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  "In short, the technologies through which we see the public shape what we think the public is. And that, in turn, shapes how we behave politically and how we orient ourselves." https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/were-getting-the-social-media-crisis ("The bigger problem isn't disinformation. It's degraded democratic publics")

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  "The word “risk” originally comes from “rhizikon”, Byzantine Greek meaning “a sharp rock or reef”, later “any hazard to shipping”...The word “average” comes from an Arabic word “awariya” meaning “lost merchandise”; the “Law of General Average” is the principle that when stuff has to be chucked overboard in a storm the losses will be shared out fairly between the merchants so that the crew are can grab the heaviest objects as they see fit without worrying about who owns what."...

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  "Regrettably, some academics are drawn to big theories that seem too grand for clarity or mere evidence." Billig, 2011 on academic writing https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8309.2010.02003.x

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  This is why @pluralistic is such an essential writer: he can tell the history you lived through and make you see it again. In this case the story of superior technology - the VCR - which was disinvented as media corps got their hooks into regulators and law. Why *are* there DVD players and not DVD recorders? Why *do* DVD players have anti-features like region encoding that nobody actively wants? Another world is possible! https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/25/gammamax/#felony-contempt-of-busines...

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  Ignore this guy, join a Union https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2026/08/27/why-postdoc-unionization-bad-idea-opinion

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  No need for an inner critic when you have the replies on social media, am I right?

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  I've started getting Google Scholar alerts which announce work by legit academics but the titles click through to porn sites. Does anyone know why that would be? Some kind of SEO scam? Some kind of phishing? Something more targetted against the affected academics? #AcademicChatter #ScholarlyPublishing

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  Testing alternatives to the engagement-maximising, polarisation-inducing, algorithms of most social media feeds https://open.substack.com/pub/tomstafford/p/another-algorithm-is-possible

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  Depressing. I knew internet hero @nixCraft@mastodon.social would have a page with exactly the information I wanted, but the search engine puts the option to generate an AI summary above the result I want. It's not "Search assist", is it, in this context? It's stealing traffic and credit

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  Fedizens! Please send me your favourite meme which shows something important about the #Fediverse I'll go first:

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  A big regret of my year off is that I didn't schedule "keeping in touch" calls with my boss, elaborately staged on a Jason Bourne theme Me video calling from the embassy basement, hands bound with cable ties Me video calling from a high speed train, sniper fire cracking glass inches from my head Me video calling while trading brutal Muay Thai blows with numberless henchmen Final video call. On a roof. My telephoto lens snaps into focus to show my boss's offi...

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  Compare/contrast: ward-by-ward Sheffield City Council election results 1/ when mapped to ward area (SCC, via @index) vs 2/ an equal-area representation (from me) #UKpol #Sheffield #Maps #Geospatial

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  New newsletter https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/the-mythical-median-voter It's about the how we imagine the voting public. And how this is distorted by polling, and faulty intuitions about statistics. And there's n-dimensionap geometry and a statistic gag in there too

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  Mythos beer on offer at Tesco's. I can only presume it is an Anthropic tie-in

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  TODAY: Volkswagen Foundation workshop on "Risky research", Hannover, Germany and looking forward to a day and a half of research on research funding, #metascience and partial randomisation for grant allocation There's a hashtag apparently #PeerReviewLottery Edit: web https://www.volkswagenstiftung.de/veranstaltungen/veranstaltungskalender/einzelveranstaltung/workshop-risky-research-normality-or-exception-challenges-for-research-and-research-funding

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  Great review of a paper so bad it could be used in a methods class to teach what NOT to do Like sitting down to a "Greatest hits of p-hacking / trial misreporting" double album. https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/one-weird-trick-to-get-significant #Reproducibility

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  South Africa withdraws AI policy due to fake AI-generated sources https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/south-africa-withdraws-ai-policy-due-fake-ai-generated-sources-2026-04-27/

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  https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/claude-powered-ai-coding-agent-deletes-entire-company-database-in-9-seconds-backups-zapped-after-cursor-tool-powered-by-anthropics-claude-goes-rogue "an AI coding agent deleted his firm’s entire production database. The AI agent’s misdemeanors were then hugely amplified by a cloud infrastructure provider’s API wiping all backups after the main database was zapped." #FAFO #AgenticAI

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  In other news, I am absolutely delighted with my new profile picture #MementoMori

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  LLMpedia: A Transparent Framework to Materialize an LLM’s Encyclopedic Knowledge at Scale Previously the factuality of LLMs has been assessed by querying them. This project generates an entire encyclopedia from model parameters, allowing an alternative — and more pessimistic — assessment of their accuracy Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24080 Site: https://llmpedia.net/

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  Where do British political scientists preprint? If the answer is the Elsevier-owned SSRN can you suggest alternatives? #PoliticalScience #preprints EDIT: My sample (n=1) report they use OSF, which is good enough for me!

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  Option #2: Develop new signals/assessment measures Feasibility seems increasingly important. If anyone can write a good proposal with AI, that doesn't mean that anyone can implement that research plan. Indeed, me and you could submit the same proposal and it would be completely inappropriate for me to be funded and completely appropriate for you to be Does that mean that funders need more investigation of feasibility in proposal review? It's sort of "prospective repro...

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  A flying visit to @cwts An inspiring research unit with a great culture and ethic, and great plans Good posters by the lifts too

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  Here's Saturday's newsletter about how an online freelancing marketplace reacted when the site introduced an AI tool to help freelancers produce their proposals for offered jobs. Proposal quality went up, but became decoupled from worker ability and effort - it's value as a signal collapsed. Without this signal the market became less functional overall, workers working harder, few jobs awarded and employers less able to tell high for low ability/effort workers https:/...

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  Reviewing should be like jury service. You have a chance of being randomly selected, then the funder or journal calls up your institution and they have to give you two weeks off, or whatever, and you bash out as many reviews as you can in that time #AcademicChatter

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  TODAY heading to the #Metascience2025 conference https://metascience.info/ This evening: ECR Metascientist happy hour hosted by the #UKRN Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday: Come to the Metascience Lab to meet people and plan new experiments in metascience. https://metascience.info/programme/#17014 Tuesday: Stephen Pinfield presents our work on Evaluating Distributed Peer Review at the Volkswagen Foundation Tuesday: if you are a funder, get in touch about The Art of Funding early evening social 1/

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  Good piece from @lizziegadd from June about how #REF2028 might assess research culture (as thresholds to meet, set by institution, rather than as a ranking, with all the perverse side-effects of competition) https://wonkhe.com/blogs/my-research-culture-is-better-than-yours/

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  Reasonable People #100! Stated preference, revealed preference and the complications brought by circumstance https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/the-surprising-deceptions-of-individual

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  Evolution, signalling theory and (only safe for work) badger pictures. What’s not to like? https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/lets-talk-about-the-badger-penis

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  Tuesday boost for my post about evolution, signals and ....the badger https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/lets-talk-about-the-badger-penis