Dr Paul Matthews
banner
paulusm.jellytussle.org
Dr Paul Matthews
@paulusm.jellytussle.org

Academic, writer, techie - UK

The meta-rer the betterer

#AcademicChatter #DataScience #KOS #dh #RStats #nujazz #downtempo #amreading #scifi #ballardian #modernism

https://fetstudy.uwe.ac.uk/~pmatthew/

https://writing.transient.me.uk/ .. more

Law 29%
Political science 12%

Reposted by Paul Matthews

Alongside the #GenerativeAI for #Education summit in London yesterday, the DfE updated their ‘Product Safety Expectations’ for #EdTech developers, and for schools to consider when deciding which tools are safe to use. www.gov.uk/government/p... A quick thread on the updates (1/15)
Generative AI: product safety standards
We use some essential cookies to make this website work.
www.gov.uk

If you are in the Bristol, UK area next week, please join us for the fantabulous #bristolr
Great speaker, refreshments and R chat ! #rstats

Enjoying some old tech CD goodness, including this absolute gem

#amlistening
I’m in this meme and I don’t like it.
#academicsky #academiclife

Expanse s2e1 : can’t believe the head of the UN would wear deely boppers to a council of war #inappropriate

#scifi
2020s: AI "System Prompts" are lengthy, carefully constructed sets of expert rules about a particular domain, created by "prompt engineers".

1980s: AI "Expert Systems" were lengthy, carefully constructed sets of expert rules about a particular domain, created by "knowledge engineers".

My StoryGraph 2025 mood map, a descent into the dark side! Will have to remember to read more uplifting & #cosy stuff this year
Every pedagogical argument I see is essentially "You could use it to do something you already do but you will also have to do a lot of setup and double check everything it does."
Brett Ewins
Today's @thetimes.com is reporting that this new book published by Springer, on sale for £180 hb, contains 'footnotes that cite scientific publications that appear to have been invented....' Who'd have thought it!
www.thetimes.com/uk/science/a...

The elusive Leopard Shark, at the Wes Anderson archive exhibition, magical

Reposted by Paul Matthews

Like those Andy Warhol films of eight hours of the Empire State Building or of somebody sleeping, ordinary life viewed obsessively enough becomes interesting in its own right by some sort of neurological process that I don't hope to understand.
Actual analysis of the BBC’s coverage of Gaza is devastating for Prescott and the right wing attacks on the BBC. Ratio of Israeli-Palestinian deaths: 1 /34. Ratio of coverage of those deaths: 19 / 1.

cfmm.org.uk/bbc-on-gaza-...
BBC On Gaza-Israel: One Story, Double Standards - Centre For Media Monitoring
cfmm.org.uk

Tony Seale this morning on How LLMs can interoperate with ontologies to do “active inference” - build a dynamic world model

#cdl25 #ConnectedData #KnowledgeGraphs

Asking the audience where they are on their data journey, on a scale from Junk Shop -> Amazon

2025.connected-data.london/talks/moving...
#cdl25 #ConnectedData #Ontologies

Reposted by Paul Matthews

Brush your teeth after eating these or else you'll get calculus.

Reposted by Paul Matthews

Remembering J.G. Ballard, born OTD 1930.
I’ve been reading his work for many years & I can readily appreciate why many qualify his writing as ‘timeless’.
And I can think of no better imagery to accompany this post than the equally timeless appeal of David Pelham’s superlative cover art 🙂

Time for learning + pizza at #BristolR yum!
Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Beech woods in fine colour today, Hambledon, UK

Reposted by Paul Matthews

In one of his lesser known dystopias, J. G. Ballard subjected America to a massive ecological disaster following an energy crisis, which has turned the country into a desert. The leftover nuclear weapons are in Las Vegas.
A brilliant book.
I also love Bill Botten's original cover.

Hedge witches, assemble! #AcademicSky #AmReading

Reposted by Paul Matthews

Gary Marcus was right.

This was a fun paper

“We shift from viewing self‐tracking as mere data work to imagining it as an ongoing conversation; from constant monitoring to ambient, meaningful sensing; from judgmental prompts to caring guidance”

doi.org/10.1145/3698...

#tracking #hci #wellbeing #participative
Making Sense of Our Data: Exploring Well-Being Self-Tracking Through Creative Collaboration | Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Creativity and Cognition
This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:
doi.org

Reposted by Paul Matthews

C'est le mauvais pantalon, Gromit!
Et ils ont mal tourné !

My takeaway: DS academics have no more idea than anyone else where we are headed in this brave new world of the LLM 🤔
arxiv.org/abs/2509.12283

#genai #datascience #academia #academicSky
Prompting the Professoriate: A Qualitative Study of Instructor Perspectives on LLMs in Data Science Education
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shifted in just a few years from novelty to ubiquity, raising fundamental questions for data science education. Tasks once used to teach coding, writing, and…
arxiv.org

Necessary Fictions by Gogo Penguin is coagulating into my new jam!

gogopenguin.lnk.to/necessaryfic...

Reposted by Paul Matthews

I have a sentient coin because I ask if it's alive, telling it that Heads is Yes and Tails is No.

I flip it and, would you believe, it says Yes!

But, what's really impressive, is that sometimes¹ it shows Tails, which proves that it is so smart it knows how to lie!

¹ about half, to be honest

Spidey Tree
This only happens to you once