"Listen, forget it," said Ford, "forget all of it. Nothing matters. Look, it's a beautiful day, enjoy. it. The sun, the green of the hills, the river down in the valley, the burning trees."

At this point the question I need to ask myself is why am I still using Chrome and google for searching?

Adam Kucharski@adamjkucharski.bsky.social · 18h ago

Two fictional (presumably AI) stories in recent X posts, now repeated as a Google summary. No need to tell tall tales about your achievements when the AI ecosystem will now do it for you…

At this point I am wondering whether my 25 year old desktop with Windows 98 still works. It is able to operate completely offline and the frequent lags when using Windows 11 mean the old computer may be quicker for many simple tasks.

Excellent and damning report from @healthfoundation.bsky.social on healthy life expectancy in the UK. - Healthy life expectancy falling in the UK while stable or increasing in similar countries - Healthy life expectancy lower than pension age in > 90% of areas. www.health.org.uk/reports-and-...

'Researchers from 3 French & Italian universities found that access to AI advice collapsed people’s willingness to say “I don’t know” from 44% to 3%. Accuracy dropped from 27% to 9%. Confidence, meanwhile, rose from 30% to 76%. "(...) the accuracy was only one third, but they were 2x as confident”'

"don't cite what you haven't read" remains the basic entry level academic responsibility; & if your discpline "doesn't have that as a norm" then sorry, your discipline needs reforming for this new world. Citations are structural parts of trust and knowledge building, not trinkets or optional extras

Miles Klee 🦉@milesklee.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Academics and technologists are sounding the alarm about a growing crisis in scholarship as we know it: AI-generated citations of nonexistent papers that have infested real journals. Despite being fake, the sources are widely assumed to be authentic the more they appear in published literature.

No science fiction could have prepared us for just how stupid the end of the world can be. "The environment was on the brink of collapse, and so, rather than deal with that, we burned what fuel we had left getting computers to scam each other for money."

It's the 21st Century most papers are being read electronically. Shouldn't we be using tooltips or other approaches which give the reader a choice of how and what information is presented?

Jo Wolff@jowolff.bsky.social · 3w ago

Increasingly coming to the view that the Harvard referencing system is the death of stylish academic writing. Flow as a reader is impossible when the text is littered with regular occurrences of (Boggins and Zuglinsky 2022).

30 years ago I did a course on the geography of development and poverty. Two of the things I took from it. In a fairer world the UK and rest of the world standards of living would become much closer. If the UK's politics did not change it would happen in a way that is catastrophic for the UK.

Inequality News@inequalitynews.bsky.social · 4w ago

📢 INEQUALITY GRAPHIC OF THE WEEK (No.24) 🔽 The UK is enduring its worst pay squeeze and associated cost of living crisis since the Napoleonic era… Source: Prof. Danny Dorling Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of a Failing State www.dannydorling.org/books/shatte...

An important factor to note is that countries are somewhat arbitrary boundaries and these countries are all in close proximity and affected by same weather patterns. The main thing I would take from this is nationalism is a really stupid ideology in the context of climate change

Hetan Shah@hetanshah.bsky.social · 4w ago

Sobering to see in one chart how June temperature records have been broken this year in so many European countries www.ft.com/content/5f06...

No copilot, I do not want you to "clean data".

Logan Roy's 'F*ck Off' from Succession

ALT: Logan Roy's 'F*ck Off' from Succession

static.klipy.com

The destruction of UK Higher Education is still being treated as a niche concern, not front page news like where Prince Harry will stay on holiday and what Trump said about a football match. Universities matter. The expected closure of smaller institutions will hit whole communities.

Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 4w ago

“These reductions in funding will be more sharply felt by some institutions than others....All institutions will now need to plan for how best to adjust their budgets to ensure they continue to deliver high-quality courses and resources to students.” (OfS) They've not yet actually done their sums.

A tutorial on (Non)collapsibility of Odds ratios. Principally in case-control studies but acts an introduction for cohort studies as well. academic.oup.com/ije/article/...

Collapsibility in case-control studies

Abstract. It is well-established that the odds ratio (OR) is non-collapsible and that adjustment of the OR for a risk factor can produce a change in the ma

academic.oup.com

The original article was written by an "AI researcher".

Saloni@scientificdiscovery.dev · last mo.

Oh no! Oh no!!

The debate around air-conditioning has, like so many others in population health, two extremes. a) An upstream collective population based approach that prevents the problem at source. b) Leave it to individuals to solve, with the arising inequalities and failure to address the underlying cause.

Chris Mason is quite possibly the most loathsome person in UK politics. Here he is extolling reporting unattributable gossip coming from "Senior figures" which in my view results in a " very shallow interpretation of events", which is the exact opposite of his claims. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Chris Mason: The anatomy of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer's downfall

Sir Keir, like his predecessors Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, lost the capacity to viably govern, our political editor writes.

bbc.co.uk

'Hope is not a nice-to-have, it's an essential aspect of leading.' Also applies to large organisations, including universities.

Andy Burnham and the search for hope in a hopeless Britain

The alternative is despair and the uglier politics that heralds

ft.com

5. I find it utterly brain-melting that the government is doing this while a) staying on X, and b) rushing to roll out AI in education. Just blows my mind.

90% of MPs went to University compared to 19% of the working age population. It is real time that MPs started acknowledging the role that Education has played in their career success. www.suttontrust.com/our-research...

Parliamentary Privilege 2024 - The Sutton Trust

What are the educational backgrounds of the new MPs elected to the House of Commons?

suttontrust.com

This has been on my mind a lot to day. I hear “duty of care” being used as a justification for interventions that are demonstrably more harmful than not doing them, but the pressure to DO SOMETHING is so powerful it often overrides our conscience, ethics and morals. #bigspd26

'While there are separate impacts on a persons’ educational achievement and subsequent career – the combined factors of child poverty, place of residence, ethnicity, and gender on educational achievement and future life chances are complexly intertangled.' 1/2

Opportunity is shaped by where you live, who you are, and how much money your family had

David Kernohan reads into a new report from the Sutton Trust on how ethnicity, gender, place, and poverty combine to determine opportunity

wonkhe.com

In 1908 the Lancet called for an 18+ age limit on reading in bed for U.K. children.

#statsmeme? (Prompted by a conversation with a student who's double majoring in stats-econ and said that stats courses make more sense to him)

In truth, the peace dividend has been spent on the entire welfare state, not working-age social security. Recently the most dramatic increases have been in health. Since 1980, health spending has risen by 4.5% of GDP. Funding also came from low debt interest costs that have also recently reversed.

Remember this next time some bar-room bore or right wing politician rails against reducing air pollution

Emergency hospital admissions fell after introduction of London’s T-charge and Ulez, study suggests

Imperial College scientists analysed health records before and after introduction of air pollution reduction zones

theguardian.com

“A driver overtook us with a really close pass. His passenger threw a cup of McDonald’s Coke out the window, totally unprovoked. How dare we be on his road and hold him up for two seconds. People just seem to be so angry with cyclists all the time, any excuse to cut them up and they’ll take it”

“Drivers kill five people every day. Cyclists hardly kill anybody”: Police chiefs accused of ignoring “massive imbalance” as new campaign brands road safety “a shared duty” and officers crack down on ...

A new police campaign focused on cycling and motorcycling, which claims that road safety is a “shared” responsibility, has been criticised by cyclists who say it “ignores the massive imbalance in risk...

road.cc

'The career ladder in academia is of particular interest as it is a “greedy” occupation due to its lack of substitutability among workers, long hours with increasing returns to productivity, and the importance of establishing and maintaining personal contacts.' Academia is a "greedy" occupation.

The lack of women at the top of the academic ladder is driven by unequal childcare responsibilities - LSE Impact

Motherhood, and the unequal childcare responsibilities that follow, explain a large share of the observed gender gap in academic employment. Sofie Cairo, Ria Ivandic, Anne Sophie Lassen and Valentina ...

blogs.lse.ac.uk

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Europe is ditching US tech — what does this mean for researchers?

European governments are choosing European digital tools — and some universities and researchers are doing the same.

nature.com

This is why excessive workloads, job insecurity and pressures to publish are a threat to research integrity. People make mistakes and there is little capacity for systems to ensure quality control.

Jonny Coates@jacoates.bsky.social · 2mo ago

In my masters lab this happened with QPCR primers. The lab stock ran out and I checked the sequences before ordering which is when we found out it was incorrect. This stuff happens all the time and relies so heavily on the first use being validated correctly and then correct copy pasting....