Palantir posts mini-manifesto denouncing inclusivity and ‘regressive’ cultures | TechCrunch Palantir's ideological bent has come under more scrutiny as it's worked with ICE and positioned itself as a defender of "the West."

Those of us who live in the UK have paid Palantir more than a billion pounds to analyse our medical records and defence data

techcrunch.com/2026/04/19/p...

In my experience, Nature papers don't have a large amount of issues... but of course, I mostly look only at images. Perhaps stats people could look more closely at the raw data.

pubpeer.com/publications...

This a great opportunity to make impact for a talented big tech campaigner. If you know someone it could fit, please share. Thanks! 👇

£80,000 to £120,000 salary

"the claims about waiting list reductions reported by Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, a pilot site for this tech, are based on a flawed study, and the trust’s enthusiasm may be affected by close ties between members of its leadership team and the company."

Dozens of AI disease-prediction models were trained on dubious data The models are designed to predict someone’s risk of diabetes or stroke. A few might already have been used on patients.

In a new preprint, the authors identify 124 peer-reviewed papers which used provenance-unknown Kaggle data to train AI for stroke and diabetes risk. Some sets show impossible patterns, yet models of the models are already hitting clinics.
#MedSky #MedAI

Three huge prizes for people improving our research

€150,000 for individuals / small groups

€100,000 for institutions

€100,000 for early career individuals / small groups

Three huge prizes for people improving our research

€150,000 for individuals / small groups

€100,000 for institutions

€100,000 for early career individuals / small groups

Paper below advocates we stop giving grants to superstar academics to start giving grants to insitutions (and rewarding teams)

If you like thinking about ambitious changes to how we do research, I recommend @rmcelreath.bsky.social's Science is Like A Chicken Coop 🐣

www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8Lq...

British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants The British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants are available to support primary research in the humanities and social sciences. These awards, up to £10,000 in value and tenable for up to 24 mont...

May I interest you in £10k for humanities or social science research? Our small grants scheme is open. Apply by 3rd June.

We allocate through partial randomisation - awarding randomly between all applications that meet our quality threshold
www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/sche...

Remember starter packs? Here's a good one!

go.bsky.app/HbNRCFp

"Sapiens": One page at a time I've been co-teaching a course for several years in which we read Sapiens . I think I've read it eight times, now. That explains the gumband...

I'm reviewing Sapiens, one page at a time!
It's a little bit fact-checking and a little-bit soul-searching combined into a lot of feelings...
ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2026/03/sapi...

I will very happily read every post you write on this!

One of the best jobs in UK social science, research & policy.

Agree with this piece

"Education is not a market, it is a key function of the state and part of the bedrock of our society."

But it needed to end with a practical rallying cry, towards academic unions and political activism

Diplomacy is not peripheral to public health—it is how public health gets done In that sense, diplomacy is not peripheral to public health—it is how global and public health gets done in the real world.

"Public health is not only about drugs, data, models & interventions. It is about people, institutions & power. Diplomacy is not peripheral to public health—it is how public health gets done in the real world"

Kathy Bunka @plosglobalpublichealth.org

speakingofmedicine.plos.org/2026/04/02/d...

It was an honor to tell the truth.

Preorders are love, y’all.

Batman breaking a firearm and saying, "This is the journal of the enemy. We do not need it. We will not use it."

how I feel when open science initiatives choose to publish in Nature

JUST ASK - if you are in an institution, ask the procurement/finance people for a report based on *supplier names* to get a sense of how deeply you are in with some of these companies. Group all the different names for one company together (eg: RELX/Elsevier/LexisNexis etc). It is enlightening.

WNBA Players Had an Ace Up Their Sleeve in Pay Negotiations: A Nobel Laureate Harvard economist Claudia Goldin helped WNBA players win a nearly 400% raise. Starting this season, players’ average salary will top $580,000.

After Claudia Goldin became the first woman to win a solo Nobel in economics, she got hundreds of invitations.

She accepted three.

One was advising WNBA players on a labor deal. She helped players land the biggest % raise in US sports history.
www.wsj.com/economy/wnba...

Ministers explore triggering break clause in Palantir’s NHS contract Government is under pressure to eject the controversial American company from NHS England data systems

That UK government ever considers asserting its contractual rights against a major supplier is rare and welcome.

And here, this is especially welcome.

This will not be easy but it can be done, but it is good it is being seriously considered at all.

www.ft.com/content/2d2b...

The Olympics Has a New Sex Testing Policy. The Evidence Doesn’t Add Up I’ve spent over 10 years obsessed with so-called “gender verification” tests. Proponents claim they have history and science on their side. They don’t.

Oh did you want 3300 words from me on today's IOC sex testing rules? An essay on the nature of evidence and why we can't seem to stop getting stuck in the same traps around sex and gender in sports? Wow lucky you!! www.coyotemedia.org/the-olympics...

Members of Contract Faculty United, a @uaw.org local at NYU, have won a tentative deal for their first contract that includes—

✅ 95% of members will get >$100,000
✅ Lowest-ranked faculty will get $91,000
✅ Every member will get a raise of ≥$14,000 starting the next academic year

#ShareGoodNewsToo

Patricia Lockwood · Supersensual Ear: Willa Cather’s Substance Willa Cather’s reader, like her characters, must keep an ear out for the whisper, an eye out for the sign and a hand...

‘Willa Cather’s reader, like her characters, must keep an ear out for the whisper, an eye out for the sign and a hand out for the scrap of paper. Cather has the ability to build the holy object backwards from information.’

@tricialockwood.bsky.social on the novelist.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Check out the Aeon philosophy prize for early career researchers - offers the chance
of intensive mentoring in writing public philosophy @aeon.co aeon.co/philosophy-p...

Developed collaboratively with the audit offices of the UK, Brazil, Finland, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands, the catalogue acts as an auditors’ playbook for AI systems across their full lifecycle. #collaboration

Data Organization in Spreadsheets Karl W. Broman & Kara H. Woo Pages 2-10 | Received 01 Jun 2017, Accepted author version posted online: 29 Sep 2017, Published online: 24 Apr 2018 1. Introduction 2. Be Consistent 3. Choose Good Names for Things 4. Write Dates as YYYY-MM-DD 5. No Empty Cells 6. Put Just One Thing in a Cell 7. Make it a Rectangle 8. Create a Data Dictionary 9. No Calculations in the Raw Data Files 10. Do Not Use Font Color or Highlighting as Data 11. Make Backups 12. Use Data Validation to Avoid Errors 13. Save the Data in Plain Text Files ABSTRACT Spreadsheets are widely used software tools for data entry, storage, analysis, and visualization. Focusing on the data entry and storage aspects, this article offers practical recommendations for organizing spreadsheet data to reduce errors and ease later analyses. The basic principles are: be consistent, write dates like YYYY-MM-DD, do not leave any cells empty, put just one thing in a cell, organize the data as a single rectangle (with subjects as rows and variables as columns, and with a single header row), create a data dictionary, do not include calculations in the raw data files, do not use font color or highlighting as data, choose good names for things, make backups, use data validation to avoid data entry errors, and save the data in plain text files.

Every day is a good day for sharing one of the most useful papers about research data ever written. PLEASE get your people to understand and follow this advice.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Assigned it in my Big Data for Epi class this week 💅

Every hospital in England has been urged to disobey an NHS directive to use software operated by controversial US analytics software company Palantir
www.bmj.com/content/392/...

Palantir: Coalition urges NHS organisations to refuse to use controversial tech giant’s software Every hospital in England has been urged to disobey an NHS directive to use software operated by controversial US analytics software company Palantir. A coalition of human rights, health and patient ...

"Every hospital in England has been urged to disobey an NHS directive to use software operated by controversial US analytics software company Palantir."

www.bmj.com/content/392/...