Amazed that anyone who has books that World of Books would want would know so little about them not to see how truly derisory their buying prices are.

Rising postage costs are quietly undermining any idea of a global market. To send a standard price hardback book from the US to the UK now effectively doubles the cost of the order.

Haven't read this yet but a topic we _so_ need to attend to: doi.org/10.1177/1043...

Finally read an urban legends book (Baby Train by Van Brunvand.) Do people still hear these? I don't think I have ever heard _any_ of them told in earnest. Do individual urban legends die out through "innoculation?" Could this style of tale telling being dying out generally for the same reason?

Sadly what AI is not doing is helping social media posters check posts. Have just seen an argument that Denmark is happier than UK because it has less raw count billionaires. (2 stats fails!) The plot of "per million population" across many more countries via Google AI is virtually flat however.

Do I have to attend a patronising low information content webinar? Can't you just write down the relevant information?

Teaching memes:

If you do a general literature review (rather than one specifically for #abm) it is striking how much empirical research is about different kinds of "dots" (people en masse, famous people as individuals, places, institutions/organisations, objects.) Should the job of #abm be to _join_ these dots?

Beward: Outcome that makes you worry about the robustness of an accreditation process. A gold TEF award for a university with teaching in perpetual chaos. The lecturing of some academics with very high level HEA Fellowships.

No I'm not impressed that you put my email address in your scam email. After all, if you didn't have it, I wouldn't be hearing from you. Try not to assume that everyone is as daft as you are.

Research project: Does social media only reproduce bad argument styles known historically or has it allowed the development of new kinds of bad argument?

Is there a risk of adverse selection in HE? Staff who are most comfortable with the "flexibility" required to hit arbitrary retention (for example) targets will be those least wedded to the idea of evidence based argument. 2+2 still doesn't equal 5 no matter how many extra UGs that would bring.

More red flag terms for dubious social science: "Under-theorised". What is the correct amount of theory and why?

Too much HE erases what it is reasonable to expect students to manage. So having explained referencing and given a link to our uni format do we have to let them off plagiarism/Poor Academic Practice because they have decided unilaterally to render quoted text in italic without any quotation marks?

All too common exchange. Reviewer: What is the point of an LLM here? Author: Look, I found another new thing to do with an LLM.

I am proud to live in a country where every election can be a victory for every party. BTW I have a bridge for sale.

So this morning what price all that self serving socials tosh about "Kemi is looking more and more like the new Churchill/Thatcher/Marilyn Monroe?" According to the voters she isn't even the new Ed Davey or Zack Polanski let alone Nigel Farage.

I am consistently surprised at how little time/emphasis academics want to put on their results. I suppose we cannot blame weaker students for writing a whole essay critique of an article without ever making clear what it purported to show.

Publications are like buses: Nothing for ages and then two come along at virtually the same time. doi.org/10.1371/jour...

An empirical network study of the antimalarial supply chain in Ghana

A survey of a sample of Ghanaian pharmacies was undertaken to trace the antimalarial drug supply chain. We sampled antimalarial drug outlets in 6 districts across Ghana and traced their immediate supp...

doi.org

I don't think it is terribly feasible but I would love to spot interview students who query their marks. On what basis (if any) do they do this? Has it worked previously? Are the aware of the procedural fairness built into marking processes?

Is there research on the equity implications of shrinking sectors? If some universities are maintaining quality and most of them aren't will the smaller sector "follow the quality" or just collapse in toto? What assumptions need to hold about training and hiring if only good actors are to persist?

An attempt to illustrate the empirical role of #abm in interdisciplinarity. Book is free to read: www.sidestone.com/books/resour...

Resources in Premodern Societies @ Sidestone Press

This volume brings together innovative research to explore the profound impact of resources on the development of early societies. Divided into three major themes – lifeworlds in resource landscapes, ...

sidestone.com

One gets a powerful sense, reading student essays in bulk, that few have realised that writing is substantially about the "other" not the "self": Not what I want to tell but what you may wish or need to hear. One can't help seeing echoes of social media (and lack of quality print reading) in this.

Possible tell for HE dumbing down. Teaching staff have to learn schemas, typologies and so on (of unclear value) so that they can mark assignments rather than using domain knowledge of, say, research methods or inequality. Takes longer too if there was never any practical incentive to learn these.

Just in the last three weeks I have heard of three very different UK charities on the verge of shutting up shop. Does someone in the media need to notice this as a possible wider phenomenon? Or is it just a glitch in my information flow?

#abm coding takes such care. You only have to forget that a variable can have a greater value than 1 and "zeroing" it (rather than decrementing it) destroys conservation of what it represents (leading to odd error messages "miles away" from the actual mistake.)

It is clear that many students don't proof read: Author names spelled differently in adjacent sentences, sentences one after another that say virtually the same thing, contradiction. Does this happen because they don't start writing in time or have they never been shown the trick and its benefits?

It is noticeable how many people forget that Donald Trump is a delusional poltroon when what he says becomes a stick to beat Keir Starmer with. Personally if I found I shared a view with DT I would re-examine it _very_ carefully.

How much do literature reviews sin by omission? Doing a LR on a not wildly abstruse topic but a significant fraction of what I am finding is a) non English, b) quite difficult to access or c) in some way "broken" (magazine is supposedly available online but all content is not there or not indexed.)

I don't intend to catch students out but it is worrying how often it is very obvious that students haven't looked at the assignment guidance or attended the teaching.