we outsource programming of our experiments to companies. This undoes a lot of open source: experiments are under industry capture, written without formal specifications. It deskills us: psychologists spent the last decade learning to code. 6/

Third, the peculiar idea that somehow we don't need to read, write, or perform literature reviews anymore; popping up like a satanic mushroom in almost all so-called OK uses of LLMs. Companies writing our papers via their chatbots is not scientific at all. See section 5: doi.org/10.31234/osf... 7/

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

Trump posts that Sen. Blumenthal “should be allowed to speak no longer”

I feel like this photo of masked, armed men pepper spraying a pastor protecting his community is going to be a defining picture of this moment in America for a long, long time.

Large Language Models Do Not Simulate Human Psychology arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06950

He's telling us what he's doing. Using the military to suppress protest. At some point the opposition needs to listen to him and adjust strategy.

As a matter of fact, the US president posted a deep-fake video with himself in it, dove into conspiracy theories and promoted an alternative reality. Wonder how the response would have been in 2023. www.rawstory.com/medbed-trump/

The more RFKJr does, the less Americans like him. CNN statistician Harry Enten revealed the health secretary scored an alarming -21 approval rating as he faces backlash over his massive cuts to medical research and moves to limit vaccine access. www.yahoo.com/news/videos/...

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said he was conducting a "social experiment" by sporting a mustache in the style of Adolf Hitler, and claimed that it made him more attractive to women. www.rawstory.com/alex-jones-2...

So when is the FCC going to step in?

Eric Trump claims he was in the Oval Office watching his father end wars, raising national security concerns

👀 www.arxiv.org/abs/2509.18234

“We’re not Tylenol experts, of course not.” Should have stopped there Richard, because the rest of what you said was incoherent.

NSF invests in science, technology, and education in all 50 states. Cutting it this much will cause substantial losses to communities around the US

Uhhh, folks? This is real bad. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

I was back at 26 Federal Plaza today, where an ICE agent violently threw this bereft woman to the ground in front of her kids. She had not touched him. She did not pose any threat. She had to be taken to the hospital. (🎥: Elias Eliahu)

Patel is basically admitting on camera that the FBI no longer adheres to the Attorney General Guidelines, which prohibits investigating U.S. persons based solely on First Amendment activity (including membership in a group).