Really good, short, LRB blog by @michaelchessum.bsky.social abt the rise of the Greens... Spoiler - his conclusion - "For more than a hundred years, the Labour Party has had a monopoly on political representation on the British left. That is now breaking down." www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/oc...

Matthew Gandy (@cam.ac.uk) will present on “Attentive Observation: Walking, Listening, Staying Put” tonight at 18:00 as part of the interdisciplinary lecture series “On Environment.” Find out more: www.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de/events_conf_... #lectureseries #rccevents #envhum #envhist

Our paper on clusters of schools across the UK is out. We find five clusters: multi-racial & super-diverse middle & working-class schools of towns & cities, suburban white middle class schools, established elite schools & (post-)industrial white working class schools. doi.org/10.1002/berj...

Wim Vanderbauwhede: “You give an input and it ‘guesses’ the answer a user would want to get, based on the input and the data it was trained on. The ‘machines’ don’t think; they generate something plausible, something that seems acceptable.” apache.be/2025/10/24/b...

Who today is influencing science a la Big Tobacco or Oil and Gas? In our new preprint we show how tech companies like Meta are capturing research on their product, using mechanisms that subtly (or not so subtly) shape what science gets produced

It's perhaps pertinent to note that people in reply *don't believe* these numbers. Yet they are from a UKRI spreadsheet. So is UKRI wrong? Or are the numbers just unbelievably bad?

Last time I checked those were at roughly 5% success rate as per the AHRC website.

But column two says "Year application received". This to me suggests that the success rate is "the probability that you would have been successful by Oct. 2025, given that you submitted in 2025", which is different from "the probability that you will be successful, given that you submitted in 2025"

This is at a time when universities are turning more to grant capture as the primary currency for promotion etc (usually regardless of what you do with it)

CAIL = prerequisite knowledge for a critical perspective, such as to tell apart nonsense hype from true theoretical computer scientific claims. For example, the idea that human-like systems are a sensible or possible goal is the result of circular reasoning and anthropomorphism. olivia.science/ai 🧵

Makes the ERC Starting Grants look very attainable in comparison (12.2% success rate for latest round)

My performance (and employability, let alone promotability) is based on my ability to win these grants. Even if i did nothing but wrote them (+ all the networking & other prep work) I could easily go years - decades - without winning one, according to these stats.

1% for new investigator is particular obnoxious as it would seem to directly undermine the core aims of the scheme. You're not helping ECRs develop if you won't give any of them money to manage as PIs

When a Microsoft data center opened next to the small Mexican town of La Esperanza, locals say electricity outages and water shortages grew severe. The local doctor rushed patients a half hour to the nearest hospital when blackouts cut off his oxygen concentrator. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/t...

📺 TV en DIRECTO | Sánchez pedirá a los Veintisiete fondos para viviendas protegidas y un mecanismo europeo para frenar la especulación: "Es la primera vez que el Consejo Europeo se va a hablar de la emergencia habitacional que vive toda Europa" tinyurl.com/2ad8we5s

Thought provoking article by @nytimes.com highlighting the hidden cost of AI, its environmental impact and the consequences for local communities with commentary from @anavaldi.bsky.social @oii.ox.ac.uk.

Can AI simulations of human research participants advance cognitive science? In @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I analyze this vision. We show how “AI Surrogates” entrench practices that limit the generalizability of cognitive science while aspiring to do the opposite. 1/

Great article. The point is that, even if the sample is unrepresentative, it is larger at the bottom. This will impress reviewers, journalists and, of course, the university's department of communications. Also, AI is a tool that allows bypassing Ethics committes and thus speeds up research.

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs - Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75% - Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60% - Social Sciences by 50–70% - History by 60% - Biology by 75% - The German department will lose all PhD seats - Sociology from six PhD students to zero

After submitting a FOIA request UKRI, I obtained success rates by three grant call scheme and I can only say that I am disheartened by the results: - AHRC Responsive Mode 2025: 2% - ESRC New Investigator Grant 2025: 1% - ESRC Research Grant Round 2025: 1%

Very glad to see this piece by the @nytimes.com on data center struggles from Mexico to Ireland: "Government support worldwide has helped tech firms build with little accountability, said Ana Valdivia, an Oxford University lecturer studying data center development." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/t...

#AcademicJob Assistant Professor in the Social Studies of Medicine joint between Departments of Sociology and History & Philosophy of Science at University of Cambridge. Apply by 17 November #HPS #STS #Sociology #SocMed #HistMed #MedHum #MedAnth #MedEthics #PhilJobs

🌱 "There is a huge amount of carbon dioxide emissions and water use related to data centres that we often forget about because it is not a very visible thing," she said. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Very glad to take part on "Humanities in Times of Geopolitical Turmoil" seminar series organised by @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social and @fabianlferrari.bsky.social. 📆 Follow the thing AI: 20/11/2025: 15:30 - 16:30 @oii.ox.ac.uk cdh.uu.nl/event/cdh-on...

Black coal up from Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (Growth in demand partially offsetting growth on RE) www.afr.com/policy/energ...

🌱 On October 29th, we will be at the Utrecht University discussing the challenges of doing quantitative estimations in the context of AI environmental impacts, organised by the greening the digital society group. Come and join us! www.uu.nl/en/events/gd...

Without Critical AI Literacy (CAIL) in psychology (doi.org/10.31234/osf...) we risk the following: 1️⃣ misunderstanding statistical models, thinking correlation is causation; 2️⃣ confusing statistical models and cognitive models, undermining theory; 3️⃣ going against stated open science norms. 4/

🌏 "A closer examination into the supply chain capitalism of AI unveils environmental harms such as water struggles, which have not been considered by the algorithmic harms and resistance literature before." www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

With the agency no longer collecting emissions data from polluting companies, attention is turning to whether climate NGOs have the tools—and legal right—to fulfill this EPA function. www.wired.com/story/the-ep...

UN Water and Energy nexus: "In a recent study, it was estimated that, as a result of the global demand for artificial intelligence, between 4.2 billion and 6.6 billion m3 of water will be required by 2027." docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/60/30

At least a third of EU citizens in UK report discrimination by public bodies

The politics of artificial intelligence supply chains link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Excellent reading of the week: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia "We expound on why universities must take their role seriously to counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm" zenodo.org/records/1706...

“In the past, they killed and expelled us,” a tribe leader said. Now, “they make us invisible.” TikTok is investing in a $10 billion data center in Brazil. An Indigenous group who says the project is being built on their land is trying to stop it, claiming they were not consulted on the project

BBC: Thirsty data centres boom in drought-hit Mexico. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

🌱 The AI supply chains: "This means looking at the environmental impacts of AI at every stage of the supply chain, from mining the minerals used in the electronics hardware, to the emissions associated with the use of the models, to the disposal of hardware" www.bera.ac.uk/blog/the-env...

Israel mata a al menos 66 palestinos en lo que va de domingo, 33 cuando iban a recoger comida.

Just l'he acabat ara. Un llibre imprescindible!

@zoejardiniere.bsky.social dealing with ignorance. Is there a Nobel prize for patience? youtube.com/shorts/PnxLn...

Very glad to see (thanks, @jonasvalente.bsky.social!) that Prof Paola Ricaurte has been selected as one of the 100 Most Influential People in AI by The Time! You can check out the talk she gave at the @oii.ox.ac.uk on bio-socio-algorithmic assemblages here: www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/...

"Tech isn't about innovation, it's about power and networking chokepoints for power." Strong thread below (on an interesting FT opinion piece) And all very aligned with e.g. Nieborg & Poell's interesting research on institutional platform power journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

We’ve “watched the web mutate from democratic commons into a gamified engine of manipulation and misinformation. The dream of a cooperative knowledge society has faded into an architecture of monetized attention and algorithmic control.” lareviewofbooks.org/article/mind...

The genitally-obsessed bigots have decided that their apartheid rules apply even to people who’ve voted to be inclusive. If you can, please donate to this campaign to fight back 👇🏻 and/or share.

We now have some data on the environmental impact per AI prompt: Gemini: 0.00024 kWh & 0.26 mL water ChatGPT: 0.0003 kWh & 0.38 mL ...the same energy as one Google search in 2008 & 6 drops of water. Seems to be improving, too: Google reports a 33x drop in energy use per prompt in a year. But...

Interesting systemic risk/global risk paper from a diverse set of authors: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"The deputy prime minister has been hit with a legal challenge after she overruled a local council to approve a hyperscale datacentre on green belt land by the M25 in Buckinghamshire." www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Some reflections from #WorldCon on how to talk to friends about "AI" buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

'It is easier to take action when you know you are not acting alone.' Collective action on climate is crucial. Scientists play an important role in driving change, write @biology.ox.ac.uk's Dr Tristram Wyatt and Cardiff University's Aaron Thierry ⬇️ #OxfordClimate

Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it