We’ve heard a lot of pious talk from the PM an senior colleagues about populists who offer false solutions and ignore real problems. Yet here we have the Home Secretary offering a false solution while she and her Treasury colleagues ignore real problems.
The Green party would most likely be part of a coalition. In which case their membership would be used to justify ditching some of the more reckless promises of the other parties. E.g. Reeve's utterly daft pledge not to put up income tax.
Implementing that is almost impossible as journals will claim that they only publish sufficiently high quality research that they do have policy impact.
Strong recommendations in papers is encouraged by some journals e.g. mandatory key message statements. e.g. "How this study might affect research, practice or policy"
To address we need robust reporting standards and then major sanctions against journals not adhering to them.
There a lot of things which I have the money to do e.g. renovate the flat and book holidays, but I can never find the time to organise them. Which probably puts me in the more money than sense category...
Oh it's in the "How To Spend IT" section. A reminder that a substantial proportion of the Financial Times's readership have several magnitude times more money than sense.
Some people would be doing everybody including themselves a favour by paying more in tax.
Organisations such as Clarviate are already collecting data that could be used to prevent this.
The problem is that publishing good papers in efficient way is not a priority for Academic Publishers, who are focused on maximising individual company profits no matter what the costs to others are.
Changes to research funding must include improved job security for researchers. So much expertise is delegated to researchers we cannot afford for them not to have job security.
Without that security it is harder for researchers to assert their expertise and challenge poor research practices.
This includes dozens of my colleagues. I have long campaigned for job security for researchers. Not only has insecurity harmed people lives it has undermined research integrity and enables a toxic managerial environment. I hope it is to rebuild, I fear the sector is shrinking.
I don't think the "Einstein" or other AI replacing the important steps of learning, esp in higher ed, would be posing quite the challenge it is right now if students hadn't been sent the message their entire lives that the point of college is to get good grades and a high paying job, not to learn.
One of the consequences of AI is that we may have to reduce our dependence on electronic communications and email and revert to sending letters through the post.
www.ethicalconsumer.org/technology/s...
Just found this link, offers why for and why not.
AI literacy has become synonymous with prompt engineering. It should mean something else entirely.
“No country, let alone continent, will ever be completely digitally independent, and nor should they be. But by pulling together, Europe can ensure its digital systems remain accessible even in a crisis – just as is expected from its physical infrastructure.”
We now appear to have a Prime Minister and a government who are willing to challenge it. If it continues things may change.
Viewing of posts and hence clicks probably follows a power law. Most posts get very little engagement, these will be genuine angry responses. A tiny minority get lots of engagement, these will be most of your experience and they will be dominated by outrage for clicks.
Yes but angry of Tunbridge Wells did not have to opportunity to annoy millions of people in thousand of communities across the world.
Trolls have been using anger to manipulate people before algorithms existed, see flamewars on Usenet ~ 30 years ago. Facebook has just monetised it. Enabled by a wider media that benefits from the attention economy.
I think most of the anger on social media is not performative. However, a tiny minority are probably using outrage to maximise their number of followers.
I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!
bluesky-map.theo.io
I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail
There are a lot more competencies related to grant writing than there are to research integrity, team work or public engagement.
Maybe UK science is ahead in some important areas?
An increasing trend in the UK is for major data resources to host their own conferences. e.g. UK Biobank, ADRUK and now CLS. In a world of diminishing funding for conferences I am wondering where this will leave conferences led by academic societies?
A University campus in Southend is the exactly the kind of place we need to defend to challenge regional inequalities and the rise of populism.
Being middle age I see that most of today's politicians concerns are entirely predictable negative consequences of their own parties' policies from previous decades.
In the early 2000s New Labour deliberately undermined BBC online presence to favour the commercial sector. It's hardly surprising that US tech companies dominate when the UK's own government consistently under mined the UK's then best provider. www.theguardian.com/media/2001/j...
This is the kind of chaos I would expect arising in the research ecosystem from a far right populist government. The kind of government that is enthral to tech bro charlatans and promoting superficial patriotism and performative cruelty towards towards marginalised groups.
40% of the population probably won't even vote therefore proportion of electorate voting Tory or Reform is therefore less 30%.
Current Tory and Labour leaderships have rendered large segments of population politically homeless and it is difficult to fix with the current electoral system.
Your original question was one of semantics, it's a giant rabbit hole whose answers lie in the qualitative domain.
Complex systems models, and causal loop diagrams in particular, makes a lot more sense when you realise that they are tool for qualitative researchers. Trying to interpret them from a quantitative perspective doesn't end well.
