Ian Brooks

I admire your dedication and planning...I tend to often just pick the next book via some weird free-association prompted by what I'm reading now.

The correct answer is 'neither, they are both non-existent papers hallucinated by the AI'

I don't think the detection tools are robust enough, and have a tendency to flag false-positives...particularly on work from the neuro-divergent.

But sod it, eh. If they use it, they'll learn less, and one day it will come back to bite.
I marked an exam resit obviously from an AI...marked straight, it failed even more badly than the first attempt, by a student who didn't come to any lectures or do any work.

Because it is difficult/impossible to identify if it has been used. I must allow it, but specify the limits of use. Which is logically inconsistent, if hard to tell ANY use, doubly hard to tell if it's used a little bit outside specified limits.

Excellent, and sort of scary*, thread.

*sitting here in a university where I am told I can NOT forbid the use of AI in any assessment submitted electronically. Next year's exams will be back to in-person, locked in a room, pen and paper.

He was. Very supportive of other artists, and very generous with his time & knowledge, always happy to answer questions and offer advice. A joy to talk to over a glass of wine or two.

Thank you, high praise! Norman is much missed.

Here's an idea: rather than burning a trillion on AI, why don't we spend it on teen scientists instead, since they apparently deliver faster than the machine?

Ah, wonderful stuff. I was at that gig, and it might just be my favourite ARC album (though it's hard to choose)

I want to suggest that we try to get ‘runctitional’ in to the dictionary by using it as an adjective for academic papers using AI. e.g. A reviewer might say ‘This paper has too many runctitional features to merit publication.’ #AcademicSky 🧪

nausea

Wow. BBC journalists are now not even allowed to report the censored line from my Reith Lecture, that Trump is “the most openly corrupt president in American history.”

You can hear how carefully they’re forced to tiptoe around it. So chilling...

Photo of a book on desktop. The cover is green with gold dotted lines and white text: Rebecca Solnit - No Straight Road Takes You There - Essays for uneven terrain.

Highly recommended - No Straight Road Takes You There by @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social

Generative A.I., the thing that drives our whole economy right now, is a perfect metaphor for the abject failure of imagination on the part of the powerful. Generative A.I. has no imagination and offers no new insights. It's a mere predictive engine that uses statistics to find the most likely next thing. What's the next word in a sequence, the next pixel in a picture? This is the opposite of imagination, which is so often about finding the least likely thing, the startling incongruity. I worry that so many of us are outsourcing our imaginations and our whole creative selves to these stochastic parrots.

Excellent speech by @charliejane.bsky.social about imagination in service to society. Great stuff.

buttondown.com/charliejane/...

that's a permanent state of affairs round here 😁

and...the new Philip Pullman, Margaret Atwood's 'Book of Lives', new Ben Myers...

Confirmed world record. #Hurricane #Melissa produced a wind gust reading of 252mph. A Hurricane Hunter dropsonde recorded this gust at 657 feet above the sea, breaking the old record of Typhoon Megi (248 mph in 2010). #wx

thank you!

Thank you!

When Tommy Robinson is celebrating your policies it is time to take a long hard look in the mirror and then quit politics forever.

Monochrome etching of a snow covered mountain seen across a glacier.

This one's off to the Yorkshire Artist's Winter Show at the Saltaire Gallery, Nov 20 - Feb 22.
Mount MacArthur, aquatint etching, 30.5x28.5 cm, edition of 15.
Named for British yachtswoman Ellen MacArthur, the peak lies at the head of the Heaney Glacier on the island of South Georgia.

Wensleydale was robbed!

This lab is key for tracking deadly waves. Its sensors are about to go offline. After NOAA cut funding to the lab that’s been monitoring seismic activity for more than 25 years, nine stations tracking tsunami-causing earthquakes for the agency will go offline by the end of the mo...

NOAA cut funding to the Alaska Earthquake Center, directed by my friend Mike West. As a result, seismic monitoring by nine stations in Alaska tracking tsunami-causing earthquakes will go offline by the end of the month. This endangers people in Alaska, Hawaiʻi, and other parts of the Pacific.

well...sometimes I might use hardcopy, though not so much these days (except proof reading my own manuscripts...hard copy, coffee, red pen).

no, no...figres all at the end so you can keep a figure in view while scrolling text. And find it quickly when it's cited again 10 pages later.

Soft, sepia toned etching of a snow covered moor. The image is split into two by the curve of a hillside, below is almost all bare snow, with a few shadows of broken stone walls. The upper half is trees and drystone walls, fading into the distance below a featureless grey sky.

The etching from the first image, framed with a wide white mount and black wooden frame. It sits on a pine shelf, various small skulls sit around it, and along with a glass jar of feathers.

New etching - "Looking Back To Stanbury" - 13x14 cm, edition of 15. Haworth moor covered in snow. No 1/15 is framed up and heading to the Zillah Bell Gallery for their winter exhibition.

Amazon is helping fund a $300 million build of a ballroom for the White House.

Independent bookstores are donating to food banks and organizations that help with food insecurity.

They are not the same.

UK immigration policy directly undermines its R&D policy. Joined up government? This incoherent policy soup is a shambles.

US climate activists condemn 18-month jail term for nonviolent art museum protester ‘It’s hard to fathom how a peaceful protester can receive more prison time than many of the insurrectionists,’ said one researcher, of Timothy Martin’s sentence

Unconscionable that a non-violent advocate for climate justice gets a jail sentence when the perpetrators of the climate crisis and fossil fuel executives get raises and promotions.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Another one bites the dust. When I expressed my professional concerns at issues in the science unit and where it was headed, I was quickly terminated. Public service broadcasters have a remit; we should hold them to it