In memory of Barbara Jaworski. blog.lboro.ac.uk/cmc/2026/04/...

A graph showing a precisely estimated and imprecisely estimated small effect.

This EEF spokesperson is confusing precisely estimated close-to-zero effects and imprecisely estimated close-to-zero effects. The former might be informative, the latter are not.

‘Time to review’ sidelining of education faculties in research Positive impact of channelling government funding into charity at expense of universities has yet to be proven, argues learned society

This THE article quotes an EEF spokesperson discussing a 2019 Educational Researcher article on RCTs I coauthored. But the EEF has misunderstood: “uninformative” does not mean “finds no difference”. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/time-review-sidelin...

Apology after pensioner left waiting months for repairs to her garden wall Since August Gail Simmons has been unable to access her front gate due to debris left from when a car crashed into her garden wall

Powerful photographic testimony in this local news article.

Evaluating the evaluation of psychology in UK universities | BPS Elizabeth Stokoe, Matthew Inglis, Colin Foster, Hugo Lortie-Forgues and Victoria Simms share tales from the Research Excellence Framework.

Evaluating the evaluation of psychology in UK universities…

@lizstokoe.bsky.social @mjinglis.bsky.social @colinfoster77.bsky.social @hugolf.bsky.social @profvicsimms.bsky.social share tales from the Research Excellence Framework.

www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

Screenshot of article title, authors, and Abstract Psychology and research assessment in the United Kingdom Matthew Inglis,Colin Foster,Hugues Lortie-Forgues,Victoria Simms & Elizabeth Stokoe Abstract What can we learn about psychology research in the UK, and its perceived quality, from examining manuscripts submitted to the psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience subpanel of the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF2021)? Using a latent Dirichlet allocation topic modelling approach, we identified 33 topics which collectively summarised the content of the journal articles returned to the subpanel. We found that the composition of submissions to the subpanel, in terms of these topics, explained a large proportion of the variance in the quality assessments they received from the expert peer review subpanel. Our model identified topics which were typically associated with receiving higher and lower unit-level quality assessments. In our discussion we pay particular attention to the fate of qualitative research, and discuss possible accounts for why units who returned a large amount of qualitative work tended to receive lower quality assessments than those who did not.

For anyone interested in #psychology, #research assessment and evaluation, how the expert panel rated research submitted to #REF2021 - and especially the fate of #qualitative research - our article in Cogent Psychology is #OpenAccess (link in next post).

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A scary picture of John Napier

Today I found a very sinister picture of mathematician John Napier (after whom Edinburgh Napier University is named) in this collection of proofs of Pythagoras’s Theorem: files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED0...

I haven’t read all the articles in this special issue on bases in numeration systems yet, but the ones I have read are excellent. royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/cur...

Take the strain: Tug of War World Championships Action, emotion and exhaustion in Nottingham where teams from across the globe vied for supremacy in an ancient test of strength

Superb Tug of War content here. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

I’m looking for a study where someone has looked at accuracy on Raven’s matrices (or similar) items under extreme time pressure at the item level (not time pressure at the test level). I can’t find anything, but surely this study must exist?

Claims youths threw apples at punters' heads in Newton-style act The company that runs the library says the unruly boys have now been moved on

“Isaac Newton-style act”
www.nottinghampost.com/news/notting...

Most importantly, I strongly disagree with Bill's apparent view that experimental work in philosophy should avoid testing competing theories and instead stick to "unproblematic common ground" with minimal "theoretical baggage". How could you make theoretical progress with such a view?

This wasn't a "curious methodological choice" which supported a non-ontic picture "only by accident". It was a deliberate attempt to empirically test a prediction made by non-ontic Zelcer-like accounts. I don't see where the "confounded results" or "muddled interpretations" are.

4. They didn’t, therefore participants couldn’t have only used ontic criteria when making their judgements.

3. If they had only used ontic criteria, the two purported explanations would have ended up with similar CJ parameters.

2. We asked mathematicians to make ontic explanations about two 'identical' proofs (same underlying argument, different presentation).

1. Some people (e.g., Mark Zelcer) believe that ontic explanations don’t exist in mathematics. If they're right, then when you ask mathematicians to make judgements about the ontic notion of explanation, they will actually make judgements about the epistemic notion.

I'm very puzzled by this criticism. The logic of this methodological choice was the following.

Bill goes on to suggest that "experimentalists ought to avoid designing studies around controversial ideology" and that they should stick to "unproblematic common ground".

In a section entitled "Experiment and Ideology", Bill suggests that our decision to prompt participants to think about explanation onticly (roughly, in a manner independent of how a reader might react to the purported explanation) was a "curious methodological choice" which "courted confusion".

Mathematicians’ Assessments of the Explanatory Value of Proofs - Global Philosophy The literature on mathematical explanation contains numerous examples of explanatory, and not so explanatory proofs. In this paper we report results of an empirical study aimed at investigating mathem...

Bill discusses a comparative judgement study that Pablo Mejía Ramos, @drtanyaevansnz.bsky.social, Colin Rittberg and I did a few years ago, concerning mathematicians' intuitions about mathematical explanations: doi.org/10.1007/s105...

Very niche thread, apologies!

I want to reply to a criticism made in this preprint by Bill D'Alessandro (who I think isn't on bluesky?). philpapers.org/archive/DALT...

Attacked by the Charnwood Borough Council mace at today’s graduation ceremony.

Can your fear of maths shape your child's future?

New research from @lborouniversity.bsky.social & University of Bologna finds link b/ween parents’ maths anxiety & lower achievement in children.

Read Kinga & Carlo's @theconversation.com article on our blog today:

blog.lboro.ac.uk/cmc/2025/06/...

This is a great summary of a very peculiar interaction. I wonder how Geraint Rees is coping with the new OfS duty that requires him and his UCL colleagues to “support constructive dialogue on contentious subjects”.

Fully-funded PhD studentship to work on children’s financial literacy. Deadline end of June. ufncollaboratory.ac.uk/childrens-financial-lite...

'I slept with the FA Cup': The magical inside story of Pompey's 2008 Wembley triumph On the 17th anniversary of Pompey’s FA Cup win, three figures from behind the scenes tell the magical inside story

A really lovely article about the 2008 cup-winning squad. I particularly enjoyed the Hermann Hreidarsson bloodied-pigeon “That’s how we deal with things in Iceland” anecdote. www.portsmouth.co.uk/sport/footba...

I wrote a blogpost about how the REF may have influenced how British academics write papers.

Evidence of @driro.bsky.social’s photography skills on show at Megan Foulkes’s PhD viva celebrations.

That’s more than Jimmy Dickinson.