Julia Eberlen

Dear All, I am delighted to report to you the first results of an experiment that is being conducted in the tea room of this Department. On 29 August, an Oslo Stainless Steel Cutlery Set (48 Pieces: 12 Knifes, 12 Forks, 12 Tea Spoons, 12 Dinner Spoons) was placed in a drawer in the Departmental tea room. A poster asking not to remove the cutlery from the tea room was attached in a visible location. The original research plan was to monitor (in real time) the disappearance of the cutlery from the tea room and then fit a point/counting process model to the observed data. However, as the research project failed to attract any major grants (and so hiring a research assistant to do the work was impossible), it was decided to conduct opportunistic discrete monitoring only. Here is the first result: sixty days in the experiment, the disappearance rates stand as follows: Knives: 8.3% Forks: 100% Tea spoons: 58.3% Dinner spoons: 41.7% Possible conclusions include, but are not limited to, the following: the people who removed the missing cutlery don’t understand written English; they don’t see forks as a special case of cutlery; forks are needed to do some kind of mathematics; the knives from the set are no good; small spoons are slightly more attractive than the large ones; things left in our tea room tend to disappear even if they are not edible; further research is needed to fully understand the phenomenon. Best, kostya borovkov

happy 11th anniversary to this email sent to all staff at the School of Mathematics and Statistics

Maybe the natural state of forks is "absent"? I'm in my 2nd year of buying 10 forks during "fleamarket season" for the tea kitchen. Everything else is constant (more knives than ever needed, just enough large spoons, not-enough-but manageable quantity of tea spoons), but fork numbers keep going down

Cap for Learning Stranded Knitting pattern by Cynthia Atley Peterson Norwegain earlap cap with optional ear laps.

I love that #petiteknit is getting people to knit, I‘d love it even more if our new friends would be courageous and widen their skills. #tincanknits has great tutorials and patterns, or try this little cap: www.ravelry.com/patterns/lib... trust me, you can do it 🥰

ich verstehe das insbesondere für Inhalte wie z.b. die Sendung mit der Maus überhaupt nicht: was verliert die ARD wenn Kinder im Ausland die Sendung schauen? Ich würde auch freiwillige GEZ zahlen (tue ich für Netflix ja auch), aber dass ist leider nicht möglich

a picture of a cartoon character with the words " ha ha " on it Alt: a GIF of the depressed cartoon character Bernd the bread with the words "Haha We are Bernd, resistance is useless"

FAIR data management: I have talked extensively to researchers about file naming conventions and its benefits, and I understand it is not in any way an exciting topic. But until I no longer receive files CallY_draftX I will keep talking. This is a unique file name on *your* computer, not on mine.

Dear Dr. [redacted], It was nice to meet you at the [redacted]! Thanks for thinking of me as a possible reviewer, as I am interested in the topic. However, I decline to review this manuscript - I often do this in the case of journals published by profiteering corporate publishers. For Nature Communications, Nature Publishing Group charges an outrageous US$6990 to authors that has little to do with higher-quality service or journal processes and lots to do with a legacy first-mover advantage that it uses to exploit academia. This is rentier capitalism. NPG funnels papers they reject from their most prestigious outlets to their newer subsidiary journals such as Nature Communications and Nature Communications Psychology, which academics go along with because they don’t (directly) foot the bill, and because, given the pressure academics are under to publish rapidly, they wish to take advantage of the reviews they may have already received from the higher-tier Nature journal. Because we are now live in a world where most studies can eventually be published somewhere, NPG has been able to exploit this by creating their own lower-tier journals and charging high-aspiration authors for the convenience. This practice conflicts with my interest in universities and funders not wasting their money, which is why I do not wish to support it by contributing to the hundreds of millions of dollars of labor that academics donate to corporate publishers. Instead, I preferentially review, and volunteer as an editor for, diamond open access journals that are free to read and publish in. For various reasons, including combating this strategy by which corporate publishers are extending the era in which they profiteer from university funds, many academics and funders now advocate for the Publish->Review->Curate model, in which academics publish their work immediately (on preprint servers, which prevents gatekeeping by editors), and then get it peer reviewed, preferably through low-cost…

Today's email to an associate editor, declining to review for a big corporate publisher. This one focuses on Nature Publishing Group's practice of funneling rejected manuscripts to their newer journals with hefty APCs.

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

Fits well with positioning themselves as research-only in the beginning: they used data that otherwise wouldn't have been available. Who would have known they would move to for-profit? Now, they use copyrighted content until the the lawsuits are over, by then, their models are well-trained.

so it appears batteries got more expensive since we bought our cargo bike in 2019, and (in my anecdotal mini-survey) the driving factors are more mode choice, better infrastructure and seeing others using them successfully

Yes, and the choice of models, but I guess that’s related (nobody will design more cargo bikes if they cost the same as a decently-sized car). size is a huge factor in a city: no way we could have fit the earlier models in the parking space available, they were either too wide, too long, or both

Maybe we could charge postage per email recipient to highlight the wasted work hours spend reading useless filler adjectives (I’m from Swabia, does it show?)

So it appears we moved from “this could have been an email” to LLM-generated essay-length emails where the receiver spends double the time saved by the sender to identify the relevant information. Can we go back to phone calls please?

Kimmel was a great first step, now let's talk about Karen Attiah

Découvrez ce nouvel épisode sur le langage dans le spectre autistique, écrit par Marine Petit du centre ACTE (Autisme en Contexte - Théorie et Expérience) de l'Université libre de Bruxelles.

Un super épisode à écouter par ici! ⤵️ 🎧
milgram.ulb.be/100g/episode...

📸 Freepik

I agree, sadly. What a wasted opportunity!

I didn’t know that a city as un-edgy as Leuven would even be seriously considered, I thought being a bit of a troubled child was one of the requirements…

Choosing Leuven over #Molenbeek for cultural capital 2030 was the safe option.
Solid, reliable, traditional, unexciting.
Our neighbours across the canal would really have deserved the recognition and a gesture of confidence.

YouTube video by ARTEde Wie schneidet man französischen Käse? | Karambolage | ARTE

As its cheese adjacent, according to this video, germans (tbf, the only reason I would not do this is actually they same as for the cheese) : youtu.be/B-WOJzb93lM?...

Image of labubu doll labeled labubu next to image of spiky labubu doll labeled lakiki

::slowly stands while clapping::

You can use the appeal procedure described here: blog.psyarxiv.com/about-psyarx...

3.2 We do not have to ‘embrace the future’ & we can turn back the tide It must be the sheer magnitude of [artificial neural networks’] incompetence that makes them so popular. Jerry A. Fodor (2000, p. 47) Related to the rejection of expertise is the rejection of imagining a better future and the rejection of self-determination free from industry forces (Hajer and Oomen 2025; Stengers 2018; van Rossum 2025). Not only AI enthusiasts, but even some scholars whose expertise concentrates on identifying and critically interrogating ideologies and sociotechnical relationships — such as historians and gender scholars — unfortunately fall prey to the teleological belief that AI is an unstoppable force. They embrace it because alternative responses seem too difficult, incompatible with industry developments, or non-existent. Instead of falling for this, we should “refuse [AI] adoption in schools and colleges, and reject the narrative of its inevitability.” (Reynoldson et al. 2025, n.p., also Benjamin 2016; Campolo and Crawford 2020; CDH Team and Ruddick 2025; Garcia et al. 2022; Kelly et al. 2025; Lysen and Wyatt 2024; Sano-Franchini et al. 2024; Stengers 2018). Such rejection is possible and has historical precedent, to name just a few successful examples: Amsterdammers kicked out cars, rejecting that cycling through the Dutch capital should be deadly. Organised workers died for the eight-hour workday, the weekend and other workers’ rights, and governments banned chlorofluorocarbons from fridges to mitigate ozone depletion in the atmosphere. And we know that even the tide itself famously turns back. People can undo things; and we will (cf. Albanese 2025; Boztas 2025; Kohnstamm Instituut 2025; van Laarhoven and van Vugt 2025). Besides, there will be no future to embrace if we deskill our students and selves, and allow the technology industry’s immense contributions to climate crisis

2. the strange but often repeated cultish mantra that we need to "embrace the future" — this is so bizarre given, e.g. how destructive industry forces have proven to be in science, from petroleum to tobacco to pharmaceutical companies.

(Section 3.2 here doi.org/10.5281/zeno...)
4/n

if you, too, wonder sometimes whether it is still worth fighting for a better world, the answer is yes:

Can externals come and eat the same dishes? this sounds amazing! Stoemp saucisse/fried egg/nothing has been my favorite regional dish from day 1 (but I'm sure they have the brussels option covered)

Liste of the member universities of the EUTOPIA alliance: Babeș-Bolyai University (Cluj-Napoca) Vrije Universiteit Brussel Ca'Foscari Venice Cergy Paris University Technische Universität Dresden University of Gothenburg University of Ljubljana NOVA University Lisbon Pompeu Fabra University Barcelona University of Warwick

Euroculinary help needed! 🇪🇺🍽️
For an event we're organising, our university restaurant offered to cook dishes typical for the cities of our European partner universities. For all students and staff during a whole week - if we provide ideas.
Any suggestions for dishes from the following ten places? ⬇️

Changes to Moderation at PsyArXiv Preprints As you may be aware, a large number of previously-public preprints posted on PsyArXiv have become inaccessible in the past 24 hours. We know this is disruptive to many people and organizations who …

a bit more info on how to contact the volunteer support, and why this is happening now, is here: improvingpsych.org/2025/08/20/c...

You can email psyarxiv@improvingpsych.org!

A girl in my primary class said to me once "das selbt sich nicht, das gleicht sich" and it marked me so much that I am incapable of using it "wrong", but I also would love to not care about it.

@cecilecolin.bsky.social une petite anecdote sur l'écriture inclusive !

Extrait de l'introduction d'un mémoire de fin d'études : "Bien que ce mémoire aborde la thématique de l'écriture inclusive, il n'est pas rédigé en l'utilisant. Cela ne constitue aucune prise de position sur le sujet, mais est simplement une démarche visant à se conformer aux normes rédactionnelles de l'université, tout en assurant une cohérence stylistique tout au long du document."

Les discours métalinguistiques antilibéraux portent leurs fruits : aucun règlement n'exclut l'utilisation de formes inclusives dans les universités belges, encore moins pour un texte français rédigé dans une université flamande.
Et pourtant on présume l'existence d'une interdiction formelle.

I think they’re here to stay, but it’s worth remembering (and this will become increasingly apparent in the years to come) that, despite some clear benefits, LLMs/large AI models are a net negative for society and it’s not even close.