Robert Dingwall

Understanding University Finances ... a very short guide

Very few people seem to understand university finances and, distressingly, this includes many academics and most policymakers. This is an attempt to condense the key points you need to know. open.substack.com/pub/profseri...

Alan Nourse has an interesting short story about how humans assume that a host rather than a virus is the intelligent life form. In Star Surgeon which is well worth reading by medical sociologists.

Absolutely agree about reading the original for yourself. Too many 'taken-for-granted' citations out there which have drifted a long way from the original. May even be saying the exact opposite!

AI will never locate a new archive. It will never uncover a new source. It will never find a small, privately held collection of papers that can upend what we think we know about the past. It can never work with undigitized sources. It can never do real oral history or ethnography.

Can Systemic Corruption be Prevented by Legal Means? The Market for Pharmaceuticals in Southern Ethiopia Some international and national regulatory and policy actors assume that strengthening domestic laws and tightening enforcement measures will be sufficient to reduce the extra-legal supply of medic...

Full article: Can Systemic Corruption be Prevented by Legal Means? The Market for Pharmaceuticals in Southern Ethiopia
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Obligatory XKCD for this thread (date: 2010)

xkcd.com/773/

A lovely vintage railway poster, in a limited palette range based on green, looking down into a village in a dale

On #YorkshireDay, enjoy this lovely railway poster of the Yorkshire Dales by Ladybird artist Ronald Lampitt

The big Yorkshire Day debate: God’s own county or country? Yorkshire Day isn’t just about a county – it’s a celebration of a historic region with the identity, power, and ambition of a nation

✍️ The big Yorkshire Day debate: God’s own county or country?

Yorkshire Day isn’t just about a county – it’s a celebration of a historic region with the identity, power, and ambition of a nation

By Colin Speakman

#HappyYorkshireDay

Happy Yorkshire Day everyone!

Hurd was right. ID cards have always been proposed as a magic bullet for the moral panic of the day.

In the 1940s it was bigamy (a fear of breakdown of traditional family structures)

In the 1980s it was football hooliganism

In the 1990s (and now) benefit fraud and illegal immigration

The largest language model anyone could ever need (With apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan) I am the largest language model anyone could ever needI’m trained on hefty datasets that no one sane would ever readI’ll answer any question with great eloq…

I am the largest language model anyone could ever need
I’m trained on hefty datasets that no one sane would ever read
I’ll answer any question with great eloquence and attitude
As long as you indulge me with a little factual latitude
stroppyeditor.wordpress.com/2025/07/29/t...

*So* much research starts with difference-based questions and researchers' categories/assumptions - helping to feed or legitimise communication myths and stereotypes. But the evidence about what people say/do in actual non-lab non-post-hoc accounts of interaction shows something else entirely #EMCA

Best argument yet for scrapping UKRI....

They also used to have a delightful cafe on St Helens Square.

Destroying the myth that performance-sport promotes public health Within this essay, we seek to critically deconstruct and destroy a rather pervasive myth – that funding and developing performance-sport promotes public health in meaningful and straightforward way...

Our latest paper challenges a powerful myth: that investing in performance-sport straightforwardly benefits health.

We explore how this belief persists, why it's misleading, and how it can influence harmful personal and policy decisions.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

No, he's just a naughty boy....

One of the things this article makes very clear in between the lines is that the same policy entrepreneurs who've wrecked UK Higher Ed are still key media sources and still have influence. No-one who's been involved in designing this disaster should be listened to again.

I can just about remember seeing stooks in the Tendring area of Essex in the very early 1950s. I think they survived a bit longer in some wetter bits of the country where it was difficult to use machinery like Cumbria.

Would have been hard put to see them in a field by 1957....

What is happening with Epstein Files? Erving Goffman tells us exactly what to expect. Let's learn sociology of The Con! 1/

Will be sadly missed.

Can you move to Substack or somewhere like that?

Clash of cultures: exhibition tells story of when Vikings ruled the north of England Viking North at Yorkshire Museum features UK’s largest exhibition of Viking-age artefacts, including era’s ‘cheap’ jewellery and evidence of slave-owning

'Viking North, which opens on Friday, focuses on the settlement of the Viking Great Army, as it is known, which arrived in the north of England from Scandinavia in AD866 and spent two centuries controlling the territory.'

This OBR chart (using OECD data) debunks two pervasive myths:

a) UK pensions are pitifully low compared to other European countries.

b) The "triple lock" has done its work of boosting UK pensions so can now be abandoned.

[my earlier piece on triple lock here: ukandeu.ac.uk/in-defence-o... ]

I see she now has a wikipedia entry as well

Why overlook Lady May Baird - a force of nature on Aberdeen Town Council and a pioneer of municipal public health? Generations of women and children in the city owe her a great debt for the investments she promoted in maternal & child health and family planning services.

'Neighbourhood health centres' have an even deeper history - back to the 1920s Peckham experiment, which was supposed to shape NHS primary care - a vision that was never realised. Why is it going to happen this time? Do we need a more incremental approach rather than another top-down initiative?

Futurist Adam Dorr on how robots will take our jobs: ‘We don’t have long to get ready – it’s going to be tumultuous’ Researcher says tech could replace nearly all human labour within 20 years and societies urgently need to prepare

If you're a social scientist who also claims to be a 'futurist', you're not real social scientist. The grift of tech determinist 'consultancy' is getting worse. Seemingly no costs to bullshit and countless uncritical journalists to write it up. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

The Paradox of Personalized Medicine | Milbank Memorial Fund Personalized medicine is one of those ideas that seems so obviously good it barely warrants debate. Why wouldn’t we want to tailor treatments to each

Addresses the economic problems of drug discovery but not of production - the pharmaceutical industry has a classic Fordist model that depends on scale - another issue for the UK 10-year Plan...
The Paradox of Personalized Medicine www.milbank.org/quarterly/op...