Every time I see something like this I have a similar reaction. Must I have the xenophobic oats/butter/whatever?
25.11.2025 19:35
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Every time I see something like this I have a similar reaction. Must I have the xenophobic oats/butter/whatever?
Still reeling from the Stanford report on Brexit. Reduced GDP by up to 8% and investment by as much as 18%. The UK Treasury would have £40 billion more each year if Britain had remained in the EU. Devastating self-immolation.
The United States is no longer providing any financial support for Ukraine according to Kiel's tracker - and has not been for a few months now (although I do wonder how one counts the intelligence support).
Europe is footing the bill alone.
“AI workers said they distrust the models they work on because of a consistent emphasis on rapid turnaround time at the expense of quality.”
Studying philosophy does make people better thinkers, according to new research on more than 600,000 college grads
Philosophy majors rank higher than all other majors on verbal and logical reasoning. theconversation.com/studying-phi... #philosophy #skills #thinking #PhilosophySky #philsky
While you are right that the goal is backdoor de jure recognition, recognition is a spectrum and de facto recognition has been a common explicit practice over the last 100 years.
the recognition angle is interesting. This text only has "de facto" recognition, not de jure. Likely that is to try and dodge resistance to the illegality of it while hoping that the practicalities of de facto are minimal. But if so it acknowledges that resistance to de jure is significant!
This actually sounds pretty desperate. Yes, limiting Ukraine's military, no NATO-accession/troops are non-starters. But the rest reads as if Putin knows he has made a huge mistake and wants to go back to how it was before. G8, reintegrate into global economy, no war crimes liability. Plus...
Niels Bohr writing to Carlsberg Foundation: "I respectfully request a travel grant of 2500 Kr for a one-year study stay at foreign universities." That's it. That's the entire proposal. He received approval the next day...
My colleague @moritz-graefrath.com and I argue in @foreignaffairs.com for selective nuclear proliferation to Canada, Germany and Japan.
We make the case it will benefit all three, as well as the USA, and that it will also strengthen the increasingly brittle global order.
Sorry, specifically for the Rice-Putin call.
Hi, this is very interesting. Do you have a source for this? Thank you!
Bertrand Russell: I was concentrating my attention on the table.
Is AI making job recruitment less meritocratic? We're getting some v interesting research studies on this question now, and the news is... not good. @jburnmurdoch.ft.com & I dive in, in the latest edition of our newsletter The AI Shift www.ft.com/content/e5b7...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.
A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:
a 🧵 1/n
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
You may be astonished to learn that this is an illusion, a trompe-l’oeil. The whole thing — not just the major painting (supposedly by Poussin) -- but the drawings, easel & paintbrushes have all been painted in oil by Antoine Fort-Bras on a wooden cutout (1686, Calvet Museum)
I saw someone's interesting-looking recent paper in an email signature, so it's net positive for me!
The rigorous crew at Science magazine did an actual test of AI: could it summarize science results as well as the human editors? I mean, it could't even tell a correlation from a cause. www.lastwordonnothing.com/2025/11/12/w...
A meme of 'Is this an archive?' showing a grid with various classifications of things that might be archives based on their content and structure.
Hoping this helps our colleagues across the industry
NYT today.
It turns out that when you put tariffs on everyone, they just trade more with each other.
Trump made US the loner in the lunchroom of world trade.
‘Study after study shows that students want to develop these critical thinking skills, are not lazy, and large numbers of them would be in favor of banning ChatGPT and similar tools in universities’, says @olivia.science www.ru.nl/en/research/...
I love to see stuff like this because it helps explain to people trapped in tech-sponsored information bubbles the actually obvious fact that universities teach people to know & think things, and AI is a way to produce the effect of knowing & thinking things w/o actually knowing & thinking them.
Twitter/X is a story on its own:
🔴 While users have become more Republican
💥 POSTING has completely transformed: it has moved nearly ❗50 percentage points❗ from Democrat-dominated to slightly Republican-leaning.
Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory. www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...
View from Mars showing windswept terrain and water-eroded rock formations.
Amazing to see this view from another world. Gale Crater on Mars. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.
The “health surcharge” is an utterly bogus labelling. It’s not hypothecated for health spending and you can’t choose not to pay it and not use the NHS. You could call it an education surcharge or a defence surcharge or anything. It’s just using the sanctified status of the NHS to rip off immigrants.
Researchers applying for the UK's Global Talent visa face high upfront costs Upfront cost of visa to applicant and employer in 2025 UK Denmark £692 India £602 Australia £405 Israel £362 US £305 Italy £235 Netherlands 1 £207 Germany | £170 Spain 1£144 Sweden | £117 South Korea | £98 France £84 Japan £21 £5,941 £O £2,000 £4 Source: Fragomen for the Royal Society • Excludes ongoing costs such as mandatory healthcare premiums or fees such as language tests
The costs of the UK’s Global Talent Visa looks a trifle high in comparison to competitor countries - largely through the Immigration Health Surcharge (which critics say is a form of double taxation as they contribute to the NHS through normal tax on their earnings)
An OpenAI executive said GPT-5 found solutions to 10 "previously unsolved" math problems when in reality all it did was find online references to places where people had already solved them
techcrunch.com/2025/10/19/o...
Hi Liviu, how do I subscribe to this newsletter?
"Maria" is rolling up raisins under the hot Madera sun. To earn $70, she has to roll 1,000 sheets! Each row has around 250 sheet. It's hard grueling work walking on the burning sand for hours rolling one sheet after another. #WeFeedYou
