Prof Stephen Wood

Took me a moment…

GALADRIEL (selectively editing the backstory): and three rings were given to the elves, who were barely involved

The housing affordability 'debate' is so stupid. In a nutshell, negative gearing + CGT discounts accelerate price growth. Reforming it won't make houses cheaper, it will just stop continued runaway growth. Building more houses will make houses cheaper, but you need more construction workers.

University dropout inadvertently illustrating the downsides of dropping out

Ashes Hollow

If I had to pick a favourite spot on the Long Mynd it would probably be Ashes Hollow. It’s always much quieter than Carding Mill Valley, so I can explore it at a leisurely pace. Add in a bright blue sky, fluffy white clouds and the Quinny Brook - you couldn’t ask for much better! #Shropshire

Remarkable that this should be the trial that such faith is shown in an unproven technique?

Listening to WIM-FM makes Monday morning better @whatismusicpod.bsky.social

Your neologism is acceptable and I will adopt it forthwith

From a British holiday perspective that’s very late to start drinking…

A careful, quietly devastating review of research on involuntary outpatient treatment. Coercion is being oversold as a way of addressing serious mental illness, and its harms (forcing patients to accept useless or harmful meds & therapies, disempowerment, social disruption, etc) are being downplayed

#OtD 22 Feb 1943 three German White Rose activists, Christoph Probst, Hans and Sophie Scholl, were executed by guillotine for urging the overthrow of the Nazi government. As the blade fell, Hans called out "Let freedom live!". More on anti-Nazi youth: workingclasshistory.com/podcast/72-e...

I kinda hate the "imagine if" gambit, but ffs, imagine if this sort of evidence had been accrued about attacks on synagogues and Jewish members of parliaments. The prime minister and all of officialdom would be bending over backwards (quite rightly) to find the perpetrators.

COMING SOON: AI + Guy™

Is it smarter to have a dumb home? ‘We’ve seen clients unable to flush toilets’ Australia experienced a boom in smart-home technology at the start of the 2020s. Years on, some early adopters are experiencing buyer’s remorse * Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email When the smart home devices Elly Bailey was expecting in the post never showed up at her Gold Coast home, she was frustrated. As a technology reviewer, these products were crucial for her work. When she eventually found the cause, she had to laugh. It wasn’t a sticky-fingered neighbour or a rogue delivery driver causing her to miss parcels, but her smart doorbell – the very thing she’d hoped would prevent missed deliveries, and part of exactly the range of internet-connected devices she was meant to be reviewing. Continue reading...

Is it smarter to have a dumb home? ‘We’ve seen clients unable to flush toilets’

Hmm that sounds like magic, let’s see you do it again!

Man who allegedly threw homemade bomb into Invasion Day rally crowd named The man accused of throwing a bomb at Invasion Day protesters in an alleged terrorism act attack in Perth can be named as Liam Alexander Hall.

40% of WA's prison population being indigenous is a massive failure of policing, racism, lazy politics and a reliance on the carceral state. There are hundreds of cascading consequences we should care about. Liam Alexander Hall's life from now on is not one of them
www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02...

FAO @rincewind.run

Although I’m cis-het myself so have no skin in this game really, I much prefer to hear about the complexity of people rather than assume a simplistic story. Townshend came across as far more fascinating than I had realised

Helpful of this NSW police officer to do away with any pretence of neutrality. Sometimes you just gotta declare loyalty to a foreign state and wear another country’s flag on your uniform.

Reliability of LLMs as medical assistants for the general public: a randomized preregistered study - Nature Medicine In a randomized controlled study involving 1,298 participants from a general sample, performance of humans when assisted by a large language model (LLM) was sensibly inferior to that of the LLM alone ...

LLMs good performance on medical exams does not translate to accurate performance in real-world settings (preregistered n~1,300 study). This can't be explained by current standard benchmarks for medical knowledge & simulated patient interactions.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Wow I’m trying and failing to imagine my mother visiting a tattoo parlour at all, let alone a dingy Neapolitan one!

Hah yes my mother too!

I see Australian police are excited at the opportunity to live up to their reputation

Today's Karl Stefanovic suggested to Minns that Muslims who were praying when police dragged them at the Syd Herzog protest might have been "baiting" cops who should have known the footage could be "weaponised" against them.

This is how media enables rather than challenges abuses of power.

😔

I haven’t taught a class for several years so I nearly fit the mould!

Would it help if I played the dripper role for a bit? For old times sake?

Repost with a photo of yours that would nake a good album cover

Four paintings with stylised flowers in multicolours

Four paintings from tne 'Bush flowers' series, by Raelene Stevens, contemporary Australian Indigenous artist from the Tweed Valley area of NSW #WomensArt

Trans athletes may not have fitness advantage in women’s sport, landmark study finds Findings suggest physical performance in trans women converges toward that of cis women over time

What's that you say!

It was all just fear pushing by bad faith groups and that trans women pose no threat to cisgender women.

www.independent.co.uk/news/science...