iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

See, maths text books *can* be pleasant!

Image of a page of a maths books showing exercises. The last exercise is asking the reader to draw flowers and apply translations to them. The exercise ends with: "Admire your pattern. Draw other images of the flower under isometries to make other beautiful patterns."

Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Saw Pressure today, really glad I caught that in the cinema. Much more interesting than I'd expected and especially nice I think for anyone involved in science - it can be actually relevant! It had Fraser and Scott who were great as expected but so was the whole cast. #Pressure

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Saw Hope (2026) - great fun, very different, uh, wotsit, media literacy assumptions? But you easily enough tell what are supposed to be jokes even if they don't land like you expect, or if you're not 100% sure they're satirizing something, and if so what. I suspect the ending is something hilarious.

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Chris Parr @chrisjparr.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Chris McDonald: funding system ‘destroying’ value of research. New science minister wants fewer, longer-term grants and a “smoother and simpler system”. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-p...

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

(I remember the discussions way back around the Stapel affair - the fear that outside influences might start looking closely at academia's self-proclaimed capacity for self-regulation and start joining up the dots. The problem of course being that if/when the dam does break, it might be much worse.)

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Is a more systemic analysis of the "powers behind the scenes" not far more important? Massive power is held by organisations who claim to be able to distribute scarce resources for the benefit of science. Each scandal puts the lie to that, and those cut-through scandals must be tips of the iceberg.

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Noticed yet another academic scandal. I think I saw some calls for stronger punishment for the researcher. Admittedly as an ex-academic, I think that's the wrong thing to focus attention on. Why are these people so successful in the first place? Who gave them all that funding? #academic #ariely

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Freya Sierhuis 🟥 @freyas.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

My God what a ferocious, hair-raisingly good book- absolutely sensational!

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KimBo @zapperfan7.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

A rooftop wind turbine that could change the way we think about home energy Imagine generating electricity from the wind without needing a massive tower, a huge plot of land, or a traditional wind farm. The technology shown here is designed to bring small-scale wind generation directly onto rooftops

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Cursed namesake overshadowing me once again. If I add "psychology" to my name I do appear though! Although merged with another namesake, come on people.

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Went to see A Private Life today - covers a combination of psychoanalysis and related topics and a thriller/mystery/romantic comedy? Not 100% sure about what I think of it but well worth watching. Minor thing - the ("A" in the) translated title seemed slightly off? #APrivateLife

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 02/07/2026

I disagree with the broader framing: no gold standard, RCTs overrated, observational analysis is getting so good confounding is not as a big of a threat as people make it out to be. There are good reason to privilege RCTs where they are possible.>

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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

"The more phil of science I read, and the more familiar I became with different pockets of the metascience community, the more I came to realize how little consensus there is about how to evaluate science. But I don’t blame those who default to thinking the metascientists have figured things out.

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Katherine Stiles @katherinestiles.org · 24/06/2026

#AcademicSky #EduSky #HigherEd University of Exeter cuts an ‘existential threat to humanities’ “The proposals will mean that Exeter’s history, English, modern languages and politics courses could see up to 25 per cent of their staff cut.” 🖋️ @julietterowsell.bsky.social ‣ @timeshighered.bsky.social

timeshighereducation.com

University of Exeter cuts an ‘existential threat to humanities’

Russell Group institution cites changing student demand as it puts 500 staff at risk of redundancy, with 150 jobs set to go

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Musings on the move from academic psychology to user research / consulting: www.tegladwin.com/UserResearch... #userresearch #ux #psychology

tegladwin.com

Thomas Edward Gladwin's homepage

The homepage of Thomas Edward Gladwin.

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Arturo R. Garcia @aboynamedart.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

Addendum: this is true - just on the app, though, not desktop

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Third, automated evaluators on which the community currently relies -- LLM-as-a-judge, artificial metrics, and even state-of-the-art (SOTA) models -- agree only weakly with expert judgment, and retrieval augmentation and scientist persona prompting yield only marginal gains."

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Senior social scientists are the harshest critics, and their skepticism is well-earned: LLMs falter most in pluralistic fields like the social sciences that demand context-aware interpretation and evolving theories. [...]

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Second, scientists reward ideas that resemble their own and prize probability over novelty, though social scientists tolerate risk more readily than life scientists. [...]

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

"Three patterns emerge. First, non-reasoning LLMs collapse into a narrow "hivemind" of similar ideas; reasoning models roam a wider hypothesis space, yet no model class spontaneously proposes null hypotheses -- a move humans make more freely. [...]

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Hate that so much - the books were such a huge part of my learning back at university, such important mnemonic elements. When I went into lecturing myself and there were no real books at all any more, it was shocking. Students just got all these random online snippets, not the same at all.

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Drew Broussard @drewsof.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

The Guardian's crowd-sourced top 100 novels of all time list is *so* much more interesting than the one they ran created by industry people: www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

This exhibition, for people sufficiently local that it might be useful info: www. somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/mc-escher-the-exhibition I'd never been to Somerset House, beautiful location for it. Nice folk working there too. Image of the Circle Limit one I liked.

A circular black-and-white image, by Escher, with lizard-like figures as tessellations, getting smaller and smaller towards the edge of the circle.

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Went to the M. C. Escher exhibition in London today - really, really cool. I actually had just enough topology to get one of his limit-tessellations. They had some fun interactive things too - see pics (I messed up the pose on the "reflection in a shiny ball" one, but anyway). #Escher

An exhibition feature where your image is projected onto Escher's drawing of a reflection in a shiny ball held in the artist's hand.

Me in a mirrored room with Escher's birds reflected into infinity.

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Maggie Wiggin @maggie162.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

My god, Octavia Butler, just miss ONCE

Page from a book saying:

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Choose your Leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led
by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.
t

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Urban Truth Collective @urbantruth.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

They want us to be afraid. And angry too. And they definitely want us to stay dependent on cars. THAT’S the real conspiracy. #UrbanTruth

“Wait, we’re afraid of walkable distances now?”

Image of vibrant walkable mixed-use community filled with people. Via the Urban Truth Collective. #1HourCityConspiracy

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Judah Grunstein @judah-grunstein.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

Not an original thought, but the far right's use of gender is a subcategory of enforcing conformity in order to subordinate the individual to the movement/state. It's not only twisted and unhealthy on a personal level but fascistic on a socio-political level.

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Just so you know, I'm only getting a single page from Chapter 4 (all of Ch 1, a fair chunk of Ch 2). Might vary between people/countries?

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

I love the Discworld novels but I guess the problem is that they really shine as a series, not any particular book by itself - not to the same degree. Seems like that makes it more difficult to "package" in cultural memory. So, someone needs to turn the series into a Trilogy of like books 1-10 etc.

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Dave Jorgenson @davejorgenson.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Colbert guest hosted a public access TV show in Monroe, Michigan a day after the Late Show ended. Guest star: Jeff Daniels Special appearance by: Eminem Musical director: Jack White Genius. youtu.be/jJTXB5uT_C4?...

youtu.be

Only In Monroe --- May 22, 2026

YouTube video by Stephen Colbert

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Eric Ravenscraft @lordravenscraft.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

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Dr. Holly Walters @manigarm.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

The reactions of some researchers on Twitter finally being held responsible for not having read the very paper they submitted are... something. Mainly, they don't think they should have to check every citation or make sure the data is real and accurate. Because it's too hard, I guess.

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 17/05/2026

“I don't understand what it's supposed to do. Every time I see a video on Instagram that's like, 'Hollywood is cooked,' what follows is, like, the most stupid dog shit I've ever seen in my life…”

hollywoodreporter.com

Seth Rogen Says If “Your Instinct Is to Use AI” to Write Scripts, “You Shouldn’t Be a Writer”

'The Studio' creator said people who are thinking about using the technology to aid their writing skills should try another occupation: "Go do something else."

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Response to a paper from a while back that claimed "Yet, as we formally prove herein, creating systems with human(-like or -level) cognition is intrinsically computationally intractable."; from the response, "the proof relies on an unjustified assumption". arxiv.org/abs/2411.06498

arxiv.org

Barriers to Complexity-Theoretic Proofs that "AGI" Using Machine Learning is Impossible

A recent paper (van Rooij et al. 2024) claims to have proved that achieving human-like intelligence using learning from data is intractable in a complexity-theoretic sense. We point out that the proof...

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Having started my most recent "maths I'm not smart enough for" book, I hypothesize that the proportion of words like "clearly", "obviously" or "evident" would be inversely related to any objective measure of the didactic quality of the book.

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Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

High Court rules the Office for Students acted beyond its powers in its first major case; misdirecting itself on law of free speech & showing bias + a "closed mind" to "unlawfully prejudge" this case to send a signal to universities via a "wholly disproportionate" sanction (£565k fine) on Sussex Uni

Press summary of High Court judgment.
- OfS did not have juridstiction over the Sussex policy document, as opposed to a governing body document
- misdirected itself on meaning of "free speech within the law" and "academic freedom"
- failed to give due regard to the university's freedom of speech code of practice
- failed to consider whether breaches had been rectified
- "unlawfully predetermined the decision" via bias & a "closed mind"

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Rich @hoxtonrich.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

This should be a source of national shame & it’s happening because of a failure to tackle environmental & social influences on health & failure to design healthy environments www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

theguardian.com

People in UK spend fewer years in good health than a decade ago, study finds

Exclusive: Health Foundation says Britain is ‘going backwards’ compared with most other rich countries

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 24/04/2026

this post is warmly dedicated to everyone who bought an SUV 'for safety' www.transportenvironment.org/articles/eve...

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

Man. They have to join things up legally somehow surely. Former boss at Lucy Letby’s hospital arrested on suspicion of perverting course of justice - Suspect is one of three ex-senior leaders also arrested last year on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

theguardian.com

Former boss at Lucy Letby’s hospital arrested on suspicion of perverting course of justice

Suspect is one of three ex-senior leaders also arrested last year on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

The question "is thinking at all actually a good idea" maybe?

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Nick Dearden @nickdearden.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

“If you criticise Palantir’s platform one more time, you are going to lose your job.” Solidarity to all NHS workers opposing this toxic corporation. Shame on those bullying them. But they won’t stop us. We’re going to ditch Palantir. www.ft.com/content/ff70...

ft.com

Senior NHS officials warned staff over criticising rollout of Palantir platform

Ethical objections and uneven adoption have made the tech group’s contract a divisive issue within English health service

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Thomas Gladwin @tegladwin.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

Switched to Qobuz for music and really loving it. Very different experience, what with the suggestions I'm getting from them, and (as I'm using it anyway) a much more mindful usage. Like I don't turn on the slop-fountain, I'll at least pick some interesting-looking album. Getting way more variation.

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