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Reposted by Jamie Gilmour

Migrant Voice

@migrantvoice.bsky.social

Earned settlement consultation closes today. If you haven't completed it already please do, and tell this government that migrants should not be treated as second class and magic money trees.
These proposals will destroy lives, and push more people into poverty. Make your voice heard and oppose them

Migrant Voice @migrantvoice.bsky.social · 6d

🚨Earned settlement consultation ends Thursday🚨
Proposed changes risk pushing hundreds of thousands of children into poverty and destroying lives.
We have created guidance on how to tell the government we need a genuinely fairer system.
www.migrantvoice.org/img/upload/J...

www.gov.uk/government/c...

www.migrantvoice.org

February 12, 2026 at 1:26 PM

Jamie Gilmour

@jamiegilmour.bsky.social

"The great loyalty oath crusade" comes to mind.

February 9, 2026 at 4:07 PM

Jamie Gilmour

@jamiegilmour.bsky.social

I've recently had reference letter requests that require the writer to use "they/their" rather than the pronouns the applicant prefers. What's your view?

January 5, 2026 at 8:52 AM

Jamie Gilmour

@jamiegilmour.bsky.social

As a test, I got chatgpt to generate a vba code snippet for a Cholesky decomposition. Then I spent an hour immunising it against rounding errors stopping the input being positive definite, using the skills I developed debugging fortran in the 80s and 90s.

Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · Dec 23

It's funny that everyone who has *ever* programmed, knows how important attention to detail is. Hours wasted because you made a typo, forgot to add a character, etc.

The tiniest thing you literally don't notice is wrong, and your program screams at you and dies.

This is a universal experience.

December 23, 2025 at 2:41 PM

Jamie Gilmour

@jamiegilmour.bsky.social

"Use caution" means be careful, but "Use alarm" doesn't mean be alarmed.

November 24, 2025 at 8:21 AM

Reposted by Jamie Gilmour

Andy Bruce (Reuters)

@bruceandy.bsky.social

Elon Musk is Stevenage

Grok: "If Elon Musk were a British town, I'd say he'd be Stevenage in Hertfordshire. Here's why it fits like a reusable rocket booster"

November 20, 2025 at 9:53 PM

Reposted by Jamie Gilmour

Reiner

@talismanisch.bsky.social

Why do fascists dream of electric people?

October 25, 2025 at 3:54 PM

Reposted by Jamie Gilmour

Philip Gwynne Jones

@pgjonesvenice.bsky.social

Caerffili this morning…

a man with a beard is holding a stick and a sword and says you shall not pass .

ALT: a man with a beard is holding a stick and a sword and says you shall not pass .

media.tenor.com

October 24, 2025 at 6:56 AM

Jamie Gilmour

@jamiegilmour.bsky.social

AI slop - "the human centipede of content". There's an image that will stick with me.

www.theguardian.com/film/2025/oc...

Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda hits out at AI-generated videos of her dead father: ‘stop doing this to him’

Film-maker tells the public to stop sending her videos, saying: ‘You’re not making art, you’re making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings’

www.theguardian.com

October 7, 2025 at 7:02 AM

Reposted by Jamie Gilmour

Anne Lutz Fernandez

@lutzfernandez.bsky.social

Say it often, say it loud:

"Overall, research has not supported the common-sense presumption that digital approaches to schooling are better than non-digital alternatives. At the broadest level, widespread computer use in education has been found to be associated with lower student achievement."

Fit for Purpose? How Today’s Commercial Digital Platforms Subvert Key Goals of Public Education

Digital educational platforms have become ubiquitous in American classrooms, with tools like Google Workspace for Education, Kahoot!, Zearn, Khan Academy, and many others now structuring curriculum, i...

nepc.colorado.edu

September 29, 2025 at 10:18 AM

Reposted by Jamie Gilmour

Dr Lucy Rycroft-Smith

@honeypisquared.bsky.social

I am delighted to announce that my new paper with @darrenmacey.bsky.social is now published, entitled 'All sizzle, no steak: AI tools are not able to act as credible knowledge brokers by summarising evidence in mathematics education'

bsrlm.org.uk/wp-content/u...

A picture of the title and abstract of the research paper: All sizzle, no steak: AI tools are not able to act as credible knowledge brokers by
summarising evidence in mathematics education
Lucy Rycroft-Smith, Darren Macey
University of Cambridge
Current discourse around AI (artificial intelligence) tools suggest they can
offer users quick access to research evidence, with the goal of improving
our practice and policies in mathematics education. However, recent
evaluations suggest that AI often falls short of human capabilities in
accurately summarising complex information, raising questions about
trust, credibility, and reliability. In this paper, we investigate whether AI
tools are able to successfully perform the educational knowledge
brokering function of finding, selecting, and summarising research with
implications for practitioners. In particular, we ask if AI tools are able to
find research papers that actually exist (accuracy), are relevant to the
question (relevancy) and are able to interpret findings into useful,
actionable implications for practitioners (applicability). We find that
generally they are not, and even when they are, they do so in a way that is
so inconsistent as to be a serious threat to credibility.
Keywords: artificial intelligence; AI; knowledge brokering; large language
models; mathematics education

June 9, 2025 at 4:25 PM

Jamie Gilmour

@jamiegilmour.bsky.social

For me, the bigger problem is that assessment focussed pedagogy has created a system where AI could do the marking. "Tell me whether this answer uses the following phrases...".
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Teachers can use AI to save time on marking, new guidance says

For the first time teachers in England are receiving guidelines on how they should and shouldn't use AI.

www.bbc.co.uk

June 10, 2025 at 7:05 AM

Jamie Gilmour

@jamiegilmour.bsky.social

Progress: if your car has keyless entry, you're advised to buy a Faraday pouch and a steering wheel lock with a key.

May 21, 2025 at 9:52 AM

Jamie Gilmour

@jamiegilmour.bsky.social

It strikes me increasingly often that lots of problems in Higher Education come from the tacit idea that we are teaching people how to pass the assessment.

May 21, 2025 at 9:46 AM

Reposted by Jamie Gilmour

Ed Zitron

@edzitron.com

My latest piece goes out either Monday or Tuesday next week, it's called "The Era of the Business Idiot." I believe our society is in the thrall of middle management, and it's turned our economy into a series of symbolic gestures between people that don't really know what's going on.
Wheresyoured.at

But that's not what a manager does, right? Management isn't work, it's about thinking really hard and telling people what to do. It's about making the calls. It's about "managing people," and that can mean just about anything, but often means "who do I take credit from or pass blame to, because modern management has been stripped of all meaning other than continually reinforcing power structures for the next manager up.
This system creates products for these people, because these people are more often than not the ones in power - they are your boss, your boss' boss, and their boss too. Big companies build products sold by specious executives or managers to other specious executives, and thus the products themselves stop resembling things that solve problems so much as they resemble a solution. After all, the person buying it - at least at the scale of a public company - isn't necessarily the recipient of the final product, so they too are trained (and selected) to make cals based on vibes.
I believe the scale of this problem is society-wide, and it is, at its core, a destruction of what it means to be a leader, and a valorization of selfishness, isolationist thinking, turning labor into a faceless resource, which naturally leads to seeing customers in an equally faceless way, their problems generalized, their pain points parts of a powerpoint rather than anything that your company earnestly tries to solve or even really thinks about. People - be they the ones you're paying or paying you - become numbers.
We have created - and elevated - an entirely new class of person, the nebulous "manager," and told decades-worth of children that that's what they should aspire to, that the next step from doing a job is for us to tell other people to do a job, until we're able to one day tell those people how to do their job, each rung on the corporate ladder further distancing ourselves from anything that interacts with reality.
The real breaking point is fairly simple: the higher…

May 16, 2025 at 2:15 AM

Jamie Gilmour

@jamiegilmour.bsky.social

Who thinks it's a good idea to have forms that you can't read to the end of before you start completing them? (I'm looking at you, the designers and users of Microsoft Forms)

February 27, 2025 at 3:42 PM

Jamie Gilmour

@jamiegilmour.bsky.social

The urge to micromanage is strong at all levels in UK academia.

Chris Hanretty @chanret.bsky.social · Feb 18

I thought that performance review via the REF was the price we paid for QR funding. Ex ante *plus* ex post evaluation seems like a lot www.timeshighereducation.com/news/univers...

Quote from a Times Higher article:

However, the freedom of universities to spend their QR block grants – which are awarded based on their performance in the Research Excellence Framework – and the absence of any mechanism to evaluate the effectiveness of this spending are known to have infuriated officials in Whitehall and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

“No one will publicly say it but there is definitely frustration at some research councils about QR – it’s useful to have this kind of flexible funding but we just don’t know if it’s being spent wisely or not,” one source told Times Higher Education, adding: “That’s a real issue when QR is about a quarter of UKRI’s annual budget.”

February 18, 2025 at 9:41 AM

Jamie Gilmour

@jamiegilmour.bsky.social

"Mainlined into veins" like a noxious substance people become addicted to causing personal and societal harm; is that the image they were going for? www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

‘Mainlined into UK’s veins’: Labour announces huge public rollout of AI

Plans to make UK world leader in AI sector include opening access to NHS and other public data

www.theguardian.com

January 13, 2025 at 8:40 AM

Jamie Gilmour

@jamiegilmour.bsky.social

I'm pleased to see that a number of UK Unis have stopped using those "are they in the top 5, 10, 20, 50%" for various vague qualities in requests for graduate student references.

January 11, 2025 at 10:01 AM

Jamie Gilmour

@jamiegilmour.bsky.social

Is "agility" always a good thing in an organisation, or is there sometimes a benefit to a more "lumbering" approach.

January 10, 2025 at 10:39 AM

Reposted by Jamie Gilmour

Aparna Nair

@disabilitystor1.bsky.social

why are these evaluations used in hiring, promotion or tenure files?
They have no statistical value as assessments and they are actively discriminatory against anyone not a cis able-bodied white man.
How many more papers like this do we need to stop using them?

Paul Bruno @paul-bruno.com · Dec 27

"even when controlling for specific components of the same evaluation surveys, students tend to give lower overall ratings to female instructors...RateMyProfessors’s overall quality ratings have a greater influence on course enrollment than official evaluations" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Gender Gap in Teaching Evaluations and its Effect on Course Enrollments

The disparity in teaching evaluations between male and female instructors is well documented. This paper demonstrates that, even when controlling for …

www.sciencedirect.com

December 27, 2024 at 12:28 PM

Jamie Gilmour

@jamiegilmour.bsky.social

@michaelgoodier.bsky.social. Nice article. It would be interesting to add stats about the percentage of Northern trains that run at lower capacity than timetabled. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024...