Dr Simon Stewart

It's hard not to notice how the UK "financial papers" POUNCE on temporary reductions in the pound, but then act utterly oblivious to the clear, long-term trends. It's almost like there's an obvious agenda at play.

Movie budgets and video game budgets are bullshit.

The one thing snake oil grifters can help doing is offering panacea.

It's kept me safer in Turkey for a long time. The built-in VPN from pixel devices (7 and later) does the trick for me.

No.

It also makes all of your browsing information private, so your internet usage cannot be directly monitored, so even if your location is not changed, what you are doing with your device cannot be discerned.

Pretty much. I do hope it won't last.

I'm in Turkey right now and a VPN is essential. When I'm back in the UK I think it will be on all the time.

I often forget how useful a VPN can be.

Even here it's not great.

Virtually all children infected with COVID-19 show signs of blood vessel damage, study shows Making matters worse, this sign of cardiovascular damage is being seen in asymptomatic children as well as kids experiencing COVID symptoms.

Children getting blood vessel damage was known from 2020!! #Longcovid All children are at risk. Each reinfection carries cumulative risk of damage. studyfinds.org/children-wit...

Many of us "cannot live with it". It can and will cause irreparable harm and/or kill us.

And when I say many of us, that includes many who don't realise, or refuse to believe this.

Frozen grapes on a hot day. Elite snack.

Lawyers warn Starmer recognising Palestinian state could break international law Sir Keir Starmer says the UK will recognise a Palestinian state in September if conditions are not met.

www.bbc.com/news/article... "Distinguished lawyers". That's bullshit, and what they are saying is bullshit.

That's just noise coming from a face.

I look forward to the trend of cartoonish facial expressions on YouTube thumbnails coming to an end. There are only so many performatively shocked/surprised/mildly annoyed/excited faces I can take in a given day.

I hope that dragon is well trained 😊

And this is exactly why we need to reject the "embrace AI" rhetoric.

it isn't AI
it's a glorified autocomplete
it's predictive text
it isn't intelligent
it does not think
therefore it does not make things up
it just posts text slop that pattern matches the ones & zeroes it sees that the user posted based on other ones & zeroes it scraped from its plagiarism library

IMMEDIATELY* going into my collective action lecture

*Once I'm back from annual leave.

A year since the wave of riots in which hotels housing asylum-seekers were attacked. Our study examined events in three locations, finding only limited evidence of intentions to protest.
@qeios.bsky.social

Funded by @ukri.org
@behaviourresuk.bsky.social

www.qeios.com/read/17ASAP

And the idea of "banning VPN services" is possibly one of the most pig ignorant things to come from this whole catastrophe.

It's getting to the point where I'm seriously considering keeping "That's bullshit" in my clipboard to paste as needed.

The UK online safety act is useless, and in no way fit for purpose. Please, @teamlabouruk.bsky.social, stop letting people cobble together laws about which they have not the first clue! Ideologically driven vibes help nobody.

*So* much research starts with difference-based questions and researchers' categories/assumptions - helping to feed or legitimise communication myths and stereotypes. But the evidence about what people say/do in actual non-lab non-post-hoc accounts of interaction shows something else entirely #EMCA

Cf. psychology.

The first research skill we tend to teach our students is how to do a t-test. I wonder has anyone ever traced how that shapes students' subsequent understandings of what psychological research *is*.

@teamlabouruk.bsky.social It's not complicated: Recognise Palestine now.

Look at the rise of measles in England and ask yourself: have we learned a single thing from Covid? | Frances Ryan People grow complacent about vaccines precisely because they are so effective. What happened to collective responsibility, asks Guardian columnist Frances Ryan

'We also know the way to achieve a solution: a public health campaign for immunisation; vaccinations in the community; and a culture of collective responsibility to protect one another.'

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Two words: Prompt injection.