We are excited to announce that Cory Doctorow will be joining us at Victoria on 25th November, talking about the fact that today, it's not enough to ask what the technology does – we must understand who it’s doing it for and who it’s doing it to.As we enter the age of AI, we are in danger of being reduced to what Cory Doctorow dubs the ‘reverse centaur’. With that term he conjures a human being conscripted as the assistant to a dominant machine. It could be a driver made to deliver nonstop, all day long; a warehouse worker packing shelves without bathroom or food breaks; or a programmer reviewing impossible amounts of AI-produced code.Don’t fall for the hype. The billionaires managing the rise of AI are putting on a command performance for the bosses and investors, not for the ordinary people who might use the products. When this latest tech bubble bursts, will there be something useful for us in the wreckage?In The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, Doctorow examines why we find ourselves in this mess and how we can get out of it. Life after AI should mean the tools work for us, not the other way around. CORY DOCTOROW is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. He is the author of many books. He writes nonfiction policy books such as The Internet Con and Chokepoint Capitalism, as well as science fiction for adults – Red Team Blues and The Lost Cause – and for young adults – Little Brother. He has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and has been honored with the Arthur C. Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Award and the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. He was made an honorary Doctor of Laws by York University and an Honorary Doctor of Computer Science by the Open University. For a quarter century, he has been an activist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He co-founded the UK Open Rights Group and holds visiting appointments at the Open University, MIT, Cornell, and the University of North Carolina. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Burbank, California.Timetable for the evening:6:30 - Arrival at Victoria, get a drink and find a seat (seating is unreserved but there will be plenty for everyone)6:45 - Conversation begins7:30 - Time for audience questions7:45 - Book signing in the bar downstairs The event space is upstairs at Victoria and there is a lift and stairs. If you have any access requirements, please get in touch at hello@junobooks.co.uk and we will do our best to accommodate.

It’s not enough to mean it, we like to see you make the effort

It’s not enough to mean it, we like to see you make the effort

Waugh is put out, Slope goes down and Golding is ungilded

A guest post by Daniel Böttger

Peer review by experts is central to the evaluation of grant proposals, but little is known about how gender and disciplinary differences shape the content and tone of grant peer review reports. We analyzed 39,280 review reports submitted to the Swiss National Science Foundation between 2016 and 2023, covering 11,385 proposals for Project Funding across 21 disciplines from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), Life Sciences (LS), and Mathematics, Informatics, Natural Sciences, and Technology (MINT). Using supervised machine learning, we classified over 1.3 million sentences by evaluation criteria and sentiment. Reviews in SSH were significantly longer and more critical, with less focus on the applicant’s track record, while those in MINT were more concise and positive, with a greater focus on the track record, as compared to those in LS. Compared to male reviewers, female reviewers wrote longer reviews that more closely aligned with the evaluation criteria and expressed more positive sentiments. Female applicants tended to receive reviews with slightly more positive sentiment than male applicants. The tone, length, and focus of peer review reports varied systematically by applicant gender and disciplinary context. These differences have important implications for fairness and consistency in research funding.