If you ever want to understand the UK higher education system and particuarly the University of Manchester, this great paper on how underachivers and mediocrity dominate secret police institutions hits close to home

Uruguay ranks among the best destinations in the world to travel to in 2026, according to the BBC The BBC continues in its slow but steady process of annihilating its journalistic reputation… Unless this is a subtle display of British sarcasm. www.bbc.co.uk/travel/artic...

Check this useful systematic review on RRD on crime and justice!

Hero without a cape British scientist has forced a leading US cancer research institute to pay a $15m legal settlement after trawling through scientific papers in his spare time! www.thetimes.com/article/3113...

❄️🥶 manchester picadilly 🥶❄️

New Year’s resolution: stop talking to people who are already convinced

Romantics still alive nowadays! A marriage proposal...in snow ❄️👰

Podeti: simply magic

Not common to see Uruguayans publishing in British Journal of Crim: check out this paper by the great Fede del Castillo Role of unions: police didn’t stop sacrificing…they just stopped doing it for free. From “vocation & heroism” to “ok, pay my overtime” watermark02.silverchair.com/azaf093.pdf?...

Uruguayan Stew in the freezing Oslo

During this holiday season, an orangutan’s gentle gaze reminds us what truly matters - compassion and a safer future for these amazing beings. Thank you to all the groups who dedicate their time to protecting orangutans. Let’s continue to show them our support always. orangutancaring.org/pages/care

Amazing work being done in the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre in Borneo Just for a change, instead of the usual virtue-signalling and posting irrelevant criticisms of Trump in bluesky, consider donating money, adopting an orangutan baby or volunteering

Check this cool paper by Carlos and colleagues! 👇

Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology, with Olga, David & Yongyu And I have the nerve to complain about my job....

Congratulations to @simine.com well deserved winner of the Einstein Foundation Individual Award for Promoting Quality in Research 2025 🎉 www.einsteinfoundation.de/en/media/pre...

Almost perfect surprise anniversary gift: Nico: “For our tenth anniversary, we’re spending all of December in Malaysia!” Olga: “Seriously? That’s so sweet! We celebrated ten years last year, but still — how lovely!”

My suggestion to the marketing team was… not enthusiastically received

80% de los que hacen teoria sociogica out!

More than a meme, a consistent life philosophy

Some people can’t help being optimistic to the point of borderline delusion

Cabo Polonio, Uruguay

Virtue signalling is the opium of European academics

JUSTICE When justice and reason are on your side, try to make them go over to the enemy’s side; then they will pursue you with justice and reason, and will surely lose Augusto Monterroso

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like...reading week" www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx5N...

"The Preregistarian religion requires me to take one very small part of science and blow it all out of proportion to its actual value" Interesting post by Luke Conway showing the problem of exaggerating preregistration's relevance

Real Halloween: giving regular candys to all kids "Of course children who have nut allergies need to be protected. We need to segregate their food from nuts, have medication available... but maybe if touching a nut kills you, you're supposed to die" Louis CK

🎃 Halloween is every day 🎃

Using DAG and being careful about bad controls in Criminology is not frequent Great paper on sentencing discrimination

But in order to work and collaborate together in a productive way, shouldn't you need to be less arrogant and mediocre and have minimal curiosity and interest in others' discipline? I thought you were talking about sociologists and economists....

There were times when we had to use chains to prevent people from stealing books. Now, you could chain most of our students to one of these bookshelves, and I'm sure that if you came back 10 days later, you'd find their dead bodies, not a single book opened

Jon Elster distinguishes between soft & hard obscurantism One of the best examples of hard obscurantism I know is Fredrickson & Losada (2005) use of differential equations from fluid dynamics to describe emotions over time, wonderfully anhilated by Sokal et al psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

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Very nice paper by Tiago & Aebi showing that the relationship economy - imprisonment that is considered a fact by many critical criminologist is weak and as usual highly sensitive to research design & analysis It's great that Punishment & Society is publishing this kind of papers!

Correction for multiple comparisons should be ubiquitous www.nature.com/articles/s41... 👍👏

Yesterday we have a visitors in Picadilly Manchester

At the University of Manchester, I check my students’ pulse every now and then just to make sure they’re still alive

Academia

"If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative" Woody Allen

My cognitive capacity is limited to keeping track & maintaining stable relationships with just one human: Olga

When it reaches the threshold of being surprising and novel enough for the reviewer

Essays/assignments ready for marking

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Life attitude

Very cool episode on what is dark matter and dark energy and how do we know is out there by @tomchivers.bsky.social & @stuartjritchie.bsky.social ps: doing one future episode on parsimony-complexity, Occam, etc in science, would be amazing! sciencefictionspod.substack.com/p/episode-83...

Lucky Man

What a cool artistic government intervention on latest Banksy work When repression and clumsiness join forces, the sky is the limit