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• Post #3643866

  I've started getting Google Scholar alerts which announce work by legit academics but the titles click through to porn sites. Does anyone know why that would be? Some kind of SEO scam? Some kind of phishing? Something more targetted against the affected academics? #AcademicChatter #ScholarlyPublishing

• Post #3558703

  Testing alternatives to the engagement-maximising, polarisation-inducing, algorithms of most social media feeds https://open.substack.com/pub/tomstafford/p/another-algorithm-is-possible

• Post #3469571

  Depressing. I knew internet hero @nixCraft@mastodon.social would have a page with exactly the information I wanted, but the search engine puts the option to generate an AI summary above the result I want. It's not "Search assist", is it, in this context? It's stealing traffic and credit

• Post #3055759

  Fedizens! Please send me your favourite meme which shows something important about the #Fediverse I'll go first:

• Post #2415851

  A big regret of my year off is that I didn't schedule "keeping in touch" calls with my boss, elaborately staged on a Jason Bourne theme Me video calling from the embassy basement, hands bound with cable ties Me video calling from a high speed train, sniper fire cracking glass inches from my head Me video calling while trading brutal Muay Thai blows with numberless henchmen Final video call. On a roof. My telephoto lens snaps into focus to show my boss's offi...

• Post #2415850

  Compare/contrast: ward-by-ward Sheffield City Council election results 1/ when mapped to ward area (SCC, via @index) vs 2/ an equal-area representation (from me) #UKpol #Sheffield #Maps #Geospatial

• Post #2415849

  New newsletter https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/the-mythical-median-voter It's about the how we imagine the voting public. And how this is distorted by polling, and faulty intuitions about statistics. And there's n-dimensionap geometry and a statistic gag in there too

• Post #2166940

  Mythos beer on offer at Tesco's. I can only presume it is an Anthropic tie-in

• Post #2005863

  TODAY: Volkswagen Foundation workshop on "Risky research", Hannover, Germany and looking forward to a day and a half of research on research funding, #metascience and partial randomisation for grant allocation There's a hashtag apparently #PeerReviewLottery Edit: web https://www.volkswagenstiftung.de/veranstaltungen/veranstaltungskalender/einzelveranstaltung/workshop-risky-research-normality-or-exception-challenges-for-research-and-research-funding

• Post #1935082

  Great review of a paper so bad it could be used in a methods class to teach what NOT to do Like sitting down to a "Greatest hits of p-hacking / trial misreporting" double album. https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/one-weird-trick-to-get-significant #Reproducibility

• Post #1831323

  South Africa withdraws AI policy due to fake AI-generated sources https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/south-africa-withdraws-ai-policy-due-fake-ai-generated-sources-2026-04-27/

• Post #1831322

  https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/claude-powered-ai-coding-agent-deletes-entire-company-database-in-9-seconds-backups-zapped-after-cursor-tool-powered-by-anthropics-claude-goes-rogue "an AI coding agent deleted his firm’s entire production database. The AI agent’s misdemeanors were then hugely amplified by a cloud infrastructure provider’s API wiping all backups after the main database was zapped." #FAFO #AgenticAI

• Post #1831321

  In other news, I am absolutely delighted with my new profile picture #MementoMori

• Post #1831320

  LLMpedia: A Transparent Framework to Materialize an LLM’s Encyclopedic Knowledge at Scale Previously the factuality of LLMs has been assessed by querying them. This project generates an entire encyclopedia from model parameters, allowing an alternative — and more pessimistic — assessment of their accuracy Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24080 Site: https://llmpedia.net/

• Post #1831319

  Where do British political scientists preprint? If the answer is the Elsevier-owned SSRN can you suggest alternatives? #PoliticalScience #preprints EDIT: My sample (n=1) report they use OSF, which is good enough for me!

• Post #1655936

  Option #2: Develop new signals/assessment measures Feasibility seems increasingly important. If anyone can write a good proposal with AI, that doesn't mean that anyone can implement that research plan. Indeed, me and you could submit the same proposal and it would be completely inappropriate for me to be funded and completely appropriate for you to be Does that mean that funders need more investigation of feasibility in proposal review? It's sort of "prospective repro...

• Post #1655935

  A flying visit to @cwts An inspiring research unit with a great culture and ethic, and great plans Good posters by the lifts too

• Post #1604893

  Here's Saturday's newsletter about how an online freelancing marketplace reacted when the site introduced an AI tool to help freelancers produce their proposals for offered jobs. Proposal quality went up, but became decoupled from worker ability and effort - it's value as a signal collapsed. Without this signal the market became less functional overall, workers working harder, few jobs awarded and employers less able to tell high for low ability/effort workers https:/...

• Post #1490177

  Reviewing should be like jury service. You have a chance of being randomly selected, then the funder or journal calls up your institution and they have to give you two weeks off, or whatever, and you bash out as many reviews as you can in that time #AcademicChatter

• Post #1436583

  TODAY heading to the #Metascience2025 conference https://metascience.info/ This evening: ECR Metascientist happy hour hosted by the #UKRN Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday: Come to the Metascience Lab to meet people and plan new experiments in metascience. https://metascience.info/programme/#17014 Tuesday: Stephen Pinfield presents our work on Evaluating Distributed Peer Review at the Volkswagen Foundation Tuesday: if you are a funder, get in touch about The Art of Funding early evening social 1/

• Post #1418720

  Good piece from @lizziegadd from June about how #REF2028 might assess research culture (as thresholds to meet, set by institution, rather than as a ranking, with all the perverse side-effects of competition) https://wonkhe.com/blogs/my-research-culture-is-better-than-yours/

• Post #1336033

  Reasonable People #100! Stated preference, revealed preference and the complications brought by circumstance https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/the-surprising-deceptions-of-individual

• Post #1336031

  Evolution, signalling theory and (only safe for work) badger pictures. What’s not to like? https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/lets-talk-about-the-badger-penis

• Post #1336030

  Tuesday boost for my post about evolution, signals and ....the badger https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/lets-talk-about-the-badger-penis

• Post #1331582

  Part three of my series of posts about signalling theory, and a fantastic case study of market change produced by the introduction of AI to a freelancing platform, giving everyone easy access to instant, bespoke, job applications. It didn’t end well, and the insight into why comes from understanding the nature of honest signals. https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/when-trusted-signals-collapse

• Post #1100078

  Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65660-9 New from @rmrahal and colleagues Funder was German Foundation for Innovation in Higher Education (Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre). "Lottery-first" meant short EoI were submitted and randomisation used to select those allowed to apply #Metascience #MetaResearch #ResearchFunding

• Post #1030121

  New newsletter. I cross the #DecisionMaking and #Metascience streams and write about recent work we've been doing at the @RoRInstitute https://open.substack.com/pub/tomstafford/p/distributed-peer-review It's the academic equivalent of those video commentaries by the actors that you get as part of the DVD extras. You've enjoyed the paper, now find out what I really think about the work! (spoiler: obviously I think it is good, but I try to put it in context a bit) #C...

• Post #1014812

  Lots of people are misinterpreting my latest newsletter https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/hostile-interpolation (not really, but the newsletter discusses the particular rhetorical style which positions readers as stupid or misled)

• Post #1001233

  Nice note on the publishing history of Akerlof's classic "The Market for Lemons" paper (1970). Rejected by two top journals for being "trivial", and a third for being "incorrect". Today one of the "most-cited papers in modern economic theory" (and possibly anywhere? Google scholar reports 48,913 citations as of today) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons #ACademicChatter

• Post #774407

  Afternoon boost for this morning's newsletter - a really neat set of studies which show how collective intelligence can be enhanced if groups structure their discussions, breaking down big questions into smaller parts. Even when the component answers are still uncertain, the overall accuracy of the estimate improves! https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/the-wisdom-of-deliberative-crowds #Reasoning #Psychology #CogSci