“These challenges are not unique to neurodivergent learners. International students, mature learners, carers, and students from widening participation backgrounds report similar issues. This suggests that the problem lies less with individual ability and more with how assessment is being designed.”

Ring-billed Gull standing on a #Stone watching the sunrise over Colpoy's Bay, Ontario for the #BlueSkyArtShow #BrucePeninsula #BruceCounty #ECK #photography #TenMinutesFromHome #PhotographersOfBluesky

UK contemporary sculptor known as Anna & the Willow creates nature-inspired sculptures made from rods of willow #WomensArt

Imagine for a second what the world would be if instead of throwing billions at things people don't care about, these companies would throw money at stuff that would improve the life of everyone, like, I don't know, clean energy, more affordable healthcare, cheaper and healthier food, etc

"We need to see young people that are being criminally exploited as victims." This National Child Exploitation Awareness Day, hear a young man's story of county lines, how he found a way out, and what needs to change. ⚠️ Listener discretion advised. Full Safe to Talk episode: pod.fo/e/38da50

I must complete the required security training. To do so, I must use the learning platform. The learning platform requires signing up for the new credential system. There is a training to sign up for the new credential system.

Be careful with with your denominators, they matter a lot! www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNot...

This is excellent (from @mmitchell.bsky.social): medium.com/@margarmitch...

My employer asks me to complete a survey on AI usage for which this is the first question (required):

Interested in the consequences of early exposure to policing? Come to a free one-day workshop Monday 23rd March to hear from leading researchers from the UK & abroad. Free. Spaces limited. Pre-registration recommended. www.eventbrite.com/e/policing-a...

In less than a month, new providers of children’s homes, fostering services and secure accommodation will no longer be able to make a profit in Wales — making it the first nation in the UK to take this landmark step. nation.cymru/news/wales-b...

AI often gets talked about as if it “thinks”. In reality, it is statistical. Our landmark paper argues that understanding this is essential for using AI safely, effectively and ethically. Read more: rss.org.uk/news-publica... Paper: rss.org.uk/RSS/media/Fi...

Just caught up with this: France is dumping Zoom and Teams. So are soldiers in Austria. And bureaucrats in Germany. They are seeking digital sovereignty, autonomy from the American tech oligarchs. apnews.com/article/euro...

New parable Junior SWE: what’s the secret to getting good LLM code? Senior SWE: knowing what to look for in code reviews Junior SWE: what’s the secret to knowing what to look for in code reviews? Senior SWE: writing a lot of code by hand

When a company in an industry built on hype tells you that a use case is a bad idea—and actually dangerous—that means it’s a *catastrophically* bad idea.

Criminally funny, but also I'm crying inside Norway comes for the #TechBros www.forbrukerradet.no/breakingfree vimeo.com/1168468796?f...

“40 [/]49 providers…273 homes…difficulties securing school placements for children in their care. Some…waited 6 months[+] to get a child into school” “struggles to regulate his emotions, after experiencing trauma…tends to run away from situations he finds overwhelming” www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

“would often run away after being…abused” “She began skipping school, hoping it would stop... "…I loved school but if… you started running off or skiving school or shoplifting, they were scared of us being picked up by the police & opening our mouths"” www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Sounds good. Hope “Failure to engage will have serious consequences, such as possible criminal charges+time behind bars” doesn’t negatively impact neurodivergent children, those w/ trauma or any other children who may find it more difficult to engage w/ the hopefully-not-one-size-fits-all process.

“we should hold on to our […]rough edges, our lack of fitting in […]the things that make us resist compliance with pressures of power. Instead of feeling guilty or out of place, feeling responsible for fitting in, we should hold ourselves (&each other) responsible for resisting the forces of harm” ❤️

The 2nd* paper from my PhD has been published as an open access Brief Report! :) Topics: SEND, exclusion, exploitation, missing children, machine learning ("AI") Paper: doi.org/10.1080/3067... The thread below attempts to explain what its about in a way that's accessible *first solo author paper

This analysis of papers from 1980 to 2025 goes beyond LLMs, but notes one challenge that arises when research questions rely on the same tools and datasets: “the adoption of AI seems to induce authors to converge on the same solutions to known problems rather than create new ones.”

"The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build. [...] No other part of the work so cripples the resulting system if done wrong. No other part is more difficult to rectify later." Fred Brooks, "No Silver Bullet"

'The Effect of Counting Rules on Cross-National Comparisons of Homicide', by @davidbuil.bsky.social (who came up with the idea & did all of the data analysis and most of the write up), myself & @marcelo-f-aebi.bsky.social, just out at Social Indicators Research (link.springer.com/article/10.1...).

“Maybe not everything has to be digital or digitized, maybe the internet shouldn’t be inserted into absolutely everything, maybe we shouldn’t be constantly connected in the way we’re now expected to be, and generative AI certainly does not need to be forced into every facet of society.” ❤️

Our new journal @evidencebasejnl.bsky.social will officially be launching its inaugural issue in April. Evidence assessments, cutting edge methodology papers, research commentaries .. www.tandfonline.com/journals/reb...

📢 New publication – and a great way to end the year In this study, we use MAIHDA (Multilevel Analysis of Individual Heterogeneity and Discriminatory Accuracy) to study who is most at risk of violence victimisation in England and Wales. Paper: doi.org/10.1177/1748... 1/n

Our work begins with a simple, but bold idea: powerful people using AI to decide our fates is not inevitable. At TechTonic Justice, we’re working for a better today and a better tomorrow. And, we want you to join us!

Big Tech is rapidly building out data centers to power AI—without adequate oversight, transparency, or accountability. @publiccitizen.bsky.social has released a new report revealing who truly benefits from the acceleration of AI across all sectors of society, and who is left to pay the price.⬇️

Anyone interested in the education debate in the UK, a review by Sir Alan Wood of the safeguarding at the much lauded Mossbourne Academy Victoria Park should be a must read. Damning chscp.org.uk/wp-content/u...

“Calculators expanded reasoning; the printing press spread knowledge. ChatGPT, by contrast, doesn’t extend cognition—it automates it, turning thinking itself into a service. Rather than democratizing learning, it privatizes the act of thinking under corporate control. “

'If you want to be a whistleblower you have to be prepared to lose your job. I’m able to do what I’m doing here because I’m nobody' Old article but new to me. Loved it (Not just because it’s about a mid-life PGR from an IT background). Academic reality though: 😔 www.theguardian.com/science/2014...

“institutions reward publication volume and citation metrics above everything else” “Papermills are merely the black-market version of the same sickness: a culture that rewards output, not validity; novelty, not truth; publication, not knowledge.”

How does a violence intervention program actually work? We interviewed 99 READI participants to find out. Key finding: They came for the job, stayed for the therapy. crimelab.uchicago.edu/resources/wh...

“Rather than choosing between two flawed approaches […] we advocate for explicitly acknowledging the model uncertainty they introduce. We demonstrate how this can be achieved…” ❤️

Our latest paper(with Ruth Weir, Niels Blom, Oluwole Adeniyi) entitled Increases In Disadvantage and Instability Are Associated With Rising Violence is finally published in the British Journal of Criminology! doi.org/10.1093/bjc/... LinkedIn post: www.linkedin.com/posts/activi...

New report alert: Young people at risk of violence are too often excluded from mental health support — unless they offend first. 🔗 Read the full report youthendowmentfund.org.uk/reports/acce... #WMHD25 #WorldMentalHealthDay #EarlyIntervention #ViolencePrevention

Short note with Fernando Miró Llinares published on @crimrxiv.com: 'Yet another problem for scholarly communication in criminology: The case of a Spanish journal turned into a paper mill' doi.org/10.21428/cb6...

“P8 is […] skewed when children don’t attend well” “When we label schools as underperforming, we make it harder […] to recruit” “disadvantaged children can be concentrated in certain schools […], in turn […]these schools find achieving a positive P8 more difficult - and so the cycle repeats”

“multiple factors contributing to disadvantage, many of which schools may not be able to influence. As some of those factors only […]start to bite at secondary school, it’s [common] for a school to be doing everything it can, only to still see little progress -a reality that P8 fails to acknowledge”

“Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted […]society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. […]software updates are rolled out […]non-consensually, [MS]Office is bundled with chatbots & we […]have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI”

Peer reviewers are exhausted. It's common to spend *months* inviting reviewers, getting refusals, inviting more, maybe 12 or more, then 2 agree but 1 doesn't complete, so you go again. That's why your paper is in limbo. I'm very sorry, it's awful, but it's also an untenable academic labour issue.

The AI authorship issue is real. We've caught papers that looked OK but had references to works by the *journal editors* that *do not exist*. Like, don't send us papers citing papers we know we didn't write, right?

Microsoft is declining to share key information with Police Scotland about where the sensitive data it uploads to Office 365 will be processed, leaving the force unable to comply with UK-wide data protection laws www.computerweekly.com/news/3666298...

“if AI allows us to make better predictions from incorrect theories, it might slow down […]progress if this results in […]using flawed theories for longer. In the extreme case, fields would be stuck in an intellectual rut even as they excel at improving predictive accuracy within existing paradigms”

“…AI companies, science funders & policy makers all seem oblivious to what the actual bottlenecks to scientific progress are. They are simply trying to accelerate production, which is like adding lanes to a highway when the slowdown is actually caused by a toll booth. It’s sure to make things worse”

“Even if individual scientists benefit from adopting AI, it doesn’t mean science as a whole will benefit. […] So far, on balance, AI has been an unhealthy shock to science, stretching many of its processes to the breaking point.” ⮛

Nice case study of a Scottish secondary school being creative with language teaching by mixing it with PE and other subjects to bring it more to life www.thetimes.com/article/a5bd...