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Laura Williams @ljwilliams.bsky.social · 3h

Hello autumn term exhaustion. Every year at this time I fear I will never pick up my PhD work ever again. I am too tired. This year I feel extra stressed because I should be making progress with writing up.

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Laura Williams @ljwilliams.bsky.social · 2d

Time off was very helpful. Very lucky to have an excellent GP who talked me round to letting him sign me off. Rest and time to work out what could change was good.

Laura Williams @ljwilliams.bsky.social · 2d

Should be thesis writing today as I don’t work on Mondays. But I was off sick for a day last week and feel so behind on teaching prep that I’m logging on to make PowerPoints. Autumn term workload can get in the bin.

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Laura Williams @ljwilliams.bsky.social · 2d

Hope it helps. I was signed off in the summer because I was completely burnt out. Autumn term is autumning hard this year. Take care of yourself.

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Laura Williams @ljwilliams.bsky.social · 9d

Mandatory online training to access a system for taking on disability support in the library. Except I’m struggling with the training and it’s making me frustrated to be dyslexic. Not sure if I should ask if there is an alternative way of proving I’m capable of using the student records system.

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Reposted by Laura Williams

Louie Stowell @louiestowell.bsky.social · 9d

The Anakin and Padme meme with alternating pics of Anakin and Padme. Anakin says We pledge a library in every primary school. Padme replies, cheerfully, With a librarian, right? Anakin merely stares at her. Now, with a look of fear, she repeats, With a librarian, right?

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Laura Williams @ljwilliams.bsky.social · 13d

My jaw hurts. My teeth hurt. My executive function has all gone. Nurse says blood pressure too high. Dentist says I need fillings replacing Had a little cry. Pulled myself together and sweated away my feelings with circuits class.

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Laura Williams @ljwilliams.bsky.social · 13d

Intel from the local Facebook group is that they were Canadian F18 Hornets.

Laura Williams @ljwilliams.bsky.social · 13d

I live under a flight path regularly used by RAF military aircraft. Extremely loud and fast fighter jets are sounding very busy today.

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Laura Williams @ljwilliams.bsky.social · 17d

Reservoirs are filling back up and the mushrooms are fruiting

Pennine hills landscape. Blue sky. Big cloud

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Laura Williams @ljwilliams.bsky.social · 18d

I'm one of those 21,000 patients to get the gamma knife at Sheffield. Now whenever I'm on campus for my PhD days I see the hospital and always think of that time in my life. I'll spare you all the polaroid photo they took of 17 year old me to document the experience.

Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust @sth.nhs.uk · 20d

Today marks a significant milestone both for Sheffield Teaching Hospitals and UK medical history: the 40th anniversary of the first Gamma Knife Stereotactic Radiosurgery treatment, carried out on the 18th of September 1985. Sheffield was the third unit established in the world. 1/4

A group of healthcare professionals celebrates with blue balloons reading "40" in front of a Gamma Knife machine, smiling for the camera.

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Laura Williams @ljwilliams.bsky.social · 19d

My WhatsApp media and camera roll is approx 90% fungi at the moment. Mushroom spotting is my current hyperfocus obsession but turns out it’s very good for helping bad mental health.

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Laura Williams @ljwilliams.bsky.social · 20d

Maybe they will buy you a special machine to clone yourself or Bernard’s magic watch to become a time wizard

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Laura Williams @ljwilliams.bsky.social · 21d

One of those days where I feel broken and tired so I turn into an extra clumsy person. Dropping stuff, knocking things over, splashing and spilling, banging my head. Lots of exclaiming. But I made good food!

Large dish with veg and beans and dumplings.

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Reposted by Laura Williams

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
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Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Reposted by Laura Williams

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 26d

"We are told that AI is inevitable, that we must adapt or be left behind. But universities are not tech companies. Our role is to foster critical thinking, not to follow industry trends uncritically." www.ru.nl/en/research/...

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Reposted by Laura Williams

Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.bsky.social · 22d

@nlisn.bsky.social is attempting to assess the proportion/spread of neurodiversity across across all UK library sectors. If you identify as neurodivergent, with or without a formal diagnosis, or suspect you may be - please fill in our short survey!

Reblogging/signal-boosting much appreciated!

Qualtrics Survey | Qualtrics Experience Management

The most powerful, simple and trusted way to gather experience data. Start your journey to experience management and try a free account today.

lancasteruni.eu.qualtrics.com

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Reposted by Laura Williams

Tom Gauld @tomgauld.bsky.social · 23d

My latest cartoon for @newscientist.com

p.s. this week I am on a USA/Canada tour with my new book. Details and preorder links at tomgauld.com

Panel 1. image of a huge nuclear plant.
“Reactor Overheating”

2. A worker in a hazmat suit works at a computer. The screen reads:
“Press cancel to avoid critical overload”

3 - 9. The worker continues to type at the computer. The screen changes in each panel and reads:
“Enter password to confirm”
“Incorrect password”
“Incorrect password”
“Do you want to reset your password?”
“Reset link has been sent to your email”
“Please choose a new password”
“New password can't be the same as old password”
The colour gets hotter in each panel. Starting blue in 1 and ending in red in 9.

Panel 10. Wide view. The entire earth is blown up.

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Reposted by Laura Williams

Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.bsky.social · 26d

Key word in this article is 'probably'. 'Probably generated by large language models'. There's no way to prove it. All the supposed tells - em-dashes, repetitive language, use of certain words, rhetorical phrasing - are present in AI because people have been writing that way for centuries!

AI tool detects LLM-generated text in research papers and peer reviews

Authors and peer reviewers are failing to disclose the use of LLMs despite journal policies limiting their use.

www.nature.com

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Laura Williams @ljwilliams.bsky.social · 24d

Woke up feeling tired, sore and grumpy. But 4 miles of running, mushroom spotting and wild swimming with good people has transformed me. Love how happy I look in this photo.

Me in the woods with a small dog and a fly agaric mushroom

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Reposted by Laura Williams

Beer Nouveau @beernouveau.co.uk · 24d

AI is the digital equivilant of the drunken bloke in the pub who insists on butting into every conversation to overly explain everything to you, including making shit up if he doesn't know it so that he can claim to be the bar brain.

And we hate it just as much.

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Laura Williams @ljwilliams.bsky.social · 25d

I’d probably buy more books if bookshops had a system where I could find out where a book was shelved. Unsuccessful at finding what I wanted on most recent visits. I don’t want to have to ask for help.

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Reposted by Laura Williams

Kirsten the Librarian @librarykirsten.bsky.social · 26d

I'm in a very different context, but the idea of phantom pain where your colleagues should be rings so true - job cuts hitting where unmanageable workloads were already a problem.

Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · Sep 7

I was going to add another comment here about how many of the scholars that should be doing this work simply aren't in academia anymore and then I realized I already did--this is phantom pain where your colleagues should be.

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Laura Williams @ljwilliams.bsky.social · 26d

Rail replacement bus is early. Shocking.

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Reposted by Laura Williams

ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · 27d

And this, reader, is why the AI Overview sucks:

“One work day, her task was to enter details on chemotherapy options for bladder cancer, which haunted her because she wasn’t an expert on the subject.” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart

Contracted AI raters describe grueling deadlines, poor pay and opacity around work to make chatbots intelligent

www.theguardian.com

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