It's remarkable how most of the world's English-speaking democracies seemed to have gotten together and decided "let's destroy the main thing that led us to unprecedented prosperity: our systems of higher education."
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...
Use of the word "ethical" - e.g. "the ethical use of genAI" - does not magically make the use of genAI ethical. See also: adding the word "strategic" to every sentence does not magically turn your document into a strategy. #CommsLife
This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions.
It does not.
It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed.
🧵 1/
Bridget Phillipson on Kuenssberg is saying she wants student finance to be fairer, which is odd given Labour has just made it much less fair. She also says she wants to improve access for people from poor backgrounds, which sits badly with bankrupting the universities those students typically go to.
This is causing despair in academe. (1) We were forced to close during Covid. We had no choice! (2) We're not service providers like a restaurant, we are institutions of state. (3) We did everything we could. (4) This will cripple current students' education.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Genuinely thanks for providing the transcripts, which are really helpful. I was amused though to read of our Australian colleagues as the “anti-EU” contingent!
When people talk about the idea that some universities must go under, there’s a certain tendency to behave as if these smaller local campuses are negligible- regrettable casualties perhaps but not ‘real’ universities. This report does a great job of illustrating why that’s wrong.
Oh Emily, I’m so sorry. Sending you much love.
(And you know, your final comment doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.)
In which we learn what happens when you combine the effectiveness of online learning with the efficiency of UK government, the academic rigour of management consultancy, and the fundamental honesty of purpose of ChatGPT.
Ha, snap! There was a year when Pink News illustrated several random articles to do with gay Jews with my handmade rainbow yarmulke. Then the next Pride I guess they got a pic of the back of someone else’s head.
Despite frequent remonstrations from digital archivists, Persephone never accepted that she could not photocopy a whole book in one go.
In my case, this painstaking labor in the process through which the science gets done. Science isn't measuring stuff in a lab. It's thinking deeply, extracting the heart of idea from the soup of thoughts running through my mind, molding it, and finding a way to communicate that idea to others.
And to me, the question here isn't how Jews feel about this, but how do you feel about it? As a British person, how does it make you feel that one of the smallest minorities in your country needs armed guards to celebrate its holidays? Are you aware of this? Are you comfortable with it?
The first blessing on the first night of Hannukah is for the mitzvah of candle lighting; the second is for God's miracles; but the third is שהחיינו - "blessed be God for saving our lives, and for keeping us, and for letting us come to this time." 2,000 years of that, motherfuckers.
all academic applications should have consolation prizes.
doesn’t have to be much, like a mug that says “i applied for leverhulme 2020”
or a t-shirt “UKRI reject 2023”
🔴 NEW: The University of Edinburgh has quietly paid more than £750,000 to a controversial consulting firm amid job cuts - staff say bosses ignored "repeated" questions about its role.
Read more about 'Nousferatu' 👉 www.theferret.scot/p...
A human-rights researcher on why she pushed back when China bullied her university
Kudos @lauratmurphy.bsky.social
An important lesson for our times for all
economist.com/by-invitatio...
For those whose two pockets are a little roomier
Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪
📢PhD available in our group focusing on "Synthesis & optimisation of stimuli responsive MOFs in flow" Based in Sch Chemistry & iPRD @UniLeeds. Start date: 1st Oct 2026. ⏰️App deadline 30th Jan. Please repost to spread the word 🙏 #chemsky #phdjobs Come join us! www.linkedin.com/posts/andrea...
I’d love to see UUK, UCU, UCEA, the Russell group, the funding councils, research charities, hell pretty much every university stakeholder to stand together and say to the Govt in one voice - Stop fucking around with our universities.
You are destroying us, and you will miss us when we’re gone.
To be clear, this is a tariff on our own exports.
Yes, it will raise money - tariffs do. The question is whether it will also cut exports from one of our core economic strengths- HE.
As @glenpeters.bsky.social says, we're way off target for any 1.5°C scenario.
To see how far off, each of the red/green bars represents the decrease in CO₂ emissions during COVID. Even if we achieved that from now until the end of 2030, we would still miss our 1.5°C target by a significant margin.
Wishing you all a happy International Day of LGBTQIA+ People in STEM #LGBTQSTEMDAY #LGBTSTEMDAY 🏳️🌈⚛️🔭 Visibility is very important for our colleagues who cannot be out :D ... Very happy to join the @cern.bsky.social celebration this afternoon.
prideinstem.org/lgbtstemday/
I've got a post-doctoral research position available at Curtin University (Western Australia) starting 2026.
The project involves computational prediction of crystal structures, their growth, and their properties for organic minerals on Titan (moon of Saturn).
staff.curtin.edu.au/job-vacancie...
You might imagine that an event celebrating 75 years of the Turing Test would be all "Wasn't he prescient, and look, now we really do have machines that think!" Mercifully, this event yesterday was close to the opposite. /1
royalsociety.org/science-even...
Screenshot. King's College London page. Examples of effective practice The following scenarios follow the above guidelines and offer insights into ways that academic staff can use AI transparently and in an assistive capacity, always ensuring human oversight and judgment remain central. Scenario A – Scaling feedback while maintaining quality Lecturer A is responsible for marking over 100 essays within a two-week window. Conscious of the limitations this workload places on the depth of individual feedback, they adopt a hybrid approach using their university’s approved or supported LLM tool, Copilot. Without ever uploading student work directly, Lecturer A composes an anonymised summary for each student, noting which marking criteria were met and the approximate percentage achieved for each. They input this summary alongside the official rubric into Copilot, prompting it to generate supportive, criterion-referenced feedback. This feedback is then carefully reviewed, adapted, and personalised before being uploaded to the marking platform. Students are made aware of this process in advance and shown a demonstration, reinforcing transparency and trust.
Simply astonishing. Maybe Lecturer A should not have to mark over 100 essays in a two-week window in the first place? Invest in qualified staff and reduce impossible workloads FFS www.kcl.ac.uk/about/strate...
How competition propels scientific risk-taking Kevin Gross∗ Department of Statistics North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC USA Carl T. Bergstrom† Department of Biology University of Washington Seattle, WA USA (Dated: September 9, 2025) In science as elsewhere, attention is a limited resource and scientists compete with one another to produce the most exciting, novel and impactful results. We develop a game-theoretic model to explore how such competition influences the degree of risk that scientists are willing to embrace in their research endeavors. We find that competition for scarce resources—for example, publications in elite journals, prestigious prizes, and faculty jobs—motivates scientific risk-taking and may be important in counterbalancing other incentives that favor cautious, incremental science. Even small amounts of competition induce substantial risk-taking. Moreover, we find that in an “opt-in” contest, increasing the stakes induces increased participation—which crowds the contest and further impels entrants to pursue higher-risk, higher-return investigations. The model also illuminates a source of tension in academic training and collaboration. Researchers at different career stages differ in their need to amass accomplishments that distinguish them from their peers, and therefore may not agree on what degree of risk to accept.
1. What does a Cold War-era game theory problem known as the silent duel have to do with high-risk research strategies, publication in Cell/Nature/Science glamor journals, and the academic job market?
Kevin Gross and I tackle these questions in our latest arXiv preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2509.06718
