David Bartram
@dbartram.bsky.social
Sociologist. Interests: inequalities, happiness, migration, & causal identification. Editor-in-chief of @socialindicators.bsky.social. PhD UW-Madison. AI-free teaching & research since 1998. Posts are personal. https://davidvbartram.wordpress.com
I'm sitting here on a porch looking out over a lake and it just seems so peaceful... www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...
Jerusalem’s most important Muslim religious site facing ‘imminent’ threat of Israeli takeover, says Jordan
Country convenes emergency meeting of ministers from Arab and Islamic world, fearing such a move could ‘trigger a religious conflict’
theguardian.com
Normalcy bias afoot: Thune gets Trump the most corrupt Attorney General ever to head his secret police, Dems may back a crypto bill, and weak Russia sanctions expand tariff powers. Meanwhile, Trump starves blue states and wages war on fair elections. Not things you'd want to alarm the public about!
Thune’s roadmap to recess
The Senate’s ability to clear its pile-up of legislation and nominations before a five-week summer recess may come down to two GOP decisions.
punchbowl.news
🗽LOLGOP🗽@thefarce.org · 2d agoListen, I'm no expert on the Senate. But dealing with Senate Republicans as if we're heading into a normal, business-as-usual election seems completely wrong. Bad morally, bad strategically, and disastrous for democracy itself.
All these LLM-generated manuscripts some academics are submitting -- they read like they've been "written" by the same person. When they get published (and many do get published), perhaps consider (if this is you) what a record you are creating for yourself.
Things I and friends have done to calm an angry abusive man from further escalating and killing us or our children: -Smiled -Kept normal schedules in order not to trigger a fight -Appeased with kind acts (cooking, cleaning, favors) -Forced friendly tones and words
The Bulwark@thebulwark.com · 3d agoRep. Max Miller: "My former wife has claimed that during a custody exchange at my home that day, I assaulted her…If I had assaulted her, would she have offered to cook me dinner six days later?"
It isn't even "intelligence". And we should stop using the term (and the initials, AI). Decline to propagate the mendacious branding.
Dylan Roth@dylanroth.bsky.social · 7d ago“We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.” - Sam Altman. I will never stop thinking about how nakedly evil this is, and it has framed every single AI headline I’ve read since.
Thinking of all the various tendencies we might expect to find among autistic people -- plagiarism is not on any reasonable list.
“vegetative electron microscopy” "The term has now appeared in at least 22 different papers" "the nonsense term may now be permanently embedded in AI knowledge bases" 1/2 www.zmescience.com/science/news...
AI Made Up a Science Term — Now It’s in Dozens of Papers
A scanning mistake and a translation error created scientific nonsense that AI models learned to repeat.
zmescience.com
If you are papermaxxing with AI and swamping academic journals with claude- or chat-prompted scholar-like content, then you are taking the time and labour of editors and reviewers that others who actually put the work in deserve instead.
One day, somebody in government will notice what the net migration level is hesding to. The fiscal forecast (£24 billion) was based on average net 235k to 2026-29 but that is at least 100k too high, costing £13 billion, or double that if want to reduce immigration visas further.
Adam Bienkov@adambienkov.bsky.social · 3w agoThe Times reporting that Andy Burnham succeeded in persuading Shabana Mahmood to become Chancellor because it would give her more control over cutting immigration
Apparently the UK spends £32.5m (and employs 553 people) to regulate the higher-education sector. And what a job it does "for [the] students"... Imagine how (un)healthy the sector would be if we *didn't* spend so much, or if the ££ was spent in a different way.
Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 3w ago'Readers may wish to reflect that this amount is significantly higher than the £585,000 fine originally levied by OfS on Sussex.'
Republicans made a pathologically-lying sociopath, a rapist, a convicted felon and likely a pedo, president. So fuck off.
In the academic sphere: Authors sometimes use LLMs to "improve readbility". But AI often does more than that: it changes text in ways that change meaning. So, the revised text might attribute ideas to other scholars in ways that amount to a misrepresentation. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
AI altering meaning of users’ drafts on issues from abortion to climate, study finds
Researchers say small changes in drafting could spread rapidly and create long-term shifts in public opinion
theguardian.com
Very good question from my GB News colleague. He may be surprised to know that Andy Burnham has spent more time in Makerfield since 18 June than I've spent in Clacton since July 2024.
My man. Belfast is a part of our fucking country. It’s not ‘our future’. It’s literally us, now
Owen Jones@owenjones.bsky.social · 2mo agoYou see these scenes from Belfast? That's our future if Reform, Restore, the Tories, GB News, Elon Musk and the right-wing media get their way. Except this will be on a much bigger scale. We have to decide: do we want those inciting hatred to destroy our country?
Just received a review invite from Frontiers in Sociology that seems to be AI-generated and cites papers I never wrote. The paper abstract also seems clearly AI-generated. The journal has a few hundred associate editors, but I’m not sure if any actual humans are involved in the editorial process.
Michael Okun@michael-okun.bsky.social · 2mo agoI’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇
If anyone had any doubt about what kind of publisher Frontiers is, this is a shocking whistleblower account
Michael Okun@michael-okun.bsky.social · 2mo agoOver the last month I saw that human editors are now stripped of control. I could no longer stop the system from auto-inviting "reviewers" with zero relevant expertise. Even worse - the AI began actively revoking the invitations I manually sent out to actual, qualified experts.
If you haven't read it yet: this book is an incredible read. Literally difficult to believe -- not that I doubt a single word. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/j...
Sales of Meta whistleblower’s memoir soar after Hay festival ‘silencing’
Sarah Wynn-Williams remained silent during her hour-long appearance, but sales of Careless People have since increased by more than 300%
theguardian.com
This is likely a sensible proposal. So there's not the slightest chance that the UK govt. will adopt it. www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Households could save £200 on energy bills in plan to break link between gas and electricity prices, says thinktank
Government plan to de-link gas and electricity prices aims to reduce bills for consumers after global surge in prices
theguardian.com
You reminder that following #Brexit the UK could not return this asylum seeker to Ireland (an EU country). Also that Brexit turned Northern Ireland into an easy access channel into the UK, as some (ahem) predicted.
Reform Party UK Exposed@reformexposed.bsky.social · 2mo agoThe Belfast attacker flew from Paris to Dublin 10.02.2023 and travelled to Belfast where he claimed asylum, his LTR was granted 28.09.2023. This was when Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick were Home Secretary and Immigration Minister respectively.
Whatever Bristol had to pay via that employment tribunal -- it was worth it.
Prettiest pumpkin 2025@wikihowtologout.bsky.social · 2mo agoPeople defending David Miller: "there is a concerted effort to equate Miller's nuanced antizionist stance with antisemitism but..." Miller: "ITS THE JOOOOS
Metrics for the Diabetes editorial have gone up *a lot* in just a few hours
Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2mo agoThe criticism of Trump, Kennedy, and Bhattacharya that was so subversive that the ADA had to eject the Editor-in-Chief of their flagship journal from their annual meeting for sharing it? Prior today it had fewer than 1000 views. Do your thing.
Better headline: "Labour government completely failing to regulate billionaire political cash; death wish suspected" www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
Reform UK raising millions more than other parties, donation figures show
Farage’s party brings in £9m largely from crypto billionaires in three months, more than twice that of Labour and Tories
theguardian.com
This is great -- clear evidence that a better system is possible. Proposal: pay for it (in part?) via a small submission fee from authors. This would discourage authors from spamming journals with completely out-of-scope manuscripts. Submission numbers are out of control. It's not inevitable.
Daniel Gorelick@danielgorelick.bsky.social · 2mo agoPaying peer reviewers works. Expanded Fast & Fair experiment @biologyopen.bsky.social: • 5.5 vs 37.7 working days to decision with reviews • ~3 vs ~9 reviewer invitations per manuscript • no reduction in editor-assessed review quality • similar acceptance rates www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Roberts is likely terrified that the Dems will expand the court and end his influence (if they regain power). I figure they probably won't -- they lack the courage -- but I do enjoy imagining that he's terrified.
Ari Berman@ariberman.bsky.social · 2mo agoThis is so outrageous. Roberts Court said in Callais finding of intentional discrimination could invalidate gerrymandered maps. Lower court found Alabama intentionally discriminated against Black voters. SCOTUS still allowed map eliminating majority Black district to go through
Wonderfully meta. Anti-immigration economist and ideologue George Borjas wrote a paper claiming immigration policy researchers (vast majority of whom, unlike him, are broadly positive about immigration) allowed their results to be driven by "ideology". Turns out it was a coding "error"...
Michael Clemens@mclem.org · 2mo agoRemember that recent paper claiming to show that "ideological bias" determined the results obtained by immigration policy research teams? A careful, open-code reanalysis by @kauspurg.bsky.social & Josef Brüderl finds that the result arises from a coding error. —> doi.org/10.31222/osf...
