Ian Graham

A serving set mocked up as a Turing test. Don't ask why.

These Tureen tests are getting crazy

Mostly so that they can say they have in their annual review, or maybe the same reason they buy lottery tickets.

YouTube video by MarukuMedia Tony Harrison - v. (1/2)

Tony Harrison RIP. He was so much more, but the anger, the energy, the thrill of V back in the day was really something
youtu.be/7if44iVP3_I?...

YouTube video by Ton Har Blasphemers' Banquet - Tony Harrison BBC

"Voltaire, me, Molière, Omar Khayyám, Lord Byron, and that - that's Salman Rushdie's chair."

The Blasphemers' Banquet, of 1989

Remembering Tony Harrison

Background: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bla...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=p19s...

Amazing reader of his own verse. Very sad. There should be a special moment of mayhem at Leeds V Bournemouth

I'd stick with the rope.

Doors Open Day 2025 at Edinburgh Futures Institute - Edinburgh Futures Institute This September, explore the fascinating history and exciting future of this special Edinburgh landmark.

⭐Doors Open Day 2025 at Edinburgh Futures Institute⭐
🗓️ Saturday, 27 September | 10:00 to 16:00

Join us on Doors Open Day 2025! Meet our staff, students and partners and discover how they are shaping better futures for all.

👉 Free entry! See the full programme efi.ed.ac.uk/event/doors-...

All it needs is enterprise.

Lots of things are not impossible... from this side of the border the marginally more probable impossibility would be Reform/SNP in return for another referendum.

Producer.ai | AI Music Agent Create the music you imagine. Producer.ai is a generative AI instrument for creating, remixing, and sharing studio-quality songs from simple prompts. Swap stems, extend tracks, and personalize your so...

I played with Producer.ai turning Scots poems into songs and the most impressive thing was it scans the lyrics correctly with the correct Scots pronunciation which most Scottish people now struggle with.

I am sure Eliot would have thought it better than Cats.

The phrasing is excellent, and it does seem to be taking account of the sounds of the words and the rhythm of the words but the backing rhythm is very monotonous.

Why is it always a children's book? When do we get a celebrity who decides to edit a Festschrift or prepare an annotated edition of a primary source text?

He might query the sample size...

I loved to see the sheep, though they always seemed to be a bit anxious. They knew that this was not normal.

A fine album

Under FOI I've obtained a copy of the unpublished full strategic review on electoral registration and conduct, which informed some of the govt plans announced last month on reforming electoral law. It has a substantial section on overseas voters which seems to have been completely ignored.

Good to see that they are not going to stop dead people voting by post. An effect of the proposed postal vote changes will be the postal vote process to becoming more computerised, and more operated by contractors, so removing votes of people who completed forms then passed away is feasible.

STEM-in-Society Programs Deserve Institutional Support STEM-in-society programs have proven their utility and have never been more needed—but they are in jeopardy nationwide.

Did you know Bluesky's founder has an #STS degree? In a new article, Erin Burkett and I explain why, despite current threats to humanities and social science, "STEM-in-Society programs" like STS are more important than ever. And we guide funders and university leaders how to better support them.

Annie and Lakeesha struggle in school. AI teacher assistants treated them very differently. A Common Sense Media study found that prominent teacher assistants that use AI generated recommendations that appeared to be rooted in racial stereotypes based on students’ names. About a third of tea...

"Asked to generate intervention plans for struggling students, AI teacher assistants recommended more-punitive measures for hypothetical students with Black-coded names and more supportive approaches for students the platforms perceived as white" www.chalkbeat.org/2025/08/06/a...

If AI is being used extensively in office jobs, then should we be letting students use AI in the classroom?

No - here's why.

With reference to 3 papers that show what you do in a job isn't the template for what you do in the classroom.

substack.nomoremarking.com/p/education-...

And yeah, I think that the DOGE folks at agencies kind of had unilateral decision making authority in a way that's kind of scary because they both had the we should come into government and do common sense things mindset without realizing that the most common sense things are actually the hardest to accomplish for very specific reasons.

Coding interviews from people who left government earlier this year, and this is a fantastic quote in response to a question about what DOGE tech folk don't understand.

It’s time to retire the word ‘technology’ The word spans too much and clarifies too little

on.ft.com/45cJxz9 It’s time to retire the word ‘technology’

Axon’s Draft One is Designed to Defy Transparency Axon Enterprise’s Draft One — a generative artificial intelligence product that writes police reports based on audio from officers’ body-worn cameras — seems deliberately designed to avoid audits that...

BIG NEWS: After a long investigation we have uncovered that Axon's Draft One--a program that uses genAI to write police reports based on body-worn camera audio--is *designed* not to retain the data on which parts were written by an officer and which parts were written by AI. A looming disaster.

Kathleen Jamie | At the Canongate Wall The stone suits the poetry. Or perhaps it’s the other way round. I think poetry suits stone, more than it suits paper...

‘Stone suits the poetry. Or perhaps it’s the other way round. I think poetry suits stone, more than it suits paper, certainly more than it suits a screen. The poetry releases something latent in the stone.’

Kathleen Jamie visits the Canongate Wall in Edinburgh: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ju...

I'm not sure that we want to encourage people to write on books.

My cartoon in this weeks @newyorker.com

Passed by the rickshaw near Currie yesterday. Great contraption and good to see your Aunty Pat having such a great time.

The thread about the Salisbury Arms and the famous literary association that never was My eye was caught by a claim in local news that the author Arthur Conan Doyle once frequented the Salisbury Arms. In the best spirit of Sherlock Holmes, this thread sets out to thoroughly and factu…

This article from @threadinburgh.scot is a jolly read. But when you get to the end, you realise that it is making a point that should worry all of us, even if we are not interested in the history of large suburban villas in #Edinburgh .

threadinburgh.scot/2025/06/27/t...