Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

David Lundie @lundieeducation.bsky.social · 3d

Wonder how long before one or the other of Torrle-dum and Twattle-dee decides bringing back old money is a vote winner!

David Lundie @lundieeducation.bsky.social · 3d

Remember when it seemed like Iain Duncan Smith was going to lead the Tories into oblivion? He seems like a positive visionary compared to what they can muster today!

David Lundie @lundieeducation.bsky.social · 7d

Wonder if students could set up a server farm and mine bitcoin on one of these contracts?

Reading students claim 'unlimited' energy bills cost £2k more - BBC News www.bbc.com/news/article...

Reading students claim 'unlimited' energy bills cost £2k more

The University of Reading says students maybe unaware how much extra they pay for unlimited energy

www.bbc.com

David Lundie @lundieeducation.bsky.social · 8d

Great to be here at @uniwestminster.bsky.social for Miyoung Ahn's book launch. Looking forward to working with her on a 4 nations ESRC research proposal looking at student belonging at @uofgdumfries.bsky.social among others.

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Ian Dunt @iandunt.bsky.social · 10d

As a society, our financial system around information is insane. It is the kind of system you would create if you wanted everyone to go insane.

Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 10d

In general I think it's hard to combat scientific misinformation when some of the best research is locked behind an academic paywall, while lots of nonsense gets published free for everyone to read in predatory journals.

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David Lundie @lundieeducation.bsky.social · 10d

Long train journey to Disneyland Paris. Son: "I'm bored." Me, seizing the opportunity to add extra embarrassment to the tedious dad joke while in France: "bonjour, bored, je m'appelle papa!"

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Dr Emma L Briant 🇬🇧 in 🇺🇸 @emmalbriant.bsky.social · 11d

There's a reason this generation of kids are worried, building 'resilience' isn't pointless, but you need to give them a future they don't need to worry about.

Rolling Stone @rollingstone.com · 11d

How a high-schooler's private battle with debilitating panic attacks became Project GenZen — a public push to bring tools for resilience to an entire generation.

🔗 www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

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David Lundie @lundieeducation.bsky.social · 11d

Remember in the 90s when anti-government protesters brought entire cities to a standstill protesting against unjust government and law enforcement actions...
ushistoryscene.com/article/the-...
www.britannica.com/event/Los-An...

a woman in a clown costume is standing in a crowd

ALT: a woman in a clown costume is standing in a crowd

media.tenor.com

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Culham St Gabriel's @culhamstgabriel.bsky.social · 22d

🌟 Don't forget to sign-up to our next In Conversation event!
Featuring some of our brilliant grantees, this isn't one to miss!
Thursday 25th September at 4.30pm as part of Grants Focus Week!
🔗 ow.ly/RK2u50WTNNw
#TeamRE #TeachRE

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Tim Carvell @timcarvell.bsky.social · 23d

A thought I keep returning to — and that’s underscored by today’s news — is that a legacy publication or a deep-pocketed investor could hire an astonishing array of talent right now and make the best newspaper in America overnight.

Tim Carvell @timcarvell.bsky.social · 23d

Well, this is fucked up and depressing.

Ian Casselberry @iancass.bsky.social · 23d

Rolling Stone fired Alan Sepinwall, Status’ Oliver Darcy reports. That’s probably the end of my subscription.

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Ed @ed3d.net · 27d

The thing that is hard to communicate is that that specific flavor of “brainrotted 4chan slug with incoherent beliefs” is also downstream of the right wing politics factories dumping glowing nuclear sludge into the river

there’s a reason nihilism has risen and it wears Rush Limbaugh’s face

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David Lundie @lundieeducation.bsky.social · 27d

"I'll protect Christians. No, I'm going to shake things up with this weird guy who does straight arm salutes. No, I'm going to back the establishment. No, I'm going to use the army. No, I'm not sick, look, distractions." It's like Trump is speed-running Franco's 40 year reign in the first 10 months!

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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.
1/n

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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Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 28d

Suspect lots of people here don't realise how big a deal Kirk was on TikTok in the UK. Twins have seen loads of videos about him (mostly him being "owned" by progressive students). Lots of chat about it already on their WhatsApps. Much more so than anything in UK politics.

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David Lundie @lundieeducation.bsky.social · 28d

I suppose the VP thinks shootings of right wing influencers are just a "fact of life". I'm sure Charlie Kirk would have been the first to tell us this is the price Americans pay for freedom. I'm not going to say that though-every shooting is a tragedy. Every. Single. One. www.pbs.org/newshour/pol...

WATCH: Vance says school shootings are 'the reality we live in' at campaign rally in Phoenix

“If these psychos are going to go after our kids we’ve got to be prepared for it,” Sen. JD Vance said Thursday.

www.pbs.org

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · Sep 7

'Personalised tutoring' amounts to codifying and automating historical norms, societal stereotypes & harmful trends found in training data

Problem solving skills development in the context of practical problem-solving tasks (Bastani et al., 2025). In addition, given the reliance on historical data underlying generative AI models, they have a tendency to encode perpetual inequity in the classroom, particularly towards the historically marginalized. A recent survey, for example, found that ‘LGBTQ+ students and students that have been disciplined in the past year’ experience far more negative effects from activity monitoring compared to their peers (CDT, 2025). In fact, instead of creating an environment for learning, AI systems used for student assessment and e-proctoring have consistently automated poor pedagogical practices, creating unworkable roadblocks, especially for students at the margins (Holtermann, 2025a; Mintz et al., 2023). These themes closely align with independent audits of LLMs that have identified recurring patterns: generative AI tends to encode and exacerbate societal stereotypes, racism and otherwise discriminatory and marginalizing norms and practices (Kotek et al., 2023; Hofmann et al., 2024). There is no reason to believe that generative AI used to assess students assignments or develop ‘personalized’ tutoring can be void of these harmful and

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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · Sep 4

Sen. Bennet to RFK Jr.: “This is not a podcast; this is the American people’s health at issue here.”

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David Lundie @lundieeducation.bsky.social · Sep 4

How did we become so terrified of one another, so incapable of basic civility that people's response to someone banging on their front door is to open fire?
The suspect in the fatal ‘ding dong ditch’ shooting of an 11-year-old Houston boy is a US Army vet. | CNN share.google/Vg1fQg0WGkEP...

The suspect in the fatal ‘ding dong ditch’ shooting of an 11-year-old boy is a US Army vet. Here’s what we know | CNN

An 11-year-old boy died after a carrying out a prank popularized on social media. Now an Army vet is charged with murder after shooting the child in the back, authorities say.

share.google

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David Lundie @lundieeducation.bsky.social · Sep 4

Both are buried in Westminster Abbey. Edward the Confessor is a saint, buried under an altar where Holy Communion is celebrated. Edward I rests under a perpetual pool of spit from Scots visitors (also Welsh visitors for similar reasons).

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · Sep 2

Mic drop from @abeba.bsky.social at UNESCO Digital Learning Week

Slide: There are no shortcuts--'ugly social realities'
Fear of being left out a fabricated & marketing public relations rhetoric
Evidence, rigorous testing and evaluation
AI in education = commercialization of a collective responsibility
Outsourcing a social, civic, and democratic process of cultivating the coming generation to commercial and capitalist enterprise whose priority is profit

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Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · Sep 3

enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

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Broadcasting Scotland @broadcastscot.bsky.social · Sep 3

Today we went along to interview Scottish Government Education Secretary, @jennygilruth.bsky.social when she attended the formal launch of the Centre for Teaching Excellence at the University of Glasgow, with staff and teachers on secondment.

We were the only Scottish broadcaster at the event.

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David Lundie @lundieeducation.bsky.social · Sep 4

Edward I isn't Edward the Confessor. English kings are numbered from after the Norman conquest (before that they had titles like "the Confessor" or "the Unready" to identify them). Two very different men.

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David Lundie @lundieeducation.bsky.social · Sep 3

How does Linehan get arrested for saying some things about trans issues, while Musk boosts literal Nazi Twitter accounts throwing the p-word around and calling for remigration.
Free speech laws need to be reviewed after Linehan arrest, says Streeting - BBC News share.google/g8TIBwQHsun3...

Free speech laws need to be reviewed after Linehan arrest, says Streeting

The health secretary says ministers wanted police to focus on street crime rather than posts on social media.

share.google

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David Lundie @lundieeducation.bsky.social · Sep 3

ChatGPT & Turing-test-passing AGI is the Benz Motorwagon of the AI age. We thought we wanted a horseless carriage/ human language imitator, but it turns out what would be really useful is not quite that, but something different that uses the same mechanism to do something genuinely useful for us.