David Pearson

People refuse to acknowledge how an LLM actually works, and insist on assigning meaning and understanding to its output. There is no meaning, and the system understands neither the user’s question nor its own “response.”

Worried about freedom of speech? Then what’s happening at the Open University should terrify you | Owen Jones The OU has capitulated to a pro-Israel lobby group about the use of the term ‘ancient Palestine’. The wider context is impossible to ignore, says Guardian columnist Owen Jones

Here's the latest attempt to erase Palestine from history.

The free speech warriors are silent.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

3 popular password managers are less secure than promised Researchers have discovered serious security vulnerabilities in three popular, cloud-based password managers.

Scary stuff

www.futurity.org/password-man...

Today, in honour of WEB DuBois's birthday in 1868, the @publicdomainrev.bsky.social features the hand-drawn infographics DuBois made with his students to depict the conditions of African-American life in 1900.

Arts-based pedagogy all those years ago!
buff.ly/3kdWqRD

🌙 Mongolian Poetry Time @ Central Library - Today at 1pm!
Join us in celebrating the beauty of Mongolian language and culture through poetry as we welcome the Lunar New Year and Tsagaan Sar in Dublin.
📅 Date: Friday, 20 February
⏰ Time: 13:00
📍Central Library
✨ Free event

"chocolate" these days

Haha. My partner calls my tabs nonsense "digital hoarding"

Food and War (40th Leeds Symposium on Food History & Traditions) A 1-day conference on food and war in Britain, including the challenges of feeding armies and the wider impact of warfare on British food.

It's the Leeds Symposium of Food History & Traditions' big 4-0.

It's on Friday 24 April & the topic is 'Food and War'. There are some great speakers inc BFHP podcast alumni @alessandrapino.bsky.social & Marc Meltonville.

REMEMBER, IT'S IN YORK!

Book here:
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/food-and-w...

An essay I wrote for The Dial about Wikipedia's humanity in the age of AI informational slurry is out now!

Transformative Economics Education: Decolonising Economics Through a Multidimensional Approach This paper presents a comprehensive framework for decolonising economics education by synthesising Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy with Pan-African thought. Using Kingston University's EC4002 module ...

I forget how long I have been working on this, I started it during lockdown and have worked on it sporadically over the summers since then.

Transformative Economics Education: Decolonising Economics Through a Multidimensional Approach

osf.io/4sp8y/

AI shatters the pretence that academic polish was ever anything but gatekeeping For Rex McKenzie, higher education assessment has always privileged certain discourses – but the rise of artificial intelligence means that this can no longer hold For Rex McKenzie, higher education a...

Interesting piece from @idemamba.bsky.social

wonkhe.com/blogs/ai-sha...

The semester 2 SOAS Food Forum continues next Monday with our own Charlotte Sanders:

'Hard to Stomach: Food and Embodied Violence in UK Asylum Hotel Accommodation.'

📅 26 January, 1:15-2:45pm
📍 SOAS, R301 (Main Building)

Life in the Cracks: Law, Violence, and Resistance in Haiti - CAMHRA Event Abstract Drawing on ethnographic portraits of law, violence, and resistance in Haiti, this talk examines what it means to…

📣 Our departmental research seminar series continues tomorrow:
"Life in the Cracks: Law, Violence, and Resistance in Haiti" - Prof Marco Motta (University of Lausanne)
📅 4 February, 3pm-5pm
📍 RB01, Main Building, SOAS
See here for registration and further details: camhra.soas.ac.uk/event/life-i...

📣 Our colleagues in the media studies department are holding their next seminar series event this evening:
"Joyride": Centring queer joy for/as human flourishing in a 'late digital age' - Prof Lexi Webster (Southampton)
📅 5pm - 7pm, 5 February
📍 SALT, Senate House, SOAS
All welcome.

Dr. Stefanie Lotter (SOAS, University of London) was a Co-Investigator on the British Academy-funded research project titled 'Dignity Without Danger: Collaboratively Analysing Stigma and Taboos to Develop Innovative Strategies to Address Menstrual Exclusion in Nepal'.

Wow what a year for music

“Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling.”

Join the SOAS Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies this Wednesday for a public talk with Prof Jason De León (via Zoom).

📅 Wed 4 Feb, 5–7pm
📍 RB01, SOAS

More info: jasonpatrickdeleon.com

Mummy vibes

‘Give PhD archive attention it deserves,’ British Library urged Scholars criticise lack of progress on restoring repository of 600,000 PhD theses more than two years after it was felled by cyberattack

'A metadata-only version of the British Library’s sorely missed PhD thesis repository will be a pale imitation of the service that disappeared more than two years ago after a cyberattack, experts have warned.' 1/2

Tomorrow!

Museums without Object: 'Revolutionary Museums' in Midwestern Nepal - CAMHRA Event Abstract Twenty years after Nepal’s civil war, a vast memorial landscape has been developed across the remote villages of…

Our departmental research seminar series continues tomorrow!
"Museums without Object: ‘Revolutionary Museums’ in Midwestern Nepal" - Stefanie Lotter (SOAS)
📅 28 January, 3-5pm
📍 RB01, Main Building, SOAS University of London
For registration and further details ➡️ camhra.soas.ac.uk/event/museum...

Dr. Gladys West, Mathematician Whose Work Made GPS Possible, Dies at 95 ALEXANDRIA, VA — Dr. Gladys West, the pioneering mathematician whose work laid the foundation for modern GPS technology, has died. She passed away

Dr. Gladys West, the pioneering mathematician whose work laid the foundation for modern GPS technology, has died. She was 95.

One of Freya's cats perhaps..?

Cat wandered in front of the camera during the #aurora long exposure

Histories of Capitalism and Race in the Middle East and Indian Ocean seminar series, Autumn 2022 — Walter Rodney Collective for Historical Research Nada Moumtaz, God's Property; Alden Young, Transforming Sudan; Muriam Haleh Davis, Markets of Civilization; Aaron Jakes, Egypt's Occupation; Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Fluid Jurisdictions; Johan Mathew, Marg...

Honored to be speaking February 12th in London as part of the Histories of Capitalism and Race series of the SOAS Walter Rodney Collective Spring 2026 series. www.soas-walter-rodney-collective.com/events. www.dukeupress.edu/on-the-semic....

The risks of digitalisation: Implications for access to food in England Join us as we explore how digitalisation policies help and hinder access to food for marginalised communities.

Is digitalisation helping or hindering food assistance? Come to this event for insights into this crucial question.

12 February, 6-8pm at SOAS, University of London.

Further details and registration here:
www.eventbrite.com/e/the-risks-...

Thrilled to unveil our first-ever digital exhibition on our brand‑new digital library — celebrating 50 years of the Swire Archive at SOAS. A milestone worth exploring! https://soas.quartexcollections.com/john-swire-sons-exhibition

Food History Launched at the IHR in 2017, the Food History Seminar provides an inclusive setting in which food historians, academics and experts working in related fields.

The schedule for the Food History seminar series (Institute of Historical Research/University of London) is out: www.history.ac.uk/seminars/foo...
Great program for everyone interested in food studies from a historical perspective!

Historical Food Preservation Presented by the New York Botanical Garden’s Humanities Institute and the Huygens Institute for Dutch History and Culture, this monthly seminar series engages with a question that has obsessed humans ...

Sign up now for the @huygensknaw.bsky.social x @nybg.bsky.social Humanities Institute historical food preservation seminar series! It's going to be a lot of online fun with great speakers, every month starting on February 25 with fermentation! Sign up via www.nybg.org/event/histor... #foodhistory