Liz Renner

Evidence for the earliest hominin use of wooden handheld tools found at Marathousa 1 (Greece) | PNAS The Middle Pleistocene (MP; ca. 774 to 129 ka) marks a critical period of human evolution, characterized by increasing behavioral complexity and th...

It was such a privilege to get to work on this amazing material from an incredible site and team - now the earliest handheld wooden tools in the archaeological record, taking evidence back to 430,000 years! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I 💙 this bot

This government clearly don't really understand the complexity or the danger of the situation. They show no sign of beginning to understand, and every sign of asking the monorail salesman how public transport should work. It's going to be an uphill struggle, but don't leave this to politicians.

I was interviewed for two documentaries about "AI" that both premiered at Sundance this year: @ghostdoc2026.bsky.social ("Ghost in the Machine") and "The AI Doc: How I Became an Apocaloptimist". As a pair, these films are a study in contrasts.

Another long 🧵>>

Looking for #culturalevolution methods advice. We will run a survey to estimate the degree and nature of #sociallearning in a local population (a US country).

Are there any standard survey instruments or social psychology scales for this?

I can find only partly relevant stuff. Please help!

Academic publishing is broken due to for-profit actors. Time to explore alternatives as researchers → A Diamond Open Access conference, Feb 5-6, 2026 in Nijmegen NL.

Free registration (limited seats): horizondiamond.nl

Let's build a sustainable publishing infrastructure together.

1. From lung cancer to climate change, capitalist governments are notoriously slow to recognize and remedy the negative externalities generated by corporate activity.

Generative AI is no exception. Large language models are proving a disaster in numerous spheres of public life.

correctly South African, or correctly rest-of-the-Anglosphere?

How many LLMs can be persuasive paper are gonna be published in top journals before we remember that yes, people can be persuaded by text?

And where was this thinking amidst all the hot takes that social media and misinfo has no causal effects?

OK i guess the *freeholder, idk, all these terms are confusing

Fuck yeah! Fuck. Yeah. Just imagining the tears my leaseholder is crying rn... 😊

‘Keep Carleton Human’: Carleton University staff rallies to push for protections from A.I. At Carleton University, CUPE 4600 -— the union representing Teachers Assistants, Research Assistants, and Contract Instructors — held the ‘Keep Carleton Human’ rally on Thursday, fighting for clear-cu...

> “This could become a school where ChatGPT writes the papers, ChatGPT grades the papers, rich kids buy an experience, and nobody gets an education,” says Ariel Becherer, a PhD student

www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/artic...

it's fucking relentless

Maybe they're starting to feel the start of that financial death roll...

Screenshot of a preprint titled “Digital Behaviourism: A functional approach to behaviour in digital environments”

Our preprint has evolved!

v2 of “Digital Behaviourism” is out now with a new title, new co-authors, and a deeper dive into the behavioural concepts that shape our online lives.

It’s time to move beyond “screen time” and focus on function of online behaviours.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

In Mad Men, at one point Don Draper goes to see the doctor, who is like "Don, you're 36." and the audience is supposed to go 😬 the smoking and drinking must have aged people in the 1950s/60s becaue he looks a lot older? this year is about to have the same effect on all of us.

Christ, it's Monday morning and I'm exhausted.

How long is it gonna take til I'm recovered from the January assessment period? My best guess is April.

Germany faces questions over publishing agreement with MDPI Landmark deal should raise questions about publisher’s practices on peer review, citations and special issues, say research sleuths

Plus, MDPI/Frontiers spend big money to convince governments they're not just legit, but leaders. Frontiers just sponsored WEF Davos, MDPI signed a deal with German national science agency.

🇩🇪+MDPI: www.timeshighereducation.com/news/germany...
Davos: sciencehouse.frontiersin.org/event/945d08...

2/3

"Peace isn't what you ask for
when the boot is already
on someone's neck"

Oh just gonna wrap my lil tail around my pal's neck... 😍

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickerin brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

🥃

Quickly telling someone you’ve liked something they’ve done (e.g. telling a writer you like their writing, or a researcher you like their research, or a teacher you like their teaching) has a phenomenally high effort-to-impact ratio.

Burns supper - Wikipedia

Presumably enough time to prepare for your Burns supper! It's today

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burns_s...

January 6th was not sophisticated, and it almost worked.

Paranthropus in the Afar region 2.5+ Ma

When Google brought its monorail to my campus Plus some things to ask when they come to yours

Hey so here's a little retrospective on Google's fall visit to my campus. open.substack.com/pub/kconrad/...

Remember that a large part of the adtech ecosystem is school data. Every school app is full of adtech. Or sells on data.
Same with your car data too

Switching off cookies or using a private browser won’t save us when schools are selling us out

A picture of a hill in the distance, surrounded by clouds with the sun glowing from behind. In the foreground are some fields and stone walls

local hill creating its own weather system

This university is blackmailing staff by threatening to artificially suppress their pay and deny them a bonus if they refuse to accept a much worse pension.

it is funny how all the fictional monsters we imagined taking over the U.S. for the last 30 years are objectively better people than the current regime. Give me Skeletor, please. Cobra Commander wants to run shit? He can hardly be worse than what we're rockin' today. It's worth a shot!