Nicholas Allott

Can you spare a minute to help this campaign? Stop Mass Redundancies at Lancaster University – Hold Senior Management Accountable

The situation in many UK universities is awful, but the news coming out of Lancaster is especially bad: 1/4 jobs to go, with senior management either leaving or not taking a pay cut. Please sign and share this petition to support colleagues there: chng.it/X6g46TjMSC

it's a small thing, but I really dislike the word "fisking," which dates back to a right-wing blogger's long line-by-line deconstruction of a (correctly) anti-war column by Robert Fisk in the early aughts

turing.ac.uk using a Cloudflare real human verification check box test?!

Really, Alan Turing Institute?

Be ready to be shocked and offended at university, students told Guidance has been published by the Office for Students on new free speech rules coming into force this year.

*first year lecture, academic strides in*

“right you sickos, im here to tell you once and for all THE FOOTNOTE GOES AFTER THE PUNCTUATION”

*students wail, gnash teeth, vomit*

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

My University has opened a virtual scholar scheme for scholars from Gaza. Please share widely and help stop scholasticide. www.exeter.ac.uk/faculties/ha...

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

I pledge that I will not provide any service to Columbia University. I will not speak at conferences held at or organized by Columbia. I will not publish with Columbia publications or provide peer reviews for them. I will not provide outside tenure evaluations for Columbia departments. I will not contribute in any way to the institution until everyone who is responsible for this week’s shameful decision has resigned, retired, or been fired, and until Columbia repudiates their catastrophic choice.

I wonder if the Columbia leadership realizes (or cares) how much blowback there might be from *within* the academy.

This post, from a Cornell Law professor, is worth reading:

3d.laboratorium.net/2025-07-25-c...

Understanding Gaza's Starvation within Israel’s Campaign Israel’s deliberate starvation of Gaza’s population is a logical conclusion of a campaign aimed at the destruction of life in the Strip, a campaign that many experts view as genocidal.

www.rusi.org/explore-our-...

The Philosophy of Linguistics Cambridge Core - Philosophy of Science - The Philosophy of Linguistics

Get it while it's hot (and free)! cup.org/46WiElu This book tells a story of what if the philosophy of science didn't start with the study of atoms or the cosmos but human language. #philsky #booksky

Plus heavy-duty diplomatic cover e.g. at the UN.

Artificial Stupidity and real hazards - Nearly Legal: Housing Law News and Comment I am more than a little furious. We live in times when far right agitators are stirring up physical violence, and people are getting sucked into internet rabbit holes of conspiracist thinking and outr...

In which I get both furious and very worried about google's AI putting incendiary falsehoods about evicting council tenants to house asylum seekers at the top of the search results. This is dangerous stuff (albeit unintended, though that might be worse).

nearlylegal.co.uk/2025/07/arti...

Ministers urged to help students trapped in Gaza with places at UK universities Forty people who have been offered scholarships unable to travel without biometric data they have no way of getting

The UK government is blocking Palestinian students in Gaza from taking up UK scholarships.

Some have been killed while waiting @theguardian.com

We’ve written to the Home Secretary demanding action and @drjogrady.bsky.social will be on @lbc.co.uk at 4 PM urging the govt to step in.

tr.ee/HjzPtS

Ha! I’d happily work for the DMV in this case, partly because Tesla are evil etc. but also because the basic claim here is right imo. ‘Full self driving’ means able to drive without human intervention - and then there’s an interesting argument that able to drive in turn means able to drive safely.

Interesting thread on an expert witness linguist in a case about Tesla. Seems to be having a hard time. No disrespect to Prof Disner, but I wonder why they didn’t get someone who specialises in semantics and pragmatics.

13. If you can't explain your niche, expert point to a curious and patient lay person, you probably don't understand it well enough. Unless we are talking about linear algebra, or convergence theorems or similar.

We’re Light-Years Away from True Artificial Intelligence, Says Murderbot Author Martha Wells Today’s large language models are hardly related to the kinds of machine intelligence we see in science fiction, according to Martha Wells, author of the Murderbot Diaries series

“A large language model that pattern matches words, sometimes sort of sounds vaguely like it might be talking to you and sometimes sounds like it’s just putting patterns together in ways that look really bizarre—that’s not anywhere close to sentient machine intelligence.”
@marthawells.com Well put.

[Edmund] relaxing [on me] after [I’ve finished] work

4-panel comic. (1) [Person 1 with ponytail flanked by person with short hair and another person speaking into microphone at podium] PERSON 1: In the early 2010s, researchers found that many major scientific results couldn’t be reproduced. (2) PERSON 1: Over a decade into the replication crisis, we wanted to see if today’s studies have become more robust. (3) PERSON 1: Unfortunately, our replication analysis has found exactly the same problems that those 2010s researchers did. (4) [newspaper with image of speakers from previous panels] Headline: Replication Crisis Solved

Replication Crisis

xkcd.com/3117/

The UK did have one standout product that was considered globally valuable- universities- and unilaterally decided to stop providing the product because it was more important to be xenophobic than successful

The quasi-market is destroying everything it touches, esp in England. All the incentives are to game the rankings and take every student you can, without regard to who they are or damage to the whole educational ecosystem. Too late tho: huge damage already done, much more already locked in. (2/2)

Helpful advice

I'm offering a 3-year PhD position with benefits (1-year extension possible). Research topic open but broadly in incremental sentence comprehension. If you're into eye-tracking, even better! No teaching until Summer 2027, light teaching after that (English). Official ad soon. Please share 🙏

UK HE shrinking a live page of all the redundancies and restructures happening across UK Higher Education. Page is updated regularly.

We have now reached 100 universities making redundancies - exactly on the scale and timeframe long predicted here. The madness rolls on and on. The disgusting, disgraceful waste of *your* money never stops.
qmucu.org/qmul-transfo...

This is a really important paper in the debate about optimal Social Democratic party strategies and the type of policy positions that are needed to deliver a "progressive majority". A must read!

Why I returned the Faraday prize to the Royal Society Andrea Sella explains how inaction over Elon Musk's membership motivated him to act

Now I've had a chance to read Andrea Sella's article in @chemistryworld.com on why he returned his Royal Society Faraday Medal. I recommend that you read it too. It's inspiring, though inevitably also disturbing, in these troubled times.
www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/why-...

We should always value when students trust us with their errors. It is the necessary vulnerability that produces real learning.

The picture according to which the movement founded by, inter alia, Russell, Neurath, and Carnap, is by its essence more right-wing than the movement largely deriving from Heidegger never stops amusing me... #Philosophy

YouTube video by The Beach Boys - Topic God Only Knows (Remastered 1996)

RIP Brian Wilson

youtu.be/M0lj3WX_5ps?...

Royal Society prize winner returns award in protest over Elon Musk Andrea Sella is latest scientist to express dismay over UK science academy’s refusal to criticise tech billionaire

UCL's Andrea Sella to return his 2014 Michael Faraday prize to the Royal Society over its continued refusal to censure Elon Musk. Sella won the award as 'an exemplary science communicator' (in the words of the RS's spokesperson). Its return too is exemplary science communication.

an orange and white cat looks proud; presidential

cats don't obey in advance and no one else should, either