Calling all teachers, schools, nurseries and youth groups! Sign up now to take part in Road Safety Week this November. We'll give you all the tools you need to get involved and teach children of all ages more about staying safe on our roads. 👉 www.brake.org.uk/road-safety-week

I'd go further: if we native English speakers expect English to be the lingua franca (ha!) of most of the world, everyone who uses it gets to influence how it evolves. Phrases that aren't standard English, like "quite some" and "allows to", are then no longer really "wrong" at all.

Rae Radford@raeradford.bsky.social · last mo.

Kudos #BookSky

I’ll be happy to see a sponsorship scheme in place. I’m not happy to see a Home Secretary who just crowed about denying Afghans and others the chance to study here using one to cling to her position. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Mahmood announces new refugee sponsorship route into UK

The home secretary says "capped safe and legal" routes would help to restore confidence in the asylum system.

bbc.co.uk

At Nesta, our innovation work is underpinned by research. As well as bringing innovation to our mission areas, we also bring it to our methods. We've been experimenting with AI in qual analysis. Our conclusion so far, occasionally useful but mainly very faillible. www.nesta.org.uk/blog/six-rea...

Six reasons why human-led qualitative research is safe from AI… for now

While NotebookLM can support researchers with qualitative data analysis, the value of the tool lies in speed and exploratory sense-checking, not in producing rigorous findings from scratch

nesta.org.uk

Good illustration of the difference between taking offence and having a sense of humour. And how one is corporate and legalistic, while the other is just human. Or chimp.

Jyoti Mishra@jyotimishra.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Well, that was a fucking ride.

The good thing is the actual sway of public opinion in the UK is massively, *massively and overwhelmingly*, against the racist hooligans. They're a small minority here. The bad news is that various facts about our political system and media ecosystem may mean that fact doesn't matter.

Trinket@trinketbirdy.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Love this city. The racists are all stuck in a shit pub rn being yelled at by *checks notes* Fatboy slim?

Immigrants do not have to contribute exceptionally to deserve safety Immigrants do not have to permanently grovel to their new country to justify their existence Immigrants are allowed to be just as mediocre, grumpy or homesick as anyone else

@clairehanna.bsky.social : "Last week, in a very high profile case, the murder of Natalie McNally, the judge.. talked about a frenzied knife attack, he talked about wounds so bad the cause of death was unable to to be determined. There were no riots over the perpetrator of that brutal crime"

Hastings museum had an LGBT history exhibit and there was a bit on a trans guy and a cis woman who married in 1954 that I found moving

A Tory peer has just told Today that "We need to get back to a form of policing that is more colour-blind". When was that, precisely? The idea that we *used* to live in a colour-blind society, until minorities got special privileges, goes against *everything* we know of the history of policing.

Interesting that the idea of another EU referendum is regularly discussed on broascast media as something that would cause division and thus a bad idea. But plans to deport literally millions of people are discussed as administrative questions.

Recently, for *obvious reasons*, I've been thinking about what it means when anxiety and sadness are caused not by individual predispositions, but by the state of the world itself. This led me to early 19th-c. France and the notion of "mal du siècle" (sickness of the century) aeon.co/essays/young...

Makes obvs sense that oppression, power, & hierarchy can make it hard to speak up. But maybe less obvs is how silencing happens when everyone seems bound by being all polite & agreeable- almost like an oppressive 'niceness'.

When Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social shared his article about why universities were in trouble and why they need investment, a Labour MP jumped in to say they weren’t a priority for her. She may be surprised at how many people are employed in universities and how important they are to the economy.

Who exactly do they think would switch their vote to Labour if only Wes Streeting were PM? Wes Streeting. I have never understood politics less.

A good speech today by Starmer would have started by either sacking Mahmood or saying something that triggered her resignation.

claremontcomms.com/2026/03/is-i...

Is It Safe? Why Different Perspectives on Risk Matter for a Safer System - Claremont

Collaborator and friend of Claremont Dr Simon Christmas asks whether we need to think more broadly when we’re evaluating what we really mean by “safe”… Is it safe? Is it risky? Ask yourself those ques...

claremontcomms.com

A persistent feature of Home Office messaging under Keir Starmer + Shabana Mahmood - to strongly prefer to reinforce public hunches over the principle of asylum itself. Eg: students who UK finds have valid asylum claim can't be "genuinely fleeing persecution" [not what the UK has signed up to]

I grew up in this community and I have a few thoughts I want to share. A short thread. www.jewishnews.co.uk/breaking-hat...

Hatzola ambulances set alight in Golders Green arson attack

CCTV footage circulating on social media shows three men approaching the vehicles and then fleeing the scene as flames appear

jewishnews.co.uk

"My name may be forgotten when it comes, but the time will arrive when great outbreaks of cholera will be things of the past. And it is the knowledge of the way in which the disease is propagated which will cause them to disappear" Happy birthday to John Snow! His name & his work is not forgotten.

My humble submission to the new Bank of England with concepts for the new bank notes to please both sides.

We’ve reached the point in history where Telegraph and Mail headlines are praying in aid Tony Blair’s views on American wars. Where’s Graham Chapman’s army officer when you need him? m.youtube.com/watch?v=3ANu...

Monty Python - silly

YouTube video by McNickler

m.youtube.com

When someone says „Scientists do not want you to know“ you can dismiss everything from there on. Scientists want you to know. They are desperate that you know. They can’t shut up about what they found out and want you to know.

Husband is on jury service. Bloody immigrants, coming over here and trying our criminals.

Amen

Peter Stefanovic@peterstefanovic.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Labour MP Clive Lewis doesn’t hold back on the Gorton and Denton result in this interview with ITV

I have written a piece articulating what I believe is a reasonably new position on AI, or at least one extremely underrepresented in the discourse, and I hope people will read it. The full piece is behind the New Scientist paywall, but I will share some snippets www.newscientist.com/article/2516...

Why I have changed my mind about AI and you should too

Both boosters and sceptics have strongly held opinions on AI tools like ChatGPT, but after an experiment in vibe coding, I have realised that both camps are wrong, says Jacob Aron

newscientist.com

Should biology put complexity first? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... - excellent essay by @philipcball.bsky.social. I would add epistasis to polygenicity and pleiotropy as a ubiquitous and fundamental phenomenon, not some optional complication that we can try to account for afterwards

Should biology put complexity first?

The dictum “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler” poses a problem for biology. How simply can it be told without doing dama…

sciencedirect.com

To be clear, Bart is relating points of view, not necessarily his own. But goodness, the fact that some in academia think this. It's a prima facie case for compulsory humanities courses, to learn what writing is for and how it works. (And thinking, for that matter.)

Bart Penders@penders.bsky.social · 5mo ago

More uniformity, some argue, creates better comparability. Academic writing should offer no room for personal styles, and is not supposed to read well; it should only communicate facts and discoveries swiftly and efficiently. 7/

I'm SO tired of people looking for "the neuroscience of X" (meaning uninformative neuroimaging pictures) when *the psychology of X* is right there, doing a perfectly good job...

Andrew D Wilson@adw.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Brain scans do not help here