Liam Hogan

Torture Techniques from CIA Black Sites Were Used at Alligator Alcatraz Amnesty International, interviewing migrant detainees, identifies use of the confinement box. There can be no denying it is a torture prison

They're using the confinement box, one of the most horrific methods of CIA torture in the post-9/11 black sites, against migrants now. This is the direct result of the lack of consequences for the architects of the torture program. Either there will be criminal penalties for this or it will expand.

Gentle reminder that the European Union was established because the first four decades of our 20th century were mostly internecine war and genocide.

Pretty crazy that nearly all of the EU Commission is still on X even as Elon Musk is literally talking about destroying the EU.

You can leave X. It's really not that difficult.

What this shows is how obviously weak their arguments are once they are confronted with any question. Doesn’t even need to be a well developed counterargument, just „but what exactly do you mean by that?“ or „what does that entail?“ This stuff can only survive in its own bubble.

“When participants used ChatGPT to draft essays, brain scans revealed a 47% drop in neural connectivity across regions associated with memory, language, & critical reasoning.

Their brains worked less, but they felt just as engaged—a kind of metacognitive mirage.”🧪

On Environmental Democracy and the Collisons’ “Abundance-Verse” Andrew Jackson 21 November 2025 I. Introduction A clamour of praise greeted John Collison’s “how to get Ireland moving” Op-Ed following its publication in the Irish Times on 25th October: the Irish…

Rebuttal to John Collison's highly contested Irish Times “sermon to the nation", by lawyer @andrewlrjackson.bsky.social. A fact-check pushing back on the tech-optimist, deregulation-first vision - defending environmental law, democratic oversight & evidence-based planning elajucd.com/2025/11/21/o...

The Government Has Cut Air Pollution Funds to Councils by 99% as Illegal Levels of Pollution Shorten Lives New data shows just £1.5 million was given to councils in England in the past year to tackle air pollution - down from a high of £225 million in 2021

New data shows just £1.5 million was given to councils in England in the past year to tackle air pollution – down from a high of £225 million in 2021 @bylinetimes.bsky.social
bylinetimes.com/2025/11/21/t...

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick.

Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

A masked national secret police force using a mix of physiognomy and face scans to more efficiently kidnap children is the kind of nightmare situation Nathan Bedford Forrest might have dreamt up if he somehow had had access to the novels of WIlliam Gibson and Octavia Butler.

Well, it's a little clearer now why billionaires are so invested in technology that produces better written emails.

comic strip with call and response text. who are we? CEOs what do we want? AI! AI to do what? We don't know! When do we want it? Right now!

every company in 2025

YouTube video by QUB Irish Studies Irish Studies Seminar: Hiram Morgan

If you missed Hiram Morgan's talk on 'Anatomies of death: force famine in the Tudor conquest of Ireland', an recording is now available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hAI...

Our landscape and ecosystem has been severely damaged for generations and the process by which it occurs is encouraged and subsidised by the State and the EU, initially to meet self-sufficiency needs, but now in the main because of export profitability. A country as an open air cow factory.

I've lived by Lough Derg all of my life but it was only when I visited Lake Starnberg near Munich a couple of years ago that I realised how incredibly polluted it is. At Starnberg the water was clear. Whereas I grew up believing that these choking algae blooms were somehow "normal".

Our biodiversity is thus at risk of collapsing.

In 2020 the Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland published a survey which estimated that there was a 56% decline in Ireland’s native wild plants over the past 35 years. The plants that feed off the excess nutrients are dominating.

The pollution of our rivers & lakes is truly an all-island problem and is caused by (a) excess runoff of nutrients/fertilisers from ever more intensive and industrialised farming practices encouraged by subsidies (b) poorly treated sewage (only half of which is treated to EU standards in the Rep.)

The private ownership claim to Lough Neagh (Loch nEathach) originates with Sir Arthur Chichester, English commander during the Nine Years’ War and one of the architects of the Plantation of Ulster. There was even an attempt by colonists to rename the lake ‘Lough Chichester’.

Why Elon Musk Needs Dungeons and Dragons to Be Racist The fantastical roots of “scientific racism”

The far right is obsessed with Lord of the Rings and Musk keeps posting about "hobbits" because modern scientific racism owes more to fantasy worlds and gaming systems than genetic science, and they see both as effective mediums for right-wing propaganda www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Rethinking digital skills in the era of compulsory computing: methods, measurement, policy and theory Around the world, digital platforms have become the first – or only – option for many everyday activities. The United Kingdom, for instance, is implementing a ‘digital-by-default’ e-government agen...

Excellent paper on Digital Skills Development which as a by-product highlights the amount of digital support library workers are doing.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Literally streams of people arriving in saying “the bank sent me here to print my statements, &c.” They then have to be assisted to log on to a PC, assisted to find the website, assisted to logon to their account, assisted to send the document to print, assisted with retrieving and paying for docs.

It’s difficult to underestimate the extra burden that this is placing on our public libraries. For example, on a daily basis library workers are now filling the in-person/human service gap that billion euro banking institutions have abdicated from to maximise their profit margins.

A bit of good news: I think you'd all be pleasantly surprised by how resistant the undergrads are becoming to AI. Institutions have lost their minds on this front, but more and more the students themselves are saying "no" to this horribly corrosive technology.

Thanks Sharon 🙂

ChatGPT is blind to bad science - Impact of Social Sciences A new study finds ChatGPT fails to take into account retraction notices across a wide range of research.

"Relying on LLMs for literature summaries without independent verification could lead to the unknowing citation and perpetuation of false information."

#AcWri #SciComm

Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory An intensive international study was coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC

Yet again, we can't afford to let LLMs become a source of epistemic grounding for society.

I’m very late to this but I tried to watch House of Guinness and found it almost impossible to finish the first episode. A Temple Bar fever dream as period drama.

Thus slave trading directly from Ireland was extremely rare, but some voyages made it through. In 1718 the slave trading vessel "Prosperity" commanded by a Capt. Hourigan left Limerick for the Gold Coast (Ghana). At Cape Coast Castle the crew purchased 111 enslaved people.

Due to the imposition of navigation laws, Irish merchants were precluded from directly engaging in the transatlantic slave trade (in Ireland) but many were very successful slave traders in the American colonies and in English and French ports (Liverpool, Bristol, Nantes &c.)

"A Neat beautiful black negro girl, just brought from Carolina, aged 11 or 12 years, speaks good English; to be disposed of." (Dublin, 1768)

“To be sold for account of D.F. a Black Negro Boy aged about 14 yrs, remarkably free from vice, a very handy willing servant" (Cork, 1762)

Enslaved Africans were present/being sold in Ireland at least as early as 1591 (in this case a slave ship had been intercepted by Irish mariners) and there are a number of adverts for the sale of slaves in Irish newspapers in the eighteenth century.