Wildlife to replace humans on next series of UK banknotes reut.rs/46XeyJc
11.03.2026 06:00
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Wildlife to replace humans on next series of UK banknotes reut.rs/46XeyJc
Why would an increased interaction with LLMs and their specific communication designs not affect human subjectivity in significant ways? Not full-blown psychosis but more subtle acquiesence to the prompts, suggestions etc. gradually shaping perspectives in ways that become invisible ...
Next Monday 16 March we have Johanna Thoma from the University of Bayreuth! Thoma's talk is called: 'On Time-Slice Democracy and Getting Stuff Done'
⏰ 18.15 - 19.45
📍 Chancellor's Hall, Senate House
🔗https://mailchi.mp/c4762fb8a750/114th-presidential-address-of-the-aristotelian-society-10988117
Attacks leave dead vs killed
POST-DOC!
3-year job in history of political thought / visual culture / art history
Department of Politics & International Studies
University of Cambridge
@thecambridgeschool.bsky.social
www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/54724/
New post: Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? (No. No it can't. Come on, now.)
davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...
i suspect many liberal uk journalists rolled their eyes at this line 6 months ago
on this team and gonna keep saying: behind the extremely thin veneer of concern and responsibility of anti-Bluesky takes is the desperate attempt to portray something that is obviously their problem as though it were our problem. nice try. go with God, have a blessed day
'If you have a protest no one wants to hear / Just attend a rally where the big shots meet / Strip to your hide and walk down the street’.
Victoria Peretitskaya explores the history of a 1960s folk song and the protest that inspired it.
a cat, looking out of the window
birdwatching
New podcast: very grateful to my hosts Alex and Dara at Inspire Us. Recorded at SOAS in London.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZUO...
Raises some important issues but also ignores the fact that many Humanities staff outside the magic circle are facing redundancy. They are naturally willing, indeed desperate, to apply for entry-level Oxbridge posts. The situation is grim. 1/2
“UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has shown that deep reading, defined as sustained immersion in a text, builds the cognitive circuits required for critical analysis, empathy and perspective-taking in ways that skimming, scrolling and short-form video simply cannot.”
“What we are seeing is the weakness of strong states. Regimes that rely on repression face a challenge: The more force they deploy, the more they risk exposing their own brutality to politically persuadable observers. Overreach doesn’t just project strength; it also undermines legitimacy.” Gift link
What happens when everything can become a bet?
Based on British Academy-funded research by @sarah-mills.bsky.social, this article explores the rapid rise of prediction markets – and what they mean for regulation, public trust and democracy. 👇
In which people CHOOSE TO VOTE for a female plumber representing a party with broadly liberal values and an unelected life peer declares it to be the end of liberal democracy.
not accepting election losses, casting non-white votes as illegitimate, are defining features of trumpian fascism
'Analysis of Home Office quarterly data reveals the number of overseas nurses granted entry to the UK has fallen by 93% over three years. Just 1,777 overseas nurses were granted entry in 2025, compared with 26,100 in 2022.'
Meanwhile, nursing programmes are at risk in many UK universities.
Last term I tried an experiment: I walked into my Tech and Design Ethics class, admitted that I had *no idea* what to do about ChatGPT - so I would let them figure it out.
As in: their first project was to decide and write the ChatGPT policy for the class.
Here's what happened:
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/
To complete the T-levels, UK students have to do a work placement. What we discovered this week is that an employer can cancel a placement on a whim, putting a student’s qualification & university place at risk. Seems like a shockingly big design flaw. This week has been very stressful.
Bookbinders and restorers in the 1930s and ’40s helped the Nazi regime create a database that was used to persecute and kill Jews and others who were deemed racially impure, a British researcher has found.
A week ago, we had an open conversation amongst senior academics in leadership roles and their use of LLMs (in both their leadership capacities and individually). Small group, not representative, but it already taught me a great deal about the diversity of perspectives (& their consequences). 1/
![To: Jeffrey epstein[jeevacation©gmail.com]
From: roger schank
Sent: Mon 1/4/2010 12:15:13 PM
Subject: there is a simpler explanation about women and intelligence
intelligence comes about in part from real focus (goal-directed
(this is why you have the absent minded professor caricature)
it is a rare woman who is not first and foremost focussed on what
thinking and feeling about her
hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why
hates you or why you dont own a kelly bag
roger schank
http://www.rogerschank.com/](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:dtgy62tymnpbnzozbpgnov56/bafkreid2mznu7l72zvvigmpcouxb4dqdqjpnvqaguq47xewvm4jcvhtuxu)
To: Jeffrey epstein[jeevacation©gmail.com] From: roger schank Sent: Mon 1/4/2010 12:15:13 PM Subject: there is a simpler explanation about women and intelligence intelligence comes about in part from real focus (goal-directed (this is why you have the absent minded professor caricature) it is a rare woman who is not first and foremost focussed on what thinking and feeling about her hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why hates you or why you dont own a kelly bag roger schank http://www.rogerschank.com/
Relevant to today's conversation about AI's inherent sexism, here's an email from cognitive psychologist and early AI theorist Roger Schank, arguing to Epstein that women can't be truly intelligent, because they care too much about what other people think.
I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point.
I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion
People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it
A brief observation on the relationship between antecedent status and reviewing incentives. Liam Kofi Bright ABSTRACT It is often believed that academics are especially harsh in their evaluation of work that critiques their own ideas. I dispute that claim. Rather, I say, consideration of the credit incentives for academics reviewing critique of their own work should lead us to expect them to typically be particularly generous to critique of their own work.
In what many are calling the most CV efficient strategy ever, I have my 2026 paper out already (relax for the rest of the year comrades!) and it's actually a bit of a joke one. Link here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... and abstract attached. But I'll just tell the story of how it came to be....
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.
