Thora Bjornsdottir
@thorabjorns.bsky.social
psychology lecturer at Stirling Uni person perception, social groups, inequality dogs, sci fi, punk 🏳️🌈🇮🇸 https://rthorabjornsdottir.wordpress.com/
Just Work. An all new comic about the gig economy, platform capitalism, delivery riders, and their battle for worker rights. You can read a responsive phone/desktop/tablet friendly online version of it - for FREE - here: tomhumberstone.com/just-work
Just Work | Tom Humberstone
Just Work
tomhumberstone.com
1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.
The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science
As a labor-augmenting technology, large language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate scientific activity across the research pipeline. But even if LLMs perform on par with human experts at ...
arxiv.org
A six-month investigation by Byline Times reveals that with the support of Palantir's Peter Thiel, Reform's policy chief James Orr has used the University of Cambridge as a student recruitment ground for a hard-right, theocratic political project aimed at bolstering talent in Farage’s party
Palantir Co-Founder Peter Thiel and Reform UK's Cambridge University Recruitment Pipeline Project Revealed
The world-renowned academic institution has nothing to say in response to a six-month investigation by Byline Times raising serious concerns about the safeguarding of students and foreign influence at...
bylinetimes.com
Great analogy for the impacts of social and wealth inequality in this piece. We allow people to fall off cliffs and pay exorbitant amounts of money to patch them up instead of investing in a fence to stop them falling off 👏
East Anglia Bylines@eastangliabylines.co.uk · 4w agoBritain is richer than ever. So why are people anxious, unhealthy and divided? Two leading thinkers argue the real problem isn't growth – it's inequality. And other countries show there's a better way, writes Stephen McNair
A depressingly long list of universities who are implementing cuts and redundancies, as well as the petitions and actions against them (via @onslies.bsky.social) qmucu.org/qmul-transfo.... This is a national emergency that should be responded to with national policy.
UK HE shrinking
a live page of all the redundancies and restructures happening across UK Higher Education. Page is updated regularly.
qmucu.org
Israel deliberately targeting Gaza children to commit genocide, UN inquiry finds
Israel deliberately targeting Gaza children to commit genocide, UN inquiry finds
Report says by aiming at children Israel is undermining capacity of Palestinian people to exist Israel continues to commit genocide by deliberately targeting Palestinian children in Gaza, an independent UN inquiry has found. The report by the UN independent international commission of inquiry examined violations against Palestinian children since the start of the war in Gaza, and said about 30% of those killed by Israeli forces have been children. Continue reading...
theguardian.com
'it’s never been about jobs. The scapegoating of immigrants and African Americans for “taking” what belongs to whites is but the moral and political justification for everyday white buy-in to the state-sanctioned violence against these groups. The policing is the payout'
Gautham Rao (pronounced: Knicks in 5)@gauthamrao.bsky.social · last mo.Thank you @saigrundy.bsky.social for this thoughtful engagement with my book, White Power: Policing American Slavery "a universal right to anti-Black violence and a state-backed justification...obligations as citizens to protect the white man’s property" www.theguardian.com/inequality/n...
I finally figured out why AI causes such a visceral reaction in thinking humans: I am writing my book chapter on PLAY, and AI is the opposite of play. We play for the joy of the process, not for the outcome. Yes it is nice to win, to have the art/ poem, but the point of life is to play.
Look at you. Worrying about the gay agenda. Meanwhile this entire time your car has had a trans mission.
Struggling to know what to read or do following the announcement of the UK's anti-trans segregation regime? I've created a basic set of information, resources, and actions - in the form of an auto-reply sent to every single person who emails me at work.
Supreme Court auto-reply: 2026 anti-segregation edition
What if every person who emailed you faced the reality of the UK’s segregation regime? Last year I created an internal auto-reply for my work email, in the wake of the 2025 Supreme Court judg…
ruthpearce.net
new open-access paper w/ @jpwilson.bsky.social & his student out in Journal of Nonverbal Behavior. We provide evidence that positive effects of medical masks on trust/responsibility judgments are due to BOTH perceptual (occulsion) & social factors (masks' social meaning) doi.org/10.1007/s109...
The Effect of Medical Face Masks on First Impressions Across Race and Time: Testing Social and Perceptual Explanations - Journal of Nonverbal Behavior
A growing body of research shows medical face masks to affect face perception and recognition. Although face masks negatively impact recognition of face identities and emotion expressions, they largely positively affect trait impressions. Here, focusing on impressions of trustworthiness and responsibility, we bridge between various lines of inquiry in the extant literature. First, among American perceivers, we test whether the effect of masks varies by target faces’ race, crucially including targets from three racial groups: Asian, Black, and White. Next, we examine the extent to which effects can be explained by the presence of masks versus the absence of lower facial information. Finally, we examine the role of temporal context, testing masks’ effect on trustworthiness and responsibility judgments in early 2021 and mid 2023. Altogether, we find face masks to have a positive effect on trustworthiness and responsibility judgments. Lack of lower facial information explained some, but not all, of the effect of masking, indicating that masks provide a specific social signal that affects trait judgments beyond the effect of occlusion. Finally, we found the positive effect of masking on trait judgments to persist in 2023 but decrease in magnitude compared to 2021, indicating that the social meaning of masks has waned over time. Masking effects were moreover stronger for White than Black (2021, 2023) and Asian targets (2023) and among perceivers with more positive attitudes toward masking (especially in 2023). Altogether, we provide evidence that both bottom-up perceptual and top-down social factors influence social perceptions of masked faces.
doi.org
Pope Leo quoting Tolkien in his encyclical on AI seems like a pointed reference for the tech oligarchs who have appropriated LOTR for their own ends.
Bruno Dias@brunodias.dev · 2mo agoOne of the many sources cited in the new papal encyclical is... Gandalf
There's no "study," this is based on a crank manifesto with only four footnotes written by a bunch of health grifters. Why is the Guardian covering this like it has any academic credibility?
The Guardian@theguardian.com · 3mo agoAt least 80% responsibility for ill health in old age down to individual, says study
"It is almost as if the uncritical and naive adoption of AI has made us more credulous and sapped our critical thinking at the precise moment we should be on guard against its evolving harms." www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult... open acces link: archive.ph/qt59c 6/🧵
AI Is Inventing Academic Papers That Don't Exist -- And They're Being Cited in Real Journals
Academic articles from authors using large language model are creating an ecosystem of fake research that threatens human knowledge itself.
rollingstone.com
"Clearly, we’re not missing the right *regulations.* We’re missing the right *motivations.*" @experimentalhistory.skystack.xyz
Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them!
OR: crock pots and lightning bolts
open.substack.com
Why I object to and reject generative AI simplysociology.wordpress.com/2026/05/08/w...
Why I object to and reject generative AI
Why I object to and reject generative AI*: the enshittification of learning, educating, thinking, writing and researching, and the loss of cognitive skills and development in those who use these te…
simplysociology.wordpress.com
In a world that often feels deeply polarized, it is rare to find a topic where almost everyone agrees. The treatment of farm animals is one of them. Surveys across many countries show that a strong majority of people, regardless of their diet, oppose common practices in animal agriculture.
Feminists began raising the alarm about the manosphere decades ago – and we were ignored | Laurie Penny
Feminists began raising the alarm about the manosphere decades ago – and we were ignored | Laurie Penny
We were told we couldn’t take a joke, and that social media isn’t real life. Now the misogyny of early chatrooms and Gamergate has made its way to the White House, says journalist and feminist activist Laurie Penny
theguardian.com
Post Doc at Uni Tübingen! 100% position for 3 (+3) years; they're looking for somebody to analyze large-scale longitudinal datasets in education research. Expertise in machine learning is an advantage, commitment to research transparency desirable 😌 proficiency in German beneficial but not required
Postdoctoral Research Fellow (100%, E 13 TV-L)
uni-tuebingen.de
"On the one hand, you have an imaginative property beloved by millions, and on the other, there are actually existing trans people." 🎁 defector.com/its-time-to-...
It’s Time To Grow Up | Defector
HBO’s new Harry Potter TV series is premiering this Christmas Day. Under current plans, it will last at least a decade. The trailer looks like the original films were run through an AI generator, but ...
defector.com
New paper, out this week in PLOS One, suggests that most close relationship self-report measures are primarily capturing relationship quality 🧵 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
Predicting relationship quality with itself? A single general factor captures most of the variance across 34 common relationship measures
In relationship science, researchers have generated a wide array of constructs and corresponding self-report measures to characterize, explain, and predict relationship quality – the foremost studied ...
journals.plos.org
What share of income goes to the richest 1% in your country? How about the richest 10% or 0.1%? How has that changed over time? The World Inequality Database (WID) is the leading source for answering questions about incomes and wealth at the very top of the distribution.
The death penalty but it only applies to one ethnic group in the seperate courts you’ve set up to try them in www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/w...
"the charisma of AI organised the entire political conversation around the technology...[and] occluded something deeper: the human decisions that led to the killing of between 175 and 180 people... Someone decided to compress the kill chain. Someone decided that deliberation was latency."
AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying
LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years, that gave us this atrocity
theguardian.com
Oh really? Is that because pandering to the far-right and assuming they will act rationally, reciprocally, & in good faith has always worked in the past, & because there's good evidence that Reform can be trusted? I totally trust this former Tory advisor report published by a right-wing think tank.
Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 5mo ago'Universities must build bridges with populist parties and take steps to restore their legitimacy among the general public or face being recast as “convenient enemies” by the next Westminster government, according to a new report.' 1/2
