We’re hiring a two-year DH postdoc for our HAVI project, to work on a new type of knowledge graph architecture for the humanities (and beyond). Deadline soon (18 Jan)! www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

This is such an important point.

But nothing beats Federweisser und Zwiebelkuchen!

Brexit has deepened the British economy’s flaws and dulled its strengths. The question is what to do about it econ.st/4qwSix0

Photo: Magnum

Uh… check out what ChatGPT allegedly told a man before he killed his mother and then himself.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Scott’s response is perfect. You saved me time writing a thread!

Immensely significant - and worrying.

Contest models highlight inherent inefficiencies of scientific funding competitions Scientists waste substantial time writing grant proposals, potentially squandering much of the scientific value of funding programs. This Meta-Research Article shows that, unfortunately, grant-proposa...

Far from the whole story but we wrote about the grant proposal contest component a few years ago. Thinking about other elements of your question this summer….

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

When billion-dollar AIs break down over puzzles a child can do, it's time to rethink the hype | Gary Marcus The tech world is reeling from a paper that shows the powers of a new generation of AI have been wildly oversold, says cognitive scientist Gary Marcus

When billion-dollar AIs break down over puzzles a child can do, it's time to rethink the hype | Gary Marcus

Worth noting today that the entire budget of the NEH is about $200M.

Trump’s new ‘gold standard’ rule will destroy American science as we know it | Colette Delawalla The new executive order allows political appointees to undermine research they oppose, paving the way to state-controlled science

Our op-ed in the Guardian addresses the danger of Trump's "Gold Standard Science" executive order.

with
@cdelawalla.bsky.social
@vambros.bsky.social
Carol Greider
@michaelemann.bsky.social
@briannosek.bsky.social

Trump Administration Halts Harvard’s Ability to Enroll International Students

Fascism knows no bounds.

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/u...

Tudor Networks of Power, By Ruth Ahnert, Sebastian E. Ahnert In many areas of historical research, the rise of digital resources has had an accelerative, rather than a transformative, effect. Historians look at simil

Steven Gunn reviews 'Tudor Networks of Power', By Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert @ruthahnert.bsky.social @sebastianahnert.bsky.social

academic.oup.com/ehr/advance-...

@oxfordacademic.bsky.social

LLMs are nothing more than models of the distribution of the word forms in their training data, with weights modified by post-training to produce somewhat different distributions. Unless your use case requires a model of a distribution of word forms in text, indeed, they suck and aren't useful.

By Michael M. Grynbaum Michael Grynbaum reports on media and politics. April 22, 2025 Updated 1:26 p.m. ET CBS News entered a new period of turmoil on Tuesday after the executive producer of "60 Minutes," Bill Owens, said that he would resign from the long-running Sunday news program because he had lost his journalistic independence. In an extraordinary declaration, Mr. Owens — only the third person to run the program in its 57-year history - told his staff in a memo that "over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for '60 Minutes, right for the audience." "So, having defended this show - and what we stand for - from every angle, over time with everything I could, I am stepping aside so the show can move forward," he wrote in the memo, which was obtained by The New York Times.

This is the right thing to do, and it’s a profound shame that he had to do it. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/b...

What a magnificent piece of writing.

I've been reflecting some more overnight on the For Some Women Scotland case. 🧵

Wooah.

State Terror A brief guide for Americans

"the president defied a Supreme Court ruling to return a man mistakenly sent to a gulag... and spoke of sending Americans to foreign concentration camps.
This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror, and it has to be identified as such to be stopped"
snyder.substack.com/p/state-terror

Replacing Federal Workers with Chatbots Would Be a Dystopian Nightmare The Trump administration sees an AI-driven federal workforce as more efficient. Instead, with chatbots unable to carry out critical tasks, it would be a diabolical mess

In this Op-ed for Scientific American, Asmelash Teka Hadgu and I discuss one of the many reasons the idea of replacing US federal workers with so-called generative AI systems should terrify us. 🧵

www.scientificamerican.com/article/repl...

1/4. On the White House’s theory, if they abduct you, get you on a helicopter, get to international waters, shoot you in the head, and drop your corpse into the ocean, that is legal, because it is the conduct of foreign affairs.

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

(1/3) It needs repeating: in 1994, Ukraine was persuaded to give up its nuclear weapons to Russia in return for the US, the UK, and Russia guaranteeing Ukraine’s sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity.

How a pediatrician persuades vaccine-hesitant parents. “She has found *tremendous* success by just letting the families know she will have to document the higher risk of specific, and often fatal illness, in the chart of their child.” [kottke.org]

And also, why current Artificial
Intelligence isn’t intelligent.