Dr Pen

BBC resignations are result of internal ‘coup’, says former Sun editor David Yelland says Tim Davie and Deborah Turness were undermined by people close to BBC board

for anyone curious about what the hell is going on at the BBC, you might want to read this.

#bbc #bias #coup #bbcpoliticalenemies #uknews #ukpol

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/nov/10/bbc-resignations-internal-coup-says-former-sun-editor-david-yelland

How many stupid LLM tricks must we read about. Neither the “researchers” (quotation marks _definitely_ required) nor the “tech journalist” author realise that robot planning is like a 50-year old field with people earning PhDs and spending entire careers on it. The Mars fucking Rover does not […]

Publishers are selling papers to train AIs — and making millions of dollars Generative-AI models require massive amounts of data — scholarly publishers are licensing their content to train them.

The academic publishing industry is now open to AI - it's feeding academic IP to big AI firms and most of the deals are confidential so you'll never know if they're regurgitating your work and you will not be able to opt out except by not publishing at all. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The big new shift is handing over those research archives to the AI industry for model training. If Robert Maxwell was the media magnate who massified academic work in for-profit journals, then Sam Altman et al are AI empire builders raiding those archives to generate value from derivative products.

If the historiography is correct then academic publishing has been a massive industry for 70 years, driven by mega media empires. They constructed and own the knowledge infrastructures in which we built our scholarly archives. ...

Yes, academic publishing is surely an industry but is getting worse

"... in the boom years after the second world war, entrepreneurs built fortunes by taking publishing out of the hands of scientists and expanding the business on a previously unimaginable scale" www.theguardian.com/science/2017...

If we only assess AI in education via the gaze of the psy-sciences - as marginally statistically significant learning gains (or not) measured from constant live experiments on computers in classrooms - then we'll miss much else about what really matters about becoming educated.

Maybe I'm missing something but is it actually even *meaningful* if AI can improve measurable learning performance by a few standard deviation points? This leaves me so cold as an account of learning, even leaving aside all the *other* problems with AI in schools that learning science often ignores.

A morning question: have you had covid? If so, how many times (including when you thought you might but didnt do tests). Just curious. You may not wish to share this kind of information, in which case, interesting to know reasons why ppl wouldnt share this info.

#covid #uk #usa #health

I’m thinking of a family friend who made several fortunes. Including as the first investor in Bob’s Big Boy. At his funeral, there were endless stories of all the ways he had helped people. Almost no one who knew him knew any of it because he’d never announced it. Paying entire college tuitions […]

When Google sends you on an adventure… but the locals say turn back now!

Literature Is Not a Vibe: On ChatGPT and the Humanities | Los Angeles Review of Books Rachele Dini discusses OpenAI’s “A Machine-Shaped Hand” and an academic sector in crisis.

Bit late to this but it's such a clever piece of AI criticism, developing a literary critique of Sam Altman's auto-metafiction story as a way to explore the grave threats to the "intellectual infrastructure" of the humanities - and HE more broadly - posed by AI lareviewofbooks.org/article/lite...

Tech tip that some of you may know. If youre using DocFetcher for search of document folders, you can search markdown files and see the preview (ie your Obsidian repos), just add the md extension to the plain text field when you first create an index. 😎

NB DocFetcher works on Linux, Mac or PC […]

"AI agents will poison years of learning analytics research."

Great point. Where are the learning analytics folks at on this stuff?

"If we do not act, we risk seeing the development of a fully automated loop in which assignments are generated by AI with the support of a LMS, AI-generated content is submitted...on behalf of the student, and AI-driven metrics evaluate the work" www.mla.org/Resources/Ad...

The Latest Front in the Battle for Academic Integrity: Initial Thoughts in Response to the Rise of AI Agents - Blog | Anthology AI Agents are reshaping education—undetectable, unstoppable, and controversial. Discover why higher ed must rethink integrity and assessments in this new AI era

Here's the infuriating text if you can bear to read the source yourself community.anthology.com/public/blogs...

The most infuriating thing I've read lately is the response by Anthology to "AI agents" recognizing they're a huge problem for education then pivoting to "blocking AI in the classroom is extremely difficult, and institutions will see best results by adapting their pedagogical approach to the AI era"

Just your occasional reminder that companies Do. Not. Need. To. Grow.

They can stay small, do good business, and make good profits, and any investors can be secure in the knowledge that their money is safe and that they will be paid out dividends every year.

Many really good businesses have […]

A box for the Acer Revo 2012

A box for the Acer Revo 2010.

Im cleaning out boxes and going through old computer kit. Ive got 2 old Acer Revos, (win 7 net tops), 2010 and 2012. Is there any market for this stuff? Resale on eBay isnt great but maybe computer museums might want them. They're in fantastic condition (with […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

"Universities are currently paying these SaaS providers and their investors twice, first with large subscription fees and again with access and aggregation power over large troves of data produced by members of their campus communities."

Matt maps an alternative pathway for edtech in HE here ⏬️

Shoutout to #fdroid apps for those on Android. Three apps I super recommend:

1. Voice Recorder: the best VR I ever used, by a mile. Great MP3 quality
2. Transistor: A very efficient no fuss internet radio app. Quick connection, tidy.
3. Showcase: the best watchlist app I ever used, links to […]

Oxford Review of Education Special Issue: Knowledge crises and democratic deficit in education. Guest Edited by Gemma Moss and Jo-Anne Baird. Volume 51, Issue 6 of Oxford Review of Education

The "knowledge infrastructure crisis" paper is part of this special issue on various "knowledge crises" and "democratic deficits" in contemporary education -all of it just published together in Oxford Review of Education www.tandfonline.com/toc/core20/5...

Knowledge infrastructure crisis: digital democratic deficits and alternative designs for education The production and circulation of knowledge in education increasingly depends on large-scale digital infrastructures. In this article we provide a critical review of the transformation of the conte...

New paper just out on how changing sociotechnical systems of knowledge production and access - platforms, the cloud, AI - pose profound challenges to educational practice and research doi.org/10.1080/0305...

Good new open access book out: '**Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons'** argues that the move to open access should focus less on the free accessibility of research outputs and more on who controls the publications and infrastructures for scholarly communication […]

#SteadySupporter

#Deepfakes sind eine wachsende #Bedrohung, da sie täuschend echt wirkende #Fälschungen ermöglichen.

Können Menschen, auch bei Vorwarnung, #Deepfakes von echten Videos unterscheiden? #Wissenschaftler sind dieser Fragestellung nachgegangen, denn wenn #Fälschungen das Internet […]

This is why we can't have nice things.

I wave the white flag in the battle with the bots. I thought the IP blocking would do it, but it it was just a blip, we're back to a request for a zip file every 3 seconds.

All I have left is putting the entire code repository behind a password, which I […]

Another exciting tech question for the Masto massive.

I need advice for Wordpress[com] assistance. I have a friend who is locked out of their site - theyve had it for a long time but recently got locked out and cant recover it bc they dont have any proof its their account. Does any Wordpress […]

hello F-droid people. Id like to try to install Transistor radio app on an old Samsung A3. But, I cannot get F-droid or F-droid basic to work. They throw a javascript trust type error and wont populate the apps. I tried downloading the Transistor apk and installing directly but errors happen and […]

#Chatbots Are Pushi ng Sanctioned Russian Propaganda | @WIRED

ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Grok are serving users propaganda from Russian-backed media when asked about the invasion of Ukraine, new research finds.

https://www.wired.com/story/chatbots-are-pushing-sanctioned-russian-propaganda/

Couldve sworn I saw a whole bunch of posts last night from @benpatrickwill.bsky.social talking about the selling of academic publishing to AI crawler bot 'training sets' but they all seem to have disappeared. Was I imagining it?
@benpatrickwill.bsky.social #academia #academicchatter #research […]