Education is a devolved policy. Scotland & England pursued different policies, and the results are clear. The best thing to do now is to get off the nationalist high horse and copy best practice in education even if (shock horror) it means emulating the English

Andy Gibson (@AndyGibsonTV) / InformingBritain.com@informingbritain.com · 2d ago

"GILRUTH: ENGLISH ROTE LEARNING A FACTOR IN LOWER SCOTS PISA SCORES" @AlistairKGrant.bsky.social for @Scotsman.com Jenny Gilruth suggested Scottish pupils trailed England in PISA scores due to Michael Gove's focus on rote learning in English schools. #TheScotsman #TomorrowsPapersToday

“The triumph of AI will be a crime against humanness. It will bottle our brains in formaldehyde. It will destroy the world as we know it. The men who promote it and profit from it are cognizant of this, and have already made arrangements to exit into another realm.“ —Arundhati Roy

Apocalypse Now and Then • EQUATOR

Artificial intelligence is capitalism’s final destination

equator.org

The act of writing is in large part to the benefit of the writer, not the reader. It is part of the process of reflecting and learning!

hatttttttte this I hate it I hate it it makes me so sad I hate it www.ft.com/content/989c...

A) probably something from Aubrey-Maturin (British, patriotic, film is somewhat known, military themed) B) 100 Years of Solitude (foreign enough to be interesting but still likely to have heard of it? And can weave a personal angle, grandad knew him, Colombian) Real answer is Moby Dick

Morgan Jones@morganj0nes.bsky.social · 2d ago

If you were a) trying your best to Prime Minister or b) going on a first date, what would you claim your favourite book was, and how far are those answers from the real answer?

I hate this so, so much. We're social creatures; we need other people and go.... weird when we don't have them. Also makes me realise how much of a outlier I, and I suspect a lot of people on here, are.

Marie Le Conte@youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 2d ago

hatttttttte this I hate it I hate it it makes me so sad I hate it www.ft.com/content/989c...

This great edition of Renewal, read in conjunction with JBM's latest, poses a challenge for some of our lazy socdem assumptions that decline in associational life is about 'at-home' beating 'going out' on cost or is the fault of austerity/neoliberalism/capitalism www.ft.com/content/989c...

Why have screens replaced socialising?

The economics of why we increasingly avoid the company of both other humans and books

ft.com

David Klemperer@dmk1793.bsky.social · 6d ago

In the Editorial, I draw on the many brilliant essays within the issue to argue for a "Pro-social social democracy" - one that treats enabling and encouraging social connection as one of its defining purposes

Published some more stuff on the ecology of Lake Titicaca, but for once focused on fish rather than grebes. Focused on the mechanisms by which invasive fish harmed native fish #ichthyology #conservation #fish doi.org/10.1111/jfb....

Competitive exclusion, not predation, likely drove the decline in native fish diversity following carnivorous fish introductions to Lake Titicaca in the mid‐20th century

Lake Titicaca is a continental centre for ichthyological biodiversity, with over 90% of native species being endemic. However, these species face significant threats from invasive species, particular...

doi.org

Contextually conspicuous species are more likely to be venomous: Habitat‐dependent aposematic colouration found throughout snakes - Duclaux - Journal of Animal Ecology - Wiley Online Library besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Contextually conspicuous species are more likely to be venomous: Habitat‐dependent aposematic colouration found throughout snakes

Conspicuous colouration signals venomous nature throughout snakes.

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

www.nature.com/articles/s41... #mountains #biogeography

Topographic variation shapes organismal responses across mountain landscapes - Nature Climate Change

The authors developed simulations to examine the role of topographic variation in mediating species response to climate change. They show that topographic variation can reduce energy expenditure by up...

nature.com

Not a historical inaccuracy but an inaccuracy nonetheless; bird song where that bird song shouldn’t be. Not every jungle has a kookaburra

Daniel@deargodwhaat.bsky.social · last wk.

Prompts a fun question: whats the most niche historical inaccuracy in a piece of work that annoys you Not like 'oh they were referring to the wrong king' , more 'they had the wrong king on a banknote in one scene'

New oviraptorosaurian dinosaur Infernogallus jamesi: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Known from several specimens, including one with most of the skull! Skull has similarities to those of parrots that feed on soft fruits, suggesting it may have done the same. 🪶🧪 (📷 @funstonpaleo.bsky.social et al.)

As yellow-eyed penguins disappear, conservationists focus on deaths in fishing nets 🧪🌎🦑🐟

As yellow-eyed penguins disappear, conservationists focus on deaths in fishing nets

OTAGO PENINSULA, Aotearoa New Zealand — Sandfly Bay was long a key nesting area for yellow-eyed penguins (Megadyptes antipodes), noisy, pink-footed birds that spend long days foraging at sea. But…

news.mongabay.com

Fisheries bycatch of birds is a massive problem for a lot of marine bird species, but often overlooked, I think because it can fall between the cracks of marine and avian research and NGOs

David Shiffman, Ph.D. 🦈@whysharksmatter.bsky.social · last wk.

As yellow-eyed penguins disappear, conservationists focus on deaths in fishing nets 🧪🌎🦑🐟

Ricardo failed to consider what if you just really hated the thing you had a comparative advantage in

Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · last wk.

Death by a thousand cuts as universities revoke international offers "en masse" of prospective students from Bangladesh, Nigeria and Pakistan to avoid losing ability to recruit international students. More job losses and course closures predicted in consequence. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

America restricting H1B's even further is a great opportunity for the UK to say to the big tech companies: build your workforce in London, we'll fast track all your visa needs! Probably won't though because Home office always wins

Scientists believe a killer whale found dead in the Western Isles is one of the oldest male orcas ever recorded following analysis of its teeth. The animal, discovered on a shoreline on South Uist in 2015, is thought to have been 65 years old or older. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Orca found on South Uist 'one of oldest males ever recorded'

A Scottish team of researchers analysed a tooth to work out its age.

bbc.com

If you’ve never done a population survey for a species you don’t appreciate A) how hard getting that number is and B ) the margins of error it can come with

Katie Martin@katie0martin.ft.com · 2w ago

were they hiding? pretending to be rocks? www.theguardian.com/environment/...

During my DPhil fieldwork in rural Peru and Bolivia I met people called: Hitler Stalin (several) Lenin (several) Yeltsin Superman Batman Ladydi Usmail Osamavinladen Vladimir Illich (several) And there’s seen as normal enough names

POLITICO Europe@politico.eu · 2w ago

Voters in the Peruvian town of Queropalca have chosen their new mayor: Hitler Mussolini Simeon Flores.

Reconstruction of the canopy of the iconic Lepidodendron aculeatum, based on new articulated fossils from the Bashkirian (Pennsylvanian) of Hagen-Vorhalle, Germany onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... #PapersinPalaeontology #FossilFriday

This... the attacks on research funding and foreign students in US universities... all opportunities for us, not being taken.

Colin Elves@colinelves.bsky.social · 2w ago

The UK could really take advantage of this if, you know, we weren’t governed by idiots.

In other words, a 10 percent contraction in one of Britain’s most successful exports. If it were steel or fish or other infinitely less profitable sectors, people would be having a meltdown.

Times Higher Education (THE)@timeshighered.bsky.social · 2w ago

Visa applications to study in the UK fell by 10.3 per cent for the key recruitment month of September, new Home Office figures show. @jgro-the.bsky.social reports #highered #visas #internationalstudents #edusky https://ow.ly/3LSs50ZVPAE

"But there is no straight line between experience and opinion. All experience is mediated via pre-existing political beliefs" Fascinating analysis here of experience vs media coverage in shaping climate salience - with wider implications for how we think about the drivers of political opinion

Making people care about the climate

As the world heats up, are we really taking notice?

break-down.org

The NSF is in almost every book about science/innovation as a positive case study. Decent chance it will be in books to come as a case study of tragedy.

Brendan Cantwell@cantb.bsky.social · 2w ago

The NSF abandoning social science and education researcher is of course a blow to these disciplines, to their universities, and a major barrier to a generation of scholars. It also surrender a large amount of influence over these disciplines to private foundations. Why does they matter?

It’s not been fully spotted but to pay for 50,000 extra prison places the Conservatives have said they would cut foreign aid to £1bn a year, or 0.03% of GDP, a 90% cut. This would not even cover UN and World Bank contributions. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

Conservative plans to slash aid budget would ‘irreparably damage’ UK’s global credibility, charities say

Party’s pledge to reduce aid budget from £9bn a year to £1bn to fund new prison places branded as ‘posturing’

theguardian.com

This would be a utterly insane change that both entirely misunderstands the issues we have with housebuilding and tne role of the EA/Natural England. Particularly given the huge additional responsibilities we've just given the latter. Hammer blow for nature and the enviroment for no good reason

James Murray@james-bg.bsky.social · 2w ago

The pitch here seems to be, ‘we’ll build the houses and infrastructure we failed to build during the 14 years we were in government, but we’ll do it in the most damaging and lowest quality way possible’. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I’m still a UCU member and locally the UCU has been great. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that HE’s largest union has been impotent as UKHE undergoes its greatest ever crisis and that same union has, on the whole, been taken over by cranks more obsessed with foreign policy than work conditions

Dr Jo Edge 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿@hagenilda.bsky.social · 2w ago

Same at UCU congress. Reason, evidence, and a lack of good faith engagement is a feature, and not a bug, of British trotskyism and various other authoritarian left sects.