Gary Polhill

If you can take out a fuse box with a cheese toastie then your landlord should have replaced it years ago. It’s the landlord who needs to fess not you…

A map of the United Kingdom from Shetland to Cornwall, divided into three equal regions: ‘North’ (the southernmost point of which is Elgin, ‘Midlands’, which extends as far south as Lancaster, and South (which includes areas of England that identify as North such as Leeds)

I was educating people about this on LinkedIn only the other day, while responding to a provocative post about where in the United Kingdom is ‘north’

Do you know, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say “It’s not rocket science” for ages now… It just goes to show that difficult things don’t last forever.

Just dropped in to #PoliticsLive debating immigration. Missed the beginning so did not know who anyone was. From what he was saying, I just assumed the chap who turned out to be Jonathan Hinder MP was from Reform.

I wish I was surprised at Sajid Javid's shocking immigration comments To have survived such sustained racist abuse only to perpetuate a new wave of bigotry on today’s immigrants is, well, dystopian at best.

I didn’t believe it but the Metro had a comment on it (could not find the original quickly): metro.co.uk/2026/01/26/w...

Actually, London would be much more fun with some mountains about the place. It’s a bit swampy.

Two words to invoke a nameless fear: “new recipe”

Why Professor Holliday Doesn’t Use Generative “AI” Why Professor Holliday Doesn’t Use Generative “AI” This is a (very) incomplete list of journalistic and scholarly sources that provide information about limitations and documented drawbacks of variou...

My course syllabi now contain a link to this document, "why Professor Holliday Doesn't Use Generative AI". Feel free to share/repurpose or just check out the links for your own reference. It won't stop some of them, but I want students to know why. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

I marched against student loans back in 1989. It was the first demonstration I ever went on. “Education is a right, not a privilege,” we sang, before the police charged us with batons. I hope you are able to effect positive change in our country’s attitude toward tertiary education.

Do be careful.

Academic publishing is broken. My suggestion is that each academic organization runs its own journal ‘Research Reports of the Uni of X’ or whatever. Lead authors would be bound by employment / grant award contracts to publish only in their organization’s journal.

I agree, but thankfully nobody can.

Sadly we don’t have a good Word processor.

A good word processor would collect these metadata automatically rather than relying on humans to enter it (which they are notorious for hating doing)

Congratulations to Professor Lorna Dawson, who has been named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in New Year Honours List! 🤩👏

She was recommended for the award by His Majesty the King for her services to innovations in soil and forensic science.

Shouldn’t the real fess have been about the bodies in your freezer?

The sun makes me feel sorry when I forget the sun cream.

Is #ABM just a technique though? (Trying to find answers to that question — like “it’s a way of thinking about the world” — made me wonder if I needed help, however…) At the moment at least, I think the research is less driven by #ABM than it is by the things #ABM breaks.

Comic. [Two people one one side of a pile of seven apples, next to person with long hair next to five apples.] PERSON: Okay, with my seven apples added to your five, we have… let’s se… twelve apples! PERSON 2 [with hands raised]: Incredible! Perfect agreement with the theory! [caption] Experimental Mathematicians

Apples

xkcd.com/3180/

Synthetic Populations in Research Infrastructures A challenge to many social and economic policies is to tackle the interactive processes between actors and institutions involved, bound to a geographical, economic, and cultural context over which the...

Our chapter on #syntheticpopulations and #researchinfrastructures is out:
link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...
An overview of #algorithms for estimation and some applied cases in #socialsimulation research,
W/ @garypolhill.bsky.social, Alice Sbrana, Nick Roxburgh, Evelina Sabatella, Mario Paolucci

MAHAMA?

Your back is up against the wall. All is lost. Who is coming to save you?

Electric cars seem to make an inordinate fuss out of plugging something in and turning it on. Other appliances manage this simple task without needing an app.

I imagine @aiannucci.bsky.social and colleagues are already scripting the satire of Your Party’s saga for a Netflix miniseries. (If not, why not? I’d watch it! I need a laugh!)

Nature’s latest AI-generated paper — with medical frymblal and Factor Fexcectorn Nature’s open-access sideline Nature Scientific Reports is the “we’ve got Nature at home” of scientific publishing. It appears to run any garbage for a mere $2,690 processing charge. A snip, I’m su…

What would it require to get “runctitional” (meaning AI generated) into the OED for next year? See pivot-to-ai.com/2025/11/28/n...

I want to suggest that we try to get ‘runctitional’ in to the dictionary by using it as an adjective for academic papers using AI. e.g. A reviewer might say ‘This paper has too many runctitional features to merit publication.’ #AcademicSky 🧪

Nature’s latest AI-generated paper — with medical frymblal and Factor Fexcectorn Nature’s open-access sideline Nature Scientific Reports is the “we’ve got Nature at home” of scientific publishing. It appears to run any garbage for a mere $2,690 processing charge. A snip, I’m su…

In case you had any doubt that peer review doesn't work in pay-to-publish journals, including those with a Nature badge....

#academicSky

pivot-to-ai.com/2025/11/28/n...

When journalists quote think tanks I think they should be obliged to say who funds them so we know whose political agenda they are parroting

Really good read about the importance of supporting postgraduates and postdocs as a research leader. I absolutely agree that this should be as, if not more important, than publication metric when hiring.

Hopefully at some point academia will achieve peak hyperbole, we will all calm down, and the value of all contributions to knowledge, incremental and revolutionary, will be appreciated.