We are now inviting teams and individuals to sign up as volunteers for our Caring Christmas Trees collection points across Edinburgh, Glasgow, Lothians and Fife!
💚❤️

Pick your location and sign up at https://www.caringchristmastrees.com/volunteer
Thank you!! 🎄

Learning technologists - what's the most annoying thing about working with academics/what don't we understand about your job that you wish we did?

I am writing a blog for #ALTC25, be as honest as you like 😅

Please share!

We have a number of fully funded PhD studentships in "Designing Responsible Natural Language Processing". I'm a possible supervisor & I'd be keen to support projects on sociolinguistics-AI, e.g., accent bias in AI, language+gender/sexuality+AI.

www.responsiblenlp.org

Ok, did not expect “The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe” to feel quite so relevant to this moment.

Here’s Edmund, deciding to side with the leader who he’s been told disappears people.

We banned a guy on the Steam forums for repeatedly saying there were “too many women” in our game

So he flipped his positive review to negative

Still totally worth it

We welcome the news Israel & Hamas have agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza. It offers the people in Gaza respite from the relentless bombardment, displacement & deprivation.

This is good news for the hostages while also recognising the massive scale of aid that is now needed in Gaza.

Thank you for sharing this! I've passed it along to other volunteers at the charity "Tap into IT". We aim to reduce digital exclusion by helping older people with IT issues. Often simple things make a big difference, like increasing the font size on a mobile phone.

train pals, do trains in the UK have to sound the horn at every station and level crossing?

🚫 No more PBSAs in Leith.
Leith Central Community Council has agreed its final position on Purpose-Built Student Accommodation (PBSA).

Leith already has 2/3 of all PBSA beds in Edinburgh — 6,332 out of 9,873.

You can also farm other stuff on solar farms.

You can raise sheep on them and the sheep keep the grass down around the solar panels, reducing maintenance costs - and the sheep can use the panels for shelter.

Over 40% of corn grown in Indiana is used to make ethanol that cars burn. One acre of corn yields about 16,500 vehicle-miles per year of ethanol, which sounds high until you realize that one acre of solar yields about 2,700,000 vehicle-miles per year: 16,000% more driving for a given plot of land.

I reckon colloquially "Bingo card" now means "things we want to look clever for predicting would be mentioned" more than it means "a square of numbers to be used to play the game Bingo".

Excited about our @adascot.bsky.social event tomorrow afternoon: Robotics & Beyond: Women and NB Meetup ada.scot/edinburgh-na... Not too late to register. 3pm Merchiston.

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

When you could code silly quizzes on Facebook, it was FULL of "what would you be in medieval times?!" etc.

I made one that nearly always answered "died as a child", "died in childbirth", "lived and died as a servant"

People got SUPER mad with it.

Everyone assumes they'll be at the top of the tree

Just occurred to me that “stay tuned“ is one of those phrases we’ll have to explain to kids, because while the semantic meaning stays, the literal meaning is lost to them.

It's increasingly perplexing that DWP aren't prioritising improving their stats to better reflect the move from legacy benefits to UC.

Until then, we'll keep getting misleading headlines like 'Long-term sickness claims rising by 5,000 a day' - you can't blame journalists when the stats are so bad!

J'ai une butternut dans ma cuisine qui a connu 3 gouvernements.

My favorite new initialism: AI;DR I'll be using this a lot from here on out.

People in the U.K. broadly have no idea how difficult, expensive, and time consuming it is to bring a non-citizen spouse to the U.K. (I know the US is not as easy as people think on that score either, but it is nonetheless much less bad than us).

if you ask the average American to describe what they think a tougher immigration system should look like, they will describe something a degree of magnitude softer and more generous than the current reality.

The lesson here is that people are both better and dumber than they appear.

Unexpected bonus of a #NeverTooLate PhD; GP lined me up with a full set of going to Uni jabs - which I had not been eligible for whilst working as a Lecturer!

I tried my GP first, who sent me to the NHS Lothian vaccination enquiries helpline. They were not aware of any kind of push to offer the MMR to people who had (one dose of) single vaccines as children. As I'm not in a vulnerable group, they couldn't offer it.

I wish I'd thought of that in time. I had all the jabs offered to me as a child and had no idea I could have got more as an adult! I tried recently but the helpline said no to the MMR.