Jane Bottomley

YouTube video by TED This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like | Carole Cadwalladr | TED

So today I found out that my TED talk ‘This is What a Digital Coup Looks Like’ was TED’s most watched talk of the year.

It’s sort of amazing & terrifying. Because this *is* what a digital coup looks like.

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

How it started (quote post)
How it's going (linked article)

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Mamdani: Oftentimes when we win elections, we tell people to go home and just trust us. But the message really has to be that we want you to come along with us… That’s something we’ve been looking to share with New Yorkers: We want to not only win with New Yorkers, but also govern with New Yorkers.

Pastor Black: While I was in the middle of using the words of Jesus, they opened fire on me. It was so clear that they had been so poorly trained, or — the alternative — that they had been deliberately told to escalate violence against peaceful protesters.

Combatting poverty and hunger in this city will take every single one of us. Myself included.

Wild crows are helping clean up cigarette litter in Sweden
A pilot project that uses wild crows and jackdaws to pick up discarded cigarette butts, and the machine releases a small food reward. Cigarette butts make up around 62% of all litter on Swedish streets. #Cigarettes #PlasticPollution #Waste

#Stockholm 💙💙💙

Bevan visiting newly built council estate with local councillors

Born on this day, 1897, Nye Bevan, Minister of Health and Housing when Labour built 805,000 council homes between 1945-51. He believed high-quality council housing should reflect 'the living tapestry of a mixed community'.

My musical tribute to Pauline Collins who has died aged 85. She was brilliant and award-winning in the film Shirley Valentine. But I will always remember her as parlourmaid Sarah Moffit in the 1970s ITV drama Upstairs, Downstairs.

On the other hand, I felt disappointed because I missed out on an opportunity to learn from my professor. I lost a learning moment, the possibility to add a new skill to my repertoire, and the opportunity to feel proud of my work. Most importantly, I watched what I valued in my education slip away. What could have been an insightful and reciprocal conversation turned one-sided and transactional. What could have been a moment of open-ended intellectual inquiry turned into a multiple-choice question. I have had other classes with this professor and appreciated the rich conversations we had in the past. I was hoping for something similar again. It reminded me of Paulo Freire’s theories in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a work that has been engrained in my mind from my writing tutor work. I realized that this interaction followed Freire’s banking concept in some ways: I was deposited an answer to my question without the time to work through it with my professor and truly learn the process of answering this question for myself.

A linguist at UMN shared this with me today, which I thought was a really helpful discussion of genAI in the classroom as a conversation around consent.

refusinggenai.wordpress.com/2025/08/29/a...

“... Drawing on recent popular and academic literature on genAI, we argue that the values embedded in this technology do not align with the values of critical humanities and social science pedagogy, which include originality, academic freedom, creativity, and critical thinking.”

C.S. Lewis responding to a letter from an American schoolgirl asking him for some writing advice.

(Worth reading? ✅️)

😆 🏆

“Billionaires against Mamdani”
“Slow and expensive buses”

Too good

This is what democracy looks like. #NoKings

A screenshot showing cartoon drawings of scientist. All are wearing white lab coats. most are men, any with white or crazy hair. Most wear glasses. Four out of 24 are clearly women, the rest appear to be men. 23 out of 24 look white, and one is sort of blue seems to be not entirely human.

A few years ago I made a slide showing the top 10 results if you search Google Image for "cartoon scientist".
In my slide, 10/10 are white men.
Someone asked if this is still true, so I tried again.
Here below you have 24 images.
20 are men, 4 are women (progress!).
23 are white, 1 is blue 🤔

Headline reads: Altman says ChatGPT will soon allow erotic for adult users.

You gently run your hand through the rack. You can feel it—pure cotton, rich wool, Irish linen. The plump buttonholes are handsewn; the buttons attached with a firm shank. You flip the price tag over. It's affordable

You buy the jacket and go home, which is only 15 mins away. Your apt is $600/month

Xi directs quashing of Chinese feminists even as he praises advances at women’s conference Chinese president is behind patriarchal turn in politics with activists silenced for ‘promoting gender antagonism’ Addressing dignitaries gathered in Beijing on Monday, Xi Jinping praised the “historic achievements” of women’s rights in China. In the past 30 years, the Chinese president said, maternal mortality rates had dropped by nearly 80%, and women were now participating in the project of national governance with “unprecedented confidence and vigour”. Xi was speaking at the global women’s summit, an event on Monday and Tuesday to mark the 30th anniversary of the historic UN’s world conference on women, which took place in Beijing. It was there in 1995 that Hillary Clinton, the then US first lady, delivered her “women’s rights are human rights” speech, lines now often quoted by people in China advocating for women’s rights. Continue reading...

Xi directs quashing of Chinese feminists even as he praises advances at women’s conference

ICE GOONS, laughing and pepper spraying Pastor after shooting him in the face with pepper balls, proceeded to gas the crowd who were trying to protect him.

‘Brummies united against racism’: poster campaign takes on the far right A message of neighbourly solidarity is thriving in Birmingham against a backdrop of racist intimidation When Mus unfurled the leaflet lying on her driveway, she was left shocked, angry and upset. “White Britons are already a minority in London … it is clear that if these trends continue white people will become a minority in Britain,” it read. The leaflet, written by a far-right group, was distributed along her street three years ago in Moseley, a leafy suburb of Birmingham. It went on to blame NHS waiting lists, a shortage of social housing and even traffic on “the rising population”. Continue reading...

‘Brummies united against racism’: poster campaign takes on the far right

Am wondering if all of those suddenly deciding they’re against communities living “parallel lives” might reconsider their support of religious schools? Or indeed private ones?

Swedish Cinnamon Buns Swedish Cinnamon Buns are not radically different from other cinnamon buns (and do see my Norwegian Cinnamon Buns), but they do diverge in one fundamental way: rather than having the fluffiness of, sa...

It’s Kanelbullens Dag, that’s to say, Cinnamon Bun Day in Sweden. And while I mean no disrespect to Norway and Iceland, who also mark this day, it’s Swedish Cinnamon Buns that are #RecipeOfTheDay!
www.nigella.com/recipes/swed...

Excellent!
"We must focus on process over product. We must explore the complex, intricate, dynamic connection between the writing process and the thinking process and reflect on what it means and what it feels like when we outsource these processes."

Thank you Mary

The craft and politics of academic writing in the AI universe Writing lecturers will not reach students by simply talking down AI, but we might reach them by embracing our expertise and engaging in the politics of resistance

Writing lecturers will not reach students by simply talking down AI, but we might reach them by embracing our expertise and engaging in the politics of resistance
northwestbylines.co.uk/news/educati...

Ramón Méndez Galain, the humble professor who turned little Uruguay into a renewable energy giant

Uruguay proves renewable energy isn’t a dream — it’s a choice.

And it’s entirely doable — if politicians have the guts.

A humble professor called Ramón Méndez Galain showed the so-called leaders of Europe and the US how it can be done. 🧵

This is just to say

I have eaten
the swans
that were in
the duck pond

and which
you were probably
saving
for the King

Forgive me
they were delicious
so white
and so necky

#thecampus #timeshighereducation #highereducation #highered | Times Higher Education Jane Bottomley from KTH Royal Institute of Technology asks whether lecturers who resist the influence of AI in academic writing are backward Luddites or defenders of historian E. P. Thompson’s “standa...

Link to my article on LinkedIn. The craft and politics of academic writing in "these times" ...

Naomi Klein on How Egypt’s Extinguished Revolution Continues to Inspire Struggle Worldwide You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, a collection from Alaa Abd el-Fattah published this year by Seven Stories Press, is living history. Many of its words were first written with pencil and paper in a c…

Sharing this excerpt from my foreword to Alaa Abd el-Fattah's extraordinary collection of prison writings, "You Have Not Yet Been Defeated."

Stay tuned...
lithub.com/naomi-klein-...

Egypt's President Sisi pardons high-profile Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, al Qahera news says Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi pardoned high-profile Egyptian-British activist, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, after a lengthy imprisonment and repeated hunger strikes that prompted international pleas for his release, Al Qahera news said on Monday.

Alaa will be free!!!!

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits."

www.computerworld.com/article/4059...