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Chris Leonard

@hoohar.bsky.social
397 followers 500 following 110 posts

Academic publishing, peer review, AI, and other niche interests (MFC). Subscribe to Scalene newsletter here: scalene-peer-review.beehiiv.com

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Reposted by Chris Leonard
Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Every now and then, when people say stupid things about socialism, I have to roll out these lines from Arthur Lewis, on what socialists want.
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
He’s also not for the pop charts.
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Reposted by Chris Leonard
Alex Holcombe @alexh.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
I and others have long argued for more support for scientists to establish data provenance or evidence chain of custody to combat fraud in our journals. Here it's invoked to combat AI slop in ArXiv pracheeac.substack.com/p/arxiv-is-k... "Provenance is the obvious place to start.
pracheeac.substack.com
arXiv Is Killing Itself So AI Doesn't Have To
Disclosure: I ranted to Claude with a bunch of my grievances and ideas, and had it organize them into this blog post.
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Who at Radio 2, over many years, as decided that weather and traffic people deserve airtime alongside professional presenters. Cos you’re wrong and I hate it.
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Hmmm.
static.klipy.com
Tony Soprano's Disappointed Look
Alt: Tony Soprano's Disappointed Look.
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Shahan Ali Memon @shahanmemon.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
More than 50,000 submissions to @iclr-conf.bsky.social this year? That's more than all the previous iterations combined. This is after the limit they imposed of 20 max paper per author. With this rate, we will have more than 100k next year. Need better reforms urgently. #SciSci #Academia
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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
'The strike action, planned for 22 September, marks the first time staff have organised to walk out in The Lancet’s 200-year history. The Lancet Group, now owned by the Elsevier publishing conglomerate, comprises 29 monthly specialty titles, in addition to the flagship weekly medical journal'.
timeshighereducation.com
Staff at prestigious medical journal set to strike over pay
For the first time in The Lancet’s 200-year history, union members plan to strike over “unacceptable” pay offer
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Gautam Kamath @gautamkamath.com · 16/09/2026
Nihar Shah did a heroic experiment for TMLR: he spent 20-25 hours over two weeks interviewing authors of seemingly low-quality submissions about their own papers. He confirmed what we all suspected: people submitting these papers have *no idea* what is going on in them.
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Pete Fraser @petefrasermusic.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
In the movie version of this, after Piddington runs out of food water and money as a result of leaving the UK, the residents apply for asylum and end up housed in a military base, with HILARIOUS consequences. www.bbc.com/news/article...
bbc.com
Piddington in Oxfordshire votes to leave UK over asylum plans
Piddington residents voted over proposals to house up to 1,256 male asylum seekers nearby
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
This looks great and I can’t wait to read it. Just FYI B&Q are charging $34.99 for the ebook version.
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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
This is both an interesting experiment and a sign of a tsunami coming for academia. AIs retroactively reading the research and finding both opportunities and issues with published papers, then sharing those judgements publicly. d3jhl7jsny6f2h.cloudfront.net
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Mutable Joe @mutablejoe.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
One for the money Two for the show Three to get ready Four for any other problem Nine to hear these options again
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
static.klipy.com
Hi Chris: Dancing Shrek Baby
ALT: Hi Chris: Dancing Shrek Baby
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
I'll be speaking on this panel about the impact of AI on open access (and indeed, traditional subscription titles) and asking if OA is still the imperative it once seemed.
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 23/08/2026
Right now what researchers care about is publication; review is just an obstacle in the way. But actually human review is the scarce commodity. We need a world where ~anything can be published, but if it’s careful and potentially important, it gets expert human review and a second draft.
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
New pub quiz team name incoming:
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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences @pnas.org · 20/08/2026
A study of private grant proposal submissions and publicly released awards from NSF and NIH finds a sharp rise in LLM use since 2023. At NIH—but not at NSF—proposals created with LLMs are more likely to be funded and to yield more publications. In PNAS: ow.ly/5zHM50ZBWoP
Corpus-level estimates of the fraction of LLM-modified sentences in  private and public NSF and NIH grants from 2021 to 2025, computed using rolling three-month windows (points).
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Dorothy Bishop @deevybee.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
New blogpost deevybee.blogspot.com/2026/08/acce... inspired by recent depressing experience as a peer reviewer. AI-generated #fraud is getting very hard to detect. #peerreview
deevybee.blogspot.com
Acceleration of the arms race between fraudsters and honest researchers
I was recently asked to review a paper that piqued my curiosity. From the abstract it sounded as if it was a secondary analysis of a datas...
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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
I feel like the debate over AI in academic journals is way too focused on where the capabilities of AI are today (or even where they were a couple years ago) and not nearly focused on where they will almost certainly be in the coming years… … and publication & research takes many years.
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Michael Hochberg @mkhochb.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Is science beginning to feed on its own AI-generated output? “Epistemic autophagy” describes a self-reinforcing loop in which generative AI helps produce scientific manuscripts and citations. Future researchers and AI systems then treat them as part of the knowledge base.
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Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · 08/08/2026
“The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate” www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-mas… > This massive lie can best be summed up as “when it comes to climate change... we have more time.”
currentaffairs.org
The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate
Thinking we have time left to address climate change, or that “Net Zero by 2050” will save us, is driving us toward full social collapse in ways that become more obvious with every new broken temperat...
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Owen Davies @odavies9.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
As thousands of research academics are made redundant the whole system of free/cheap peer review will collapse.
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Captain Haddock @realcaptainhaddock.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Am sure this is fine www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-...
scientificamerican.com
It’s 90 degrees in the Arctic right now
The Arctic is heating faster than the rest of the planet. New data illustrate how dire that is
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
I don’t suffer as badly as you, but the last time I was struggling to sleep I burst into tears at the beauty of the Allo Allo theme tune.
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Literature Supporter @literaturesc.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
The most important book of the year -- get out the pitchforks. LIMITARIANISM: THE CASE AGAINST EXTREME WEALTH by INGRID ROBEYNS
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
I’ve just woken up, but it took me a while not to see Andy Burnham’s robot arm tickling this woman’s breast.
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Adam Schwarz @adamjschwarz.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
When the story of why humanity didn't stop climate change is written, it will feature front pages like this. Even as the skies blacken with climate change-induced wildfires, right wing media continue their relentless crusade against measures to tackle it.
The Times: Net zero risks blackouts. Below a photo of French wildfires.
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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Very worried about this sort of thing hitting more broadly:
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Looking up the lyrics to Being Boiled, and Google's AI summary helps me yet again.
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Commentator on the England game the other night said Jude Bellingham was "worth his weight in gold". Assuming he is around 75kg, that's around £10m. Not really close to his value. He should have said "worth his weight in crystalline osmium" - £200m.
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
When I was waiting for the race to go through Beynac, where we’ve holidayed before, they got there and then the live feed switched to a tiny inset while they showed still images from Google Streetview. Told you it was a niche complaint.
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
Good yes. What’s your beef? Mine is quite specific.
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
FIFA presidents are like UK Prime Ministers - somehow each one is worse than the previous one. Imagine yearning for the days of Sepp Blatter and Gordon Brown as some kind of halcyon days. Looking forward to Voldemort and F**age next.
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Hattifattener @hattifattener.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
As in 1066 England will prevail against the Norwegians before tragically losing to the French a couple of weeks later.
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General Boles @generalboles.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
"I know it's not the sort of thing you usually do Mr Havelange but speaking as a nuclear power we'd appreciate Gascoigne's yellow being overturned and the match result annulled"
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Let’s all laugh at the Yellow Cowdenbeath before the England game starts.
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
I gave a talk exactly on this at SSP last month. Personal peer review lenses finding stuff you’d never look at in adjacent (and wildly different) disciplines.
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Emma Monk @monkemma.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
It was inevitable, wasn't it🙄 Of course the Telegraph would run with something like this👇 So let's remove some of the rose-tinted spectacles and also look at some of that data comparing 1976 with modern heat waves Because the 1976 nostalgia porn is wearing a bit thin at this stage 🧵1/23
Telegraph headiline:

"Heatwave hysterics wouldn't have lasted a day in 1976", overlaid with a bold “MONK DEBUNKED” stamp.
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
You could replace Rooney very easily.
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Carceral Abolition @carceralabolition.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Mural in San Andrés Cholula, Mexico www.reddit.com/r/MarchAgain...
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
which journal is this??
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
Did he learn nothing from War of the Worlds?
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
I heard that too and cringed for him.
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Been on the proplus all night, revising for an exam he’s done no work for.
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Paul Kingsley @paulkingsley7.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
“The result is a horror show for US science research. Not only is peer review made a secondary consideration, but the new rules would allow any federal agency to cancel any grant at any time based on the vague assertion that it isn’t in the “national interest.” 1/2 🧪 arstechnica.com/science/2026...
arstechnica.com
Proposed new US funding rules: We can cancel any grant at any time
Peer review now optional, political staff would screen grants for forbidden topics.
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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
GPT-5.5 Pro is the model producing many of the novel math proofs, and also the model you should have reviewing any technical or academic paper for flaws.
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
Over 200! Who’d thought? flavor365.org/the-ultimate...
flavor365.org
The Ultimate Guide to Fanta's 200+ Flavors Worldwide
How many Fanta flavours are there? Discover the surprising answer for 2026. We explore the full list of 200+ global, rare, and discontinued Fanta drinks.
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
I had lychee Fanta in Morocco and it’s my life’s mission to find it again.
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Chris Leonard @hoohar.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
Except they have to call it stuff like hyper nutrition or neo-protein renewal. Chill out Chad, it’s just a ragu.
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Hadas Weiss @hadas.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
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