In an effort that will no doubt torch my follower base, I have laid out some basic numbers around our fiscal situation. Obvious, but still a little sobering for me.
freethinkecon.wordpress.com/2025/07/15/t...
Fully transparent and open AI coming out of Switzerland soon. Something worth monitoring. ethz.ch/en/news-and-...
The biggest crises hide in plain sight:
“The cuts made by Donald Trump and Elon Musk to the USA’s overseas aid have already claimed an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 lives across the world – six to 10 times the death toll of Gaza – and get a fraction of the attention of Trump’s day-to-day chaos.”
I bet they have. Dundee's accounts are going to be looked at under a microscope the size of the sun, and they won't be the last either.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Free webinar: Explore the diversity gap at the top of charities
On Tuesday 24 June we lift the lid on trustee demographics and skills gaps, looking at potential solutions and continuing the conversation sparked by our recent report for the Charity Commission👇
Join in:
To mark Carers UK's 60th Anniversary in Scotland, we are using our platform to share the stories of carers.
In her piece, "Identity Crisis- from Career to Carer" Alison talks about her feelings toward giving up paid work to care.
Read her article here: www.carersuk.org/news/60th-an...
Fascinating deep dive into the MIT economics/AI paper scandal/clusterf***.
thebsdetector.substack.com/p/ai-materia...
New post: Starmer’s Disgraceful and Damaging Remarks
mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2025/05/star...
As with austerity in the 2010s, if none of the main parties can be honest about immigration then the public debate will be equally dishonest.
Incalculable = when we calculated it, it didn't give us the answer we wanted
There's a comically common school of thought in the government which basically goes 'UK state doesn't do enough. Doesn't build enough. Doesn't have enough skilled teachers in certain subjects. Doesn't provide enough for Neets. Current level of money fine, and also can do this with fewer people'.
When the Labour Party returned to office in 1997, a shocking 27 per cent of British children were living in relative poverty. Three terms of carefully targeting benefits and tax credits later, that proportion had almost halved. By 2010, even though the number of children in Britain had increased, the number growing up in poverty had fallen by nearly a million. It was one of the Blair and Brown governments’ signature achievements. It’s been largely undone: by 2023, the figure stood at 22 per cent before housing costs, and 30 per cent after. Much of this reversal can be attributed to a single, ruinous policy: the two-child benefit cap, introduced in 2017, which stops families from claiming certain benefits for more than two children regardless of need. The Tories ostensibly introduced the policy to send a message to parents about responsibility, as if no family’s finances ever took an unexpected turn for the worse, or as if punishing children for the actions of their parents is OK. But everyone knew it was also there to save money. No British politician ever lost votes by punishing welfare claimants. Which is why, even though it’s widely agreed to be the single biggest step it could do to address child poverty and the generational problems that result, the government has absolutely no intention of scrapping it. “If they still think we’re going to scrap the cap then they’re listening to the wrong people,” says the inevitable anonymous source. “The cap is popular with key voters, who see it as a matter of fairness.” Note the way that decision is justified there. There is no attempt to push back on the argument – made by such hotbeds of social radicalism as Barnardo’s, Save the Children and Citizens Advice – that this will push a record number of kids into poverty right around the time the next election rolls around; no attempt to justify it as a policy at all. The cap is popular with “key voters”; that is enough. This isn’t governing. It’s campaigning.
www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...
BREAKING: Over 40% of of universities predict imminent deficit.
More than 4 in 10 English universities expect a deficit this year due to lower international student recruitment.
OfS raises concerns over recruitment targets “that cannot be achieved”.
www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...
British Academy report 'emphasises the urgent need for policymakers to recognise social and cultural spaces – such as libraries, leisure centres, galleries, and community hubs – as essential infrastructure that contributes directly to economic growth and the reduction of social inequalities.'
So much terrible policy about immigration comes from treating 'how many people does it take to run this thing?' as something you can answer separately from, or instead of, questions about your economic model, geography, etc. etc.
Thinking narrowly about my own sector (university), is anyone in Government thinking through the likely size and shape of it in a couple of years time as a result of these policies? Hard to take them seriously when they saw growth is the main mission.
NEW BLOG POST: Developing a READING practice: 4 reasons and 5 tips www.raulpacheco.org/2025/04/deve...
In this blog post I give you 4 reasons/justifications for developing a reading practice and 5 tips on how to do it.
#RPVSky
British Steel employs 3.6k people. Coventry Uni group, which auditors say may not survive, employs 7.7k. But there is an emergency debate in parliament for British Steel and nothing for the whole HE sector imploding
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Was teaching PhD students recently and felt incredibly stupid trying to navigate between German, Spanish, and American keyboard layouts on their personal machines.
Spring statement: Rachel Reeves’ battles are far from over
The chancellor's fiscal tightrope, navigated today by a careful balancing act, stretches far into the future — with geopolitical headwinds still swirling
Latest for @politics-co-uk.bsky.social 👇
www.politics.co.uk/politicslunc...
Less than a week to go to apply to the Paris Summer Institute in CSS.
This year we will focus on LLMs and gen AI.
It's entirely free, open to all disciplines across the social sciences, and our speaker's list is already wonderful and getting better. More info here: sicss.io/2025/paris/
Screenshot of the linked Quarto website, with input checkboxes to change different conditions for a regression model that predicts economic performance based on US political party, with a reported p-value
I’ve long used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive “Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory” to illustrate the idea of p-hacking when I teach statistics. But ABC/Disney killed the site earlier this month :(
So I made my own with #rstats and Observable and #QuartoPub ! stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way/
Don’t go crazy, a Short-Life Working Group will suffice.
Plumbing new depths with every say. Depraved. “U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is planning to revoke temporary legal status for some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled the conflict with Russia” www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...
To repeat: "A country so stupid it actively trashes one of things it's good at and famous for."
I’m just about to write one of these for our SRS dataset, this is very useful, thank you for sharing.
🚀 Launching a new #Stata package #geoflow that allows users to generate spatial arcs.
This package is a culmination of over a year of work for building stable core dependencies. It also brings us one step closer to flexibly plot network data.
Wrote about gang grooming and child sexual exploitation now, what’s changed since the first scandals broke in the 2010s, and what we still don’t know
on.ft.com/4h9E4NI
The course websites for my Spring 2025 causal inference and data visualization classes (both with #rstats) are live!
evalsp25.classes.andrewheiss.com
datavizsp25.classes.andrewheiss.com
My bit for this week’s Observer on Labour’s early poll slump www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
