Four generations of my family have served our country. Service is in my blood. The President wouldn’t know anything about that.

'Despite persistent myths, employment rates for humanities graduates are comparable to those of STEM graduates, as Humanities Indicators data shows. Early earnings differ but the salary gap narrows significantly mid-career, particularly for graduates who pursue further study'. 1/2

Hero. “Maybe I am making my position worse with my words, but my honour and conscience are more important to me. I did what I considered necessary.” We should talk more about people like her. Forget Loser-Pig Trump, his sycophants, and all the useless "leaders" of today. bsky.app/profile/theg...

40 years to the day since Ireland's greatest-ever rock'n roll star left us for the great gig in the sky. He set our musical world alight in the previous decades, putting Ireland on the musical map like no other. No-one will ever be as cool as Phillo again. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXOr...

Portrait of Sir Keir Starmer. 🇬🇧💪

Can’t believe the winner of both the Israel Peace Prize and FIFA Peace Prize has started 2026 with an oil war.

At the moment, the Crans-Montana fire looks like an exact repeat of The Station nightclub fire (where 100 people died, mainly by the exit). How on earth is this possible?! Every venue manager should study this tragedy and make sure it won't repeat - damn, even I knew about it!

Serious question: what’s the point of autoethnography? People seem to think it has one, and that it (demonstrably) generates valuable (i.e. objective) knowledge [I know ‘objective’ is a dirty word we’re not supposed to use anymore, in social science at least, which is why I enjoy doing it so much😬]

I just came here to say.. Happy New Year!

The destruction of knowledge and history is haphazard & breathtaking. NASA’s Largest Library Is Closing Amid Staff and Lab Cuts.

This can't be right; does not make any sense. And I'm an old-school cyclist - I'd gladly believe all sorts of abhorrent things about e-bikes! But this can't be.. *If the data is correct, I wonder if it's due to e-bikes being popular in commuting: rides happen among traffic, during rush hours.

Great thread. "These models optimise for likely answers, not guaranteed truth. That’s a poor match for formal proofs where every step must be correct." This is in general the case with what we call "AI" (ie machine learning): they can be of an efficient help, if you know what you are looking for.

Currently, more Americans get their news from social and video platforms than from traditional outlets. Soon, the content on these platforms will be nothing but AI slop. What do you think will happen? www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Maybe we should start speaking in terms of parasites: AI parasites. That's what we are getting infested by, parasites. And at the moment, I can't see any remedy. Any other, that is, but getting off the internet - start reading books & newspapers, meeting people. Doesn't sound all bad to me!

Post-doc positions: "Academic freedom is under pressure today. This requires rescue havens of free research. ... [we] invite early career researchers, whose work is restricted due to political pressure in the USA..." uni-freiburg.de/frias/call-f...

Anyone else feel like we’re maybe two data centres away from people believing that Rodney Dangerfield was president in-between Eisenhower and Kennedy?

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

I think it's clear that soon the whole of internet will be flooded by AI slop. What will happen when we can't trust anything online? That's the question we should be asking. But I don't see this question being asked, let alone answered. I think we are heading towards a collapse.

South Park called it, and it’s hilarious. One of the creators purchased the Trump Kennedy Center URL address before the name was even changed because they know Trump’s narcissism is in the driver’s seat.

Giving what we can has implemented a fun game where you spin a globe to see how your starting point in life would compare if you were reborn today, randomly somewhere on earth. www.givingwhatwecan.org/birth-lottery

I finally got some time to flesh out my rant about these headlines... TL;DR: age differences ≠ aging jenndowd.substack.com/p/does-adole... #demography #episky #medsky #neurosky

We've got the Darwin Award, we've got Ig Nobels. We need a prize for the most idiotic innovation. It should be called, hmm.. Trump Prize? bsky.app/profile/scie...

Damn, can't get to this. But I find it credible that this is something that machine learning is actually good for. But let's be careful: - People have preached the gospel of precision medicine for decades. - If we get better at identifying risk factors, will this automatically improve well-being?

"Young exceptional performers and later adult world-class performers are largely two discrete populations over time." I do think we have a serious problem in current academia in that the system incentivises - quite intentionally - quick, narrow performance. We need to change this.

When viewing the fake article in Google scholar on my university network, there is a link to access the article via my uni's library. That link sends me to a library page that makes fake article appear real... Turns out library page is made programmatically from info on Google scholar 🤦

Peer-reviewed publications to suffer from Gresham's Law: bad science will drive out the good. Maybe we could do better with a fully open peer review process on a website like arXiv? Authenticated users can post comments on a discussion board where everyone can read and rate the comments.

i’m going to start telling students to avoid using articles from 2022–onward

Story time. Got a paper rejected. No big deal. It happens. Except one reviewer explicitly stated they were unfamiliar with our methods and asked a GenAI to explain it. They then used this to trash the paper, oh, and the journal forbids AI use in reviews. Livid is mild to describe my feelings.

I find this very alarming. AI is being used in explicitly prohibited ways. No doubt this will soon be the norm. The consequences of this will be dramatic. Over the holidays, the publishers and the whole of academic community are doing nothing else but working on a solution to this, right? RIGHT?!

Fellow academic writers: to make the AI summary redundant, state your conclusion rather than your topic or question in the title and write an abstract that summarises the content. The field biologists understand this, but it hasn't reached the rest of us. And yes, I'm guilty of not doing this too.

Minusta olisi hallitukselta suoraselkäistä, että lähtisivät ajamaan maamme nimen muuttamista Fingoliaksi.

I've got an idea: why don't we accompany research papers with concise pieces of text summarising the structure and the main ideas of the paper? I think this could be a thing! We could call it, I don't know, maybe "abstract" or something.

Just decline the peer review invitation. What are you people even doing?

Sata vuotta sitten suomalaiset siirtolaiset joutuivat aasialaisiksi koettujen piirteidensä takia kiusatuksi ja USA:n maahanmuuttoviranomaisten hampaisiin. Kansallismielisissä piireissä oltiin loukkaantuneita ja toivottiin valtiovallan puuttuvan asiaan. (Kuvat: Uusi Aura 19.5.1925 ja SK 20.10.1934)

Thus begins the knowledge collapse. I have not seen any discussion on vision for a future where we lose trust on everything online. This seems inevitable. I remain hopeful: we need to get back to real life - meeting people, reading magazines and books, discussing with each other. Oh, I can't wait!

What a great piece. "Most of what passes for ancient 'regional tradition' was assembled in the late 20th century, largely for tourism and domestic reassurance. The real history of Italian food is turbulent: a saga of hunger, improvisation, migration, industrialisation and sheer survival instinct."

Oh why, why, did we have to learn to play that damn recorder in school?! Here's why:

Where is MEGA? Make Europe Great Again! bsky.app/profile/mark...

A new academic society was launched last summer: the Finnish Cognitive Science Society. A number of events are scheduled to take place, including a conference next June. More informally, a reading group will be convening a few times in a term.

Erinomainen kirjoitus; sopii mutatis mutandis kaikkiin akateemisiin perustaitoihin, jotka opiskelijoilla pitää olla hallussa. Ehkä kynän & paperin nimiin vannominen ei ole oleellisinta. Oleellisinta on perusasioiden jämäkkä opettaminen - koko arvosanaskaala käyttöön. Pään silittämisen aika on ohi.

Finally, I understand the feelings of the few. Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend. We were all equal in the end. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFXf...

We discussed this when I was running a RG on addiction at @kingsphilosophy.bsky.social. We concluded that a person attending the group was addicted to her husband due to her unhealthy urge to go home and spend the evening with him rather than stay, continue the discussion and enjoy drinks with us.

I find it weird - alarming - that this is not clear to everyone. Confusion is being intentionally propelled by the AI Snake Oil Salesmen, I suppose. A simple rule of thumb: LLMs are a proper subset of ML. We should speak consistently in terms of "ML" - and drop the term "AI" altogether.

I've found this brouhaha quite, hmm.. funny. There are many countries whose legal systems don't rely on jury trial - and where, I dare to say, the rights of the citizens are much better protected than in the UK (let alone in That Other jury trial country). bsky.app/profile/theg...

Sen. Mark Kelly demonstrates tremendous courage and tenacity as he speaks the truth about the illegitimate occupant in the Oval Office. 🔥🔥🔥 #TrumpisaNationalDisgrace

Yes, I think it's clear that this is the way to go. There are many obstacles in sight - but hey, who said this was going to be easy?! (Well, the AI snake oil people did.) Incidentally, this hybrid model fits neatly in with the age-old dichotomy of deductive & inductive reasoning. Back to the basics!

"Figure 1 shows the overall methodology." Ladies & gentlemen: science is in serious trouble. bsky.app/profile/erik...

In addition to being a fascinating (if horrific) insight into a mostly-unknown period of European prehistory, this includes a BANGER of a quote: "I can see why all these people without heads wouldn’t be good for a community, and might be a cause for abandonment." www.science.org/content/arti...