Oxford Professor Sarah Blagden, @oncology.ox.ac.uk appears in the first episode of Cancer Detectives: Finding the Cures on @Channel4 tonight! 📺 Watch at 9pm, Thurs 20 Nov, or stream on Channel 4. Brought to you by @CR_UK. #CancerDetectives #CancerPrevention www.channel4.com/programmes/c...

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

It looks like in the face of LLMs, just as professors have to go back to in-person and oral assessments to preserve the integrity of teaching, survey researchers have to go back to in-person interviews to preserve the integrity of polling. A lot of change is coming, folks! phys.org/news/2025-11...

💥New: Money, Time, Trust, Control – How commercial publishers drain science ✍️ @danbrockington.bsky.social @aileenfyfe.bsky.social @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca #AcademicSky #ScholComm #AcademicPublishing

More fuel for @stephenkb.bsky.social’s theory that post-AI jobs will include bank teller - and now also door-to-door opinion pollster.

Excellent long read on medical AI and patient 'care'. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Schools in England have become testing sites for AI. I know it's common to say education is now an experimental lab for AI, but in England it's more methodologically true. 3 examples of escalating seriousness and an explanation coming up 🧵

A quick (1000 words) read to enjoy with your morning coffee or afternoon tea: "Psychology wants to stay WEIRD, not go WILD" Why hasn't psychology diversified it samples, methods, theories, etc.? Because it doesn't want to. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Over the past months (and at least 11 versions!), I was lucky to work with 11 amazing colleagues on a call to action to reform academic publishing. Not another declaration, but an appeal to our powerful friends, research funders & institutions, to Stop the Drain of Scientific Publishing. 1/n

I'm concerned about the health research community rushing to *require* patient/public involvement (PPI) for all methodological research. 🧵 1/12

“It’s time for the ‘publish more’ mindset to perish.” Mandy Hill, writing in the Financial Times, calls for reform in academic publishing: Read the full letter (paywall) 🔗 https://cup.org/3WRVlDm

By all means do what you have to do to survive in a toxic environment but please, I beg you, don’t suck up to bullies. Don’t inflate their egos. This encourages them to bully more people. Survive them not nourish them. There’s a difference.

Speaking Out | Under pressure: Becoming the good enough academic Milena Tekeste journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

📣 Save the date for the 13th PCI webinar on December 1st, 2025, at 4 PM CET!! Simine Vazire (University of Melbourne, Australia) will present "Recognizing and responding to a replication crisis: Lessons from Psychology". For more details and registration, visit: buff.ly/wZNoD2v

My favourite Halloween pumpkin display this year, at Wisley Gardens

When asked about Russia’s war in Ukraine, ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, DeepSeek, and xAI’s Grok all regularly cite Russian propaganda www.wired.com/story/chatbo...

"A neuroscientist swears by LLMs for speeding the boilerplate-heavy business of drafting grant proposals. He’s still responsible for the content, but if his grant-writing chops decline, he’s unbothered. That’s not science, in his view; it’s a performance demanded by the research economy."

“Each generation has had to learn how to work with its newly acquired cognitive prostheses, whether stylus, scroll, or smartphone,” Kwame Anthony Appiah writes—but what’s different with AI is its speed and the intimacy of the exchange with it.

"“You can only critically assess the output of an AI chatbot if you have the skills to do so, and you don’t develop these skills by using AI. Before you can be critical of an AI summary, you have to learn to understand a text without having it summarized by an AI tool.”

Yet again, we can't afford to let LLMs become a source of epistemic grounding for society.

We’re delighted to announce that The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years by Sunil Amrith has been awarded the 2025 British Academy Book Prize!

Wake up, babe, the least subtle visual metaphor in history just dropped

Grammarly is now an enemy of education "Universities risk putting students in impossible positions where they’re simultaneously told they can use a tool and that using certain functions of that tool constitutes cheating." Seriously, ban it. It's no friend of education wonkhe.com/wonk-corner/...

Remember the Year of the MOOC from a decade ago? The one where tech bros predicted the end of all but 3-4 universities because who needs campuses when everyone can just take MOOCs and learn everything? Hits a little different now after pandemic pedagogy, huh? The tech hype cycle is a helluva drug.

One of our PhD students, Leah Warren, has curated an excellent newsletter celebrating Black History Month by spotlighting influential Black psychologists whose work has shaped the discipline & challenged exclusion in academic psychology. More here: sites.google.com/site/doconno...

By Mark Carrigan from *Checks notes* 2023.... #AcWri #AcademicPublishing

Most researchers believe the rise of artificial intelligence is harming academic publishing, says a new study which warns a surge of “poor-quality or AI-generated content” is threatening to overwhelm peer review processes. @jgro-the.bsky.social reports #academicsky https://ow.ly/FGWy50XbCSK

Cardigan highlights "a deeper issue about why authors would seek help from automated systems and what this suggests about the current state of academic publishing."

New article out this month on how doctors become fascists. 50% of German physicians joined the Nazi Party––twice the proportion of any other profession. US doctors today are arguably the most conservative in the world, and we're heading along a similar path. drive.google.com/file/d/1CAk9...

UK universities have announced cuts equivalent to more than 15,000 jobs over the past year as financial pressures mount, according to @ucu.org.uk #AcademicSky #highered

"Universities have collectively announced more than 12,000 job cuts in the last year, new analysis from the University and College Union (UCU) suggests." Make no mistake. Our university sector is in trouble.

To learn more, join our webinars “Peer Review and its Diversification” 15-16 October 2025 on Zoom Registration: forms.gle/1R4Y3d33W8bQ...

📚 A Guide for Early Career Reviewers rachelheyard.pages.uzh.ch/ecr-reviewers/

This is a REALLY good video that gets into the *specifics* of how AI is degrading our information environment and putting truth further out of reach for the average person / the population as a whole

My new Substack: Will AI Rescue Primary Care? Why AI-enabled solutions have mostly failed to solve the primary care crisis, and my hope/prediction that the endgame will likely be a new two-tiered system that increasingly relies on AI for basic care needs. robertwachter.substack.com/p/will-ai-re...

"Why would OpenAI and Microsoft spend $23 million to give 'free training' on how to use AI to teachers? Because they love teachers? No. Because they want to get their products into public schools in an attempt to cultivate the education market. ... To automate teachers, in other words."

⭐ Reflexivity: How to actually do it ⭐ @tracymorison.bsky.social @ischp.bsky.social ischp.net/2025/10/08/r...

Securing funding means thinking like a strategist, storyteller and coalition-builder. Nicole Akers shares her expert tips for navigating the demanding grant process, and winning: www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/who-c... #AcademicSky #PhDSky #ECRchat

Scholarslop: The Dangers of an Algorithmic Idea of the University - great piece by @berrydm.bsky.social "academics will need to find new means to defend the university and contest the use of scholarslop before it is too late" stunlaw.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-...

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month #BreastCancer is the most common cancer among women globally and represents approximately a quarter of all cancers that occur in women every year. Breast cancer is highly curable if detected in its early stages and adequate treatment is provided.

The AI doomsayers are warning of a bubble, but—at least for now—that doesn't seem to matter to AI’s biggest investors, Will Gottsegen writes in The Atlantic Daily.

They really need to be stopped...these Big Tech companies are destroying the planet with the goal of getting people addicted to their money-losing sycophantic chatbots. The AI industry is not the future.

"The human brain is simply not wired to treat AI like any other technology," Webb Wright writes. "For some users, the system is alive."

First op-ed for @LiveScience.com on my @absw.bsky.social media fellowship. "Whether good science is swamped by a quagmire of poor quality studies depends on the integrity of researchers and the awareness of the organizations which facilitate and fund it."

My latest column www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

What happens to your brain when you use ChatGPT to write your essay? MIT watched students’ brain activity to find out. The results are worrying.

Webinar: Evaluating impact in Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE). Join us for this FREE 90-minute session on the different approaches to evaluating PPIE in health research, led by PPIE experts. 📆Tues 21 Oct 2025, 1-2.30pm Register: tinyurl.com/5xvmpdmw @nihrspcr.bsky.social

“To add insult to injury, many metaphorical … phrases (especially used to describe ANNs; see Table 1) — like train, learn, hallucinate, reason — are applied to machines and result in distorting how we perceive these machines: humanising them while dehumanising us” zenodo.org/records/1706... 14/🧵

If academics & researchers in AI (like myself) don’t want the coming AI winter to destroy our field, we need to be accountable for how we allowed another hype cycle on our watch. We have the expertise to stop it. We need to speak truth to power in our own institutions!