Unfortunately, deciding what a person wants to say and then manipulating evidence to fit seems to be the default position in most areas of life not just the BBC. This includes politics, journalism and academia. See the work on Questionable Research practices ukrio.org/ukrio-resour...

I think this is true of academia in general. Institutional knowledge of how the system operates is far more important for careers than disciplinary specific knowledge.

Tinkering around with metrics to try and improve the behaviour of those extrinsically motivated and gaming system is missing the point.

The real issue is how do we get people to focus on the intrinsic motivation of creating and communicating good science.

My conclusion about this generation of social media is that you don't use it, it uses you.

Unless you are shareholder the best you can hope for it is amplify existing social capital.

Also attributing it to mental health is really stigmatising to people with mental health conditions. The underlying issue might better be described as Durkheim's Anomie.

This story highlights the problems of people speculating on social media without establishing what happened first. Only a single British born man was charged. The other may have been suspected simply because of their ethnicity and age.

People like Paul Johnson (formerly of the IFS) are saying that economic growth will make it easier for the government to solve problems. The unfortunate result is that the government ends up prioritising growth even if that growth causes the problems it supposed to help solve.

Apologies for the passive aggressive thread detached from the original context. But people totally unaware of how they live in a tiny privileged bubble is both frustrating and a lost cause in terms of debate.

Which is more than I can say for many academics on secure contracts who are utterly oblivious to how exploited their junior colleagues are.

Or course that was after I had been made redundant.

Academia really needs to stop giving literally 10s of millions in funding to people whose understanding of research is so limited they would struggle to get higher than a C for a MSc dissertation.

Early in my career the PI wanted me to a "determinants of" paper. My failure to explain the flaws of the approach lead me spending the next year on utterly pointless research.

I was finally vindicated when a peer reviewer tore the paper apart.