Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Rob Farrow

Paul Crider @paulcrider.liberalcurrents.com · 4d

He's right.

Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 4d

Macron remarks are notable- some quotes: "We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies."

Defend Democracy @defenddemocracy.bsky.social · 4d

President Macron: “Europeans, let's wake up!

We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks.”

defenddemocracy.eu/macron-democ...

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Ilkay Holt @ilkayholt.bsky.social · 5d

#OpenScience Statement from UN's Secretary-General’s Scientific Advisory Board. "this Scientific Advisory Board calls for urgent cooperation to advance science as a global public good – and we stress that doing so requires accelerated transformation to open science." www.un.org/scientific-a...

Open Science | Secretary-General’s Scientific Advisory Board

Open science — the practices of widely sharing all forms of scientific knowledge — offers crucial benefits to the vitality of research, to connecting science to policy-makers and society, and to…

www.un.org

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Rob Farrow @rfarrow.bsky.social · 10d

MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing

fortune.com/2025/08/18/m...

MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing | Fortune

There’s a stark difference in success rates between companies that purchase AI tools from vendors and those that build them internally.

fortune.com

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UK Anti-Corruption Coalition @ukanticorruptioncoalition.org · 12d

⬇️ This is the first time a British politician will be found guilty under the UK Bribery Act.

Spotlight on Corruption @spotlightcorruption.org · 12d

🚨 BREAKING: The former leader of Reform UK in Wales, Nathan Gill, has pleaded guilty to #bribery, admitting he received corrupt payments as a Brexit Party MEP in exchange for making statements in the European Parliament to promote Russia’s interests in #Ukraine.

Reform UK’s ex-leader in Wales Nathan Gill pleads guilty to bribery charges

Gill admits to eight charges while an elected member of the European parliament

www.theguardian.com

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Tarik Abou-Chadi @tabouchadi.bsky.social · 12d

For the Guardian, @turnbulldugarte.com and I discuss our research that clearly shows one thing: Labour's anti-immigration strategy will only strengthen Reform and weaken its own electoral prospects. It won't win voters back but ultimately normalizes the far right

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Our research makes it clear: by capitulating to the right, Labour is driving voters to Reform UK | Tarik Abou-Chadi and Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte

Mimicking Farage on immigration is senseless. Labour voters feel betrayed; anti-immigration voters see through the ruse, say academics Tarik Abou-Chadi and Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte

www.theguardian.com

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Rob Farrow @rfarrow.bsky.social · 16d

Strategy: wait until Palestine is destroyed, then recognise it

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Financial Times @financialtimes.com · 18d

Britain’s zombie universities should put Schumpeter on the syllabus on.ft.com/46tIQC1 | opinion

Britain’s zombie universities should put Schumpeter on the syllabus

It’s time to borrow from the corporate crib sheets — and if all else fails, creative destruction is a force for good

on.ft.com

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Reposted by Rob Farrow

Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 21d

Academia dot edu licensing agreement says it can use your likeness and voice and publications in any manner they want, world wide.

Ordinary Notes @hystericalblkns.bsky.social · 21d

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

The new TOC from academia dot edu.

By creating an Account with Academia.edu, you grant us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license, permission, and consent for Academia.edu to use your Member Content and your personal information (including, but not limited to, your name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness, city, institutional affiliations, citations, mentions, publications, and areas of interest) in any manner, including for the purpose of advertising, selling, or soliciting the use or purchase of Academia.edu's Services.

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Kashana @kashana.blacksky.app · 21d

You want to be alive, but they want you dead. We’re a new, well, funded democratic group that thinks you can meet them halfway.

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GO-GN @go-gn.bsky.social · 22d

We were delighted to join you for #OpenFest25! Thanks so much for making us so welcome at this fantastic event 😀
@rfarrow.bsky.social @beckpitt.bsky.social

Jenni Adams @jenniad.bsky.social · Sep 4

Building diverse open research networks and communities session now underway at #OpenFest25

Rob Farrow, Beck Pitt & Carina Bossu are speaking about the Global OER Graduate Network, which has special interests in amplifying research from the global South.

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Rob Farrow @rfarrow.bsky.social · 22d

Up bright and early to head to University of Oxford for the 1st AIEOU Collaborator Conference @ai-e-ou.bsky.social

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Prof Damien Page @profdamienpage.bsky.social · 28d

As we continue to recreate BNU, we’re now recruiting for a Director of Brand, Communications and Marketing. Crucial senior leadership role for shaping our future. Reshares appreciated.
jobs.bucks.ac.uk/vacancy/dire...

Director of Brand, Communications & Marketing (1861) | Buckinghamshire New University

Full Time (37 hrs per week) – Permanent - High Wycombe campus and hybrid working Competitive salary HELP US BREAK THE MOULD

jobs.bucks.ac.uk

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 28d

“The truth is that artificial intelligence, no matter how sophisticated it may appear, is still massively dependent on the most precarious human labor on the planet. An untold number of digital workers, estimated by the World Bank to be well over one hundred million globally.”

My New Op-Ed in the Culture Pages of Magazine L’Espresso | Antonio A. Casilli

A new article of Yours Truly is featured in the culture pages of the Italian magazine L’Espresso. I introduce the readers to our award-winning documentary In the Belly of AI, which I co-wrote and that...

www.casilli.fr

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Anita Leirfall @anitaleirfall.bsky.social · 28d

Philosophy majors rank higher than all other majors on verbal & logical reasoning, according to our new study published in the J of the American Philosophical Assoc. They also tend to display more intellectual virtues such as curiosity & open-mindedness theconversation.com/studying-phi... #philsky

Studying philosophy does make people better thinkers, according to new research on more than 600,000 college grads

Philosophers are fond of saying that their field boosts critical thinking. Two of them decided to put that claim to the test.

theconversation.com

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The Author, Séamas O'Reilly @seamas.bsky.social · 28d

- you clean up that banksy?
- sure did, your honour, leaving a perfect, permanent outline, imbuing the work with real fuckin gravitas while making its point better than the artist did himself just like you asked

Adrian+Shane @adrianandshane.bsky.social · 28d

They erased the new Banksy mural in London. But the stain remains.

Side-by-side images of Banksy’s mural on the Royal Courts of Justice in London. On the left, the artwork appears faded and scrubbed, leaving only a ghostly outline of a judge raising a gavel over a protester holding a placard. On the right, the mural is fully visible in sharp black and white stencil, showing a judge in a traditional white wig and robes striking down at a protester who defends himself with a bloodied sign.

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Samuel Moore @samuelmoore.org · 29d

While other journals deal with the pressure to publish more and more articles, the Journal of Philosophy accepted just one paper out of 403 submissions in the first half of 2025.

Philosophy’s Journal Problem Captured in One Number? - Daily Nous

The number of articles accepted by a top philosophy journal in the first six months of 2025: 1. So reports The Journal of Philosophy. Here are the journal's 2025 statistics through July 1st, as report...

dailynous.com

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Reposted by Rob Farrow

GO-GN @go-gn.bsky.social · Aug 18

In the third of our awesome #GO_GN #OER25 scholarship blogs, check out @brandoncarson.bsky.social's awesome post "Energized by Connection: Reflections on OER25 and the GO-GN Community"
go-gn.net/gogn/energiz...
#OER #OEP #opened @altuk.bsky.social

Energized by Connection: Reflections on OER25 and the GO-GN Community |

This post is by GO-GN OER25 Scholarship awardee Brandon Carson (Faculty of Education, Ontario Tech University) This past June 23–24, 2025, I had the privilege of attending OER25 in London, graciously ...

go-gn.net

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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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Open Research Leeds @openresleeds.bsky.social · Sep 4

Keep an eye out for collaborative online sessions between @knowledgeen.bsky.social and GO-GN, September-October time @beckpitt.bsky.social @rfarrow.bsky.social

#OpenFest25

Open Research Leeds @openresleeds.bsky.social · Sep 4

The GO-GN Open Research Handbook go-gn.net/gogn_outputs...

*Global OER Graduate Network

See here for other GO-GN resources go-gn.net/resources/

#OpenFest25

The GO-GN Open Research Handbook |

We are pleased to share with you The GO-GN Open Research Handbook! This publication brings together materials from our Research Methods Handbook, Conceptual Frameworks Guide, and Research Reviews. One...

go-gn.net

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Doug Mirams @dmirams.bsky.social · Feb 25

An endangered species: how LLMs threaten Wikipedia’s sustainability link.springer.com/article/10.1...

An endangered species: how LLMs threaten Wikipedia’s sustainability - AI & SOCIETY

As a collaboratively edited and open-access knowledge archive, Wikipedia offers a vast dataset for training artificial intelligence (AI) applications and models, enhancing data accessibility and acces...

link.springer.com

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Reposted by Rob Farrow

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · Sep 3

The OpenAI employee share sale at the BS $500bn number is now up to $10.3 billion. This is a cashout. This is the thing you do when you do not see a future for the company.

www.cnbc.com/2025/09/03/o...

OpenAI boosts size of secondary share sale to $10.3 billion

OpenAI is allowing current and former employees to sell more than $10 billion worth of stock in a secondary share sale.

www.cnbc.com

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Horizons Magazine @horizons-en.bsky.social · Sep 3

Political attacks, natural risks, computer obsolescence... 🙊🌊
Scientific data is under threat. We provide details of a struggle for its preservation and for #OpenScience with Jürgen Enge, @sabinaleonelli.bsky.social, @rrrrrok.bsky.social und Frank Oliver Glöckner.

www.horizons-mag.ch

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Mike Hogan @michaelhogan.bsky.social · Sep 3

New Blog Post

When AI Overrules You: How being outvoted by AI teammates impacts human-AI collaboration.

www.psychologytoday.com/ie/blog/in-o...

When AI Overrules You

New research reveals how humans react when AI teammates outvote them — and the surprising patterns that could reshape workplace collaboration.

www.psychologytoday.com

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Matt Zoller Seitz @mattzollerseitz.bsky.social · Sep 3

About how AI-generated videos about history steal content from humans and "threaten to literally rewrite history—or people’s understanding of it—with all of the biases imbued into AI by its training material and, increasingly, by the willful manipulation of the companies that own these tools."

Colin Dickey @colindickey.com · Sep 3

The purpose of AI is to destroy any consensus of history, example #4,528,926

AI Generated 'Boring History' Videos Are Flooding YouTube and Drowning Out Real History

"These AI videos are just repeating things that are on the internet, so you end up with a very simplified version of the past."

www.404media.co

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · Sep 3

“The technology is producing a generation of eternal novices, unable to think or perform for themselves.”

I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education.

The end of critical thinking in the classroom

www.theatlantic.com

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