Siân Harris

It's also not a level playing field selection if people can dip in & out of private sector to give their kids an edge. I remember having no idea even how to manage my time in an exam, let alone how to answer the type of questions. I guess tutors and prep school make difference to exam preparedness.

I went to a grammar school and I think selective education is a terrible idea. Seggregating children with an exam at 11 can have huge impact of their sense of worth throughout life. Plus, it narrows children's social circles to people who have the same kind of academic ability and future jobs.

A few days ago we announced 200,000 members.

The Green Party has 215,000! 🚀

Join us making hope normal again:

Join.greenparty.org.uk

No, they can choose whether to say that.

Following on from discussions about community engagement last week at #r2rconf, I've gathered together some of the approaches we take in @countermetrics.bsky.social.

Very clear that for Starmer, 'sectarian voting' is when British Muslims don't vote Labour, and for many others, it is just when British Muslims vote.

Zack Polanski, Hannah Spencer, the Greens writ large: 'Wouldn't it be nice if things were nice?'

Starmer, Labour broadly, most of the UK press: 'We must fight this insane destructive extremism with every bone in our bodies'

Hope Beats Hate: Green Party Defeats Reform and Labour in Huge Gorton and Denton By-Election Victory A concerted political and media campaign to scare voters about a “Green Menace” winning this by-election failed, reports Adam Bienkov

Gorton and Denton was 127th on the list of Green Party target seats.

To win by such a margin there suggests there is much bigger potential for Green gains in May's local elections than most people expect

bylinetimes.com/2026/02/27/h...

Join the Green Party Join the Green Party from just £6 a year. Become a member today - join the only party standing up for people and planet.

Delighted with the new Green MP in Parliament. Huge congratulations Hannah! If you want to be part of inclusive, positive politics focused on tackling injustice and protecting the environment, please visit join.greenparty.org.uk

Net migration in all of 2025 (Jan-Dec) will be revealed in May 2026: it is clearly well below net 205k of year to June 2025; and could well be lowest outside pandemic since 2010 (150k in 2012-13) + since 1998 (140k)

Ministers still saying net migration is still comparatively high - but it isn't

@frontiersmedia.bsky.social presenting #R2RConf on #AI in #ResearchIntegrity. It is NOT an emerging technology. We tell ourselves that so we're ok with "with still have time" approach. We need scenario planning now. It's here now, are we prepared?

100% agree for me too

ChatGPT training data is 93% English language says Nikesh Gosalia. Is AI democratising access to scholarly publishing or encoding colonialism at scale? The evidence suggests we are heading down a dangerous path #R2RConf

This is not a metaphor for #colonialism. It is colonialism. #NikeshGosalia #R2RConf And every minute it gets worse. Compounding with each new training instance. AI is being optimized for specific user base. Non-english speakers not "seen" in these tools.
#academicsky #AI #sciencesky

Slide showing the 4 solution areas to focus on to solve the problem: technical, publisher, policy/governance, individual actions.

The positive message is that it’s solvable. It’s not a technical problem, it’s a choice. #R2RConf

Slide showing the 7 injustices of AI in STM publishing: - AI tools simply perform worse in non-English languages. - Cultural bias. - Knowledge gaps. - Language laundering. - Reinforcement of publication barriers. - Economic inequality. - Epistemic injustice.

Very important presentation on how AI can exacerbate the inequities that are already huge in the global scholarly communication system. #r2rconf

The “Shirley Card” Legacy: Artists Correcting for Photography’s Racial Bias | National Gallery of Art Whiteness has been the default in color photographs, but artists like John Akomfrah work toward a “uniquely Black image.”

#NikeshGosalia kicking off #R2RConf session on #AI impact on global south - fascinating story of "Shirley cards" used by Kodak to calibrate for color of their printers. They KNEW the whole time that it didn't work on brown/black ppl. Techonly changed when chocolate makers didn't like how it looked.

That's a good idea!

#r2rconf Related to @loupeck.bsky.social's question about whether a little alcohol is good for you, see this insight from some epidemiologists I work with at @uob-ieu.bsky.social - ieureka.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2023/08/08/i.... The short answer is it’s unlikely to be beneficial to our health.

Really interesting discussion about AI in scholarly communications at #r2rconf - but many of the points made are not about the benefits of AI tools for scholarly communications. Benefits of AI in research is a different question.

Thank you for asking your question. I was getting up the confidence to ask a very similar question. Really important to avoid excluding public contributors and other voices from authorship.

That'll be a trip down memory lane. I was editor of @researchinfo.bsky.social 04-14 so I did a lot of interviews with people over the years who predicted how OA would evolve and what its impact would be. One of these days I'll reread all those articles and see how it compares with today's reality!

Looks interesting. Downloaded to read on my train to Researcher to Reader

Labour lost three by-elections yesterday - all to different parties mobilising disaffected voters on their liberal left flank: Greens (see below), Lib Dems and Plaid Cymru.

Starmer/McSweeney strategy of marginalizing the left flank to go after socially con Reform curious continues to backfire

Who decided that every modern book that is romantic fiction needs to have 'hilarious' or 'laugh-out-loud' on the book's cover and all over their descriptions? Do the people who write these descriptions actually read the books? And do they have a very odd sense of humour?

I propose to make universal the old policy of the Blackfriars conference at the American Shakespeare Center:

If you do not end your paper on time, you will be forced to exit, pursued by a bear. Literally, a bear will come take your paper from you.

Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.

Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

People Are Doing Something Strange and Illegal With the Epstein Files If you’ve been looking for a way to get Windows 7, now’s the time.

New from me: People are pirating software, activating Windows, and downloading random manuals from the Epstein files. It’s absurd—and shows how badly the DOJ mishandled the release, with real, dangerous consequences for victims.

slate.com/technology/2...

If most people can't work in this new setup (a) wealth still prob wouldn't be fairly distributed & (b) there'd be the kind of resentment we saw in covid where some ppl who wanted to work couldn't & some who had to go into workplaces thought everyone else was doing nothing all day, incl those wfh.

Twenty-three nominations, yet no Nobel prize: how Chien-Shiung Wu missed out on the top award in physics – Physics World Mats Larsson and Ramon Wyss reveal why Chien-Shiung Wu never won a Nobel prize

Many people have wondered why the Chien-Shiung Wu never won the Nobel Prize for Physics. New findings from the Nobel archives, exclusively revealed in Physics World, show she was nominated 23 times by 18 different physicists - and yet was still left empty-handed. 🧪⚛️
physicsworld.com/a/twenty-thr...