Detail of Kincade like oval view of church, cemetery, with father, child, and dog walking by.
Colophon showing the manuscript was written by Alberto Sangorski for Riviere and sons.
It's a poem by George Herbert btw, called "Sunday"...
I'm making one last push to let people know about this online talk -- sponsored by the British Library in conjunction with their current exhibition on fairy tales. The live stream starts at 7:30 tonight, but if you buy a ticket *before* the event you can watch it any time over the next 7 days.
The cyberattack on The British Library in October 2023 knocked out ebooks and almost ever other computer thing there for years.
Ebooks just came back. They were knocked out everywhere using the BL’s license (legal deposit libraries I think? More libraries?)
Distributed physical copies matter.
Anyone with elderly parents certainly did! Solidarity.
Until they ban chromebooks, gmail addresses, online homework platforms and AI crawling all over everything my child does without permissions, this is window-dressing.
For everyone who told me to calm down 'embrace & accept' AI innovation: Behold! The end game. If you think they won't try to roll this out in schools, think again.
📚✨ New publication alert!
We’re delighted to share the latest work by our project member Ana Belén Martínez García:
“Fragments of Care: Hassan Akkad’s Refugee Testimony in a Time of Crisis.”
More info here: www.routledge.com/Writing-COVI...
the penne opticon
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.
Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).
Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.
Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
this is awful for many reasons, but IHE's framing suggests a frictionless market for academic labor where tenured faculty who dislike the terms of their job can leave for "bluer pastures" anytime. This recodes a functionally collapsed market for humanistic expertise in terms of free market fantasy
'Ties up with Gap'. Wut.
absolute queen right here (alt text: a census form filled out by Alice Knox, head of her own household, 48 years and 10 months old, female, marital status: single, with the parenthetic addendum "Thank God")
News | Five museums in England shortlisted for Art Fund’s #MuseumOfTheYear 🏆
The winner will be announced on 25 June – congratulations to the shortlisted museums:
• Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery
• The Box, Plymouth
• The Fitzwilliam Museum
• The National Gallery
• V&A East Storehouse
Margot Martindale
Olympia Dukakis
Gary Oldman
Patrick Vaill
Marisha Wallace
Today in “weird things I never thought I’d be grateful for”: the grocery store in walking distance has no membership or loyalty cards. The listed price is the price. The sale price is for everyone, not just members. No typing in your phone number. No points. No deadnames. Just groceries.
'a YouGov survey of 1,004 primary and secondary school teachers in the UK found nearly three-quarters (74%) said there was too much emphasis on passing exams; while 73% said there was not enough focus on preparing pupils for employment or developing “soft skills”.' 1/2
The CFP for Dickens Day 2026 is live! We warmly invite proposals linked to this year’s theme of “Dickens and family” (both in his life and work). The deadline is 15 June, and the day itsef will be on Saturday 10 October at Senate House, London. All are welcome!
www.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...
You'd only know it if you consulted the public record, so here it is: lordslibrary.parliament.uk/office-for-s...
Murray and Pierre return to the lab after an evening out to find a blue glow emanating from the aparatus
On this day, 20th April 1902 Marie Skłodowska Curie and husband Pierre successfully isolated one tenth of a gram of Radium, the first sample of a radioactive element, from 8 tons of pitchblende.
Artist: Frank Hampson
‘Madam Curie’ (1970)
'Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said "freedom of speech is the foundation of every university's success" but there had been too many cases contributing to "an unacceptable culture of fear and stifling the pursuit of knowledge".
Presumably referring to impact of current mass HE redundancies.
> The controversy associated with the statement “Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer” reveals more about modern attitudes towards women [than her] achievements. [Her 1843 algorithm] was so advanced, that it was still utilised in record-breaking computation of Bernoulli numbers in 2008.
it’s time to start thinking differently about citation metrics and promotion requirements, too.
but the neoliberal university isn’t ready for that conversation.
Stained glass of St Brendan arriving by boat to see the ‘unhappy Judas’ (who is consumed by fire)
‘A Meeting’ (1918) - a dancing mermaid and merman
Richard Mulcahy in IFS uniform in a blue and white stained glass surround - made for his family in 1925
The ‘unhappy Judas’ in stained glass about to make a grisly end thanks to an angel suspending a noose
Some stunning Harry Clarkes on display at the NMI
👍🚩
A graphic on a dark blue background with the shape of the State of West Virginia in lighter blue at the lower right, with the State Seal and a stylized ballot box. An “I Voted” sticker image is at the middle right. The text says “West Virginia voters abroad. Primary election May 12th. Request and return your ballot now! Go to Vote from Abroad dot org to find out how! Deadlines are coming, don’t delay!” The VFA logo is at the bottom.
West Virginia overseas voters! You have a primary election on May 12 to choose the Democrats to run in the General Election on Nov 3.
For details: votefromabroad.org/states/WV
Register by April 21.
Already registered? Request your ballot by May 6.
Return your ballot by email by May 12, 7:30pm.
‘Your brain isn’t fully formed until you’re 25’: A neuroscientist demolishes the greatest mind myth
www.sciencefocus.com...
Dr Dean Burnett tackles a stubborn, and increasingly harmful, brain myth. For Science Focus Magazine.
#Brains #Teens #Development #Autonomy
'She also documented how few women were in federally sponsored clinical trials for AIDS drugs...
That was significant, she told The San Francisco Chronicle, because “the clinical trials are the only way you can get treatment.”' Long helped save so many lives.
Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.
I can‘t believe that we‘re willingly handing over crucial parts of our workforce, data management and even education to a criminal version of Clippy
An exit stanchion in a building reads “Dramatic Exit.”
This rehearsal studio understands its customers.