Today's Mail headlines are yelling about "campus wokery", but I've just been blocked from talking to a UK government dept (about women in STEM) because I was critical about UK government policy (unrelated to women in STEM): a thread 🧵 [1/7] Recently I was asked to give a lunchtime talk to a group in a major government department about women in STEM, to take place on Ada Lovelace Day (which is tomorrow). As might be expected, I was told they’d do due diligence on my social media. [2/7]

🧵 Content warnings: a short thread.
Today's Times banged on about content warnings. They used this quote: “Real life doesn’t come with a content warning — we can’t protect people from difficult ideas for their whole lives, nor should we try to.”
They ENTIRELY miss the point. 1/5 A content warning flags issues in a text/source. It doesn't do this to "protect people from difficult ideas", it does it to warn people who have first hand experience of particular types of trauma. It's for those who already KNOW about that content personally. 2/5

Convenient that an attempted slating of universities by the Times (and no doubt others to follow) hits the front page on the day when the academic and academic-related union, @ucu, are launching a campaign on pay, working conditions, and USS pensions. #ucuRISING

https://twitter.com/brokenbottleboy/status/1557269200581828615

I have absolutely no problem providing content warnings on the material I teach. It's good inclusive practice. It's not limiting academic freedom of speech, it's providing an option. As for removing books – hello, we update modules every year. Sometimes some don't make the cut.

🧵Thought I’d curate all of my weary sighing replies to those who don’t approve of the @UCU strikes here in one handy place. #OneOfUsAllOfUs #UCUstrike ⬇️ “Lazy! Academics hardly do any work anyway”
a) Not only do we regularly pull 40+ hours a week, our work has increased in the pandemic as we “pivoted” (god, that word) to blended teaching.
b) if we hardly do any work, how come you think this strike is disruptive to students? 🧐

I am at my sister’s house in deepest Fermanagh. She and my brother-in-law found a colouring book about dinosaurs in the charity shop.
BUT WAIT! This is no ordinary dinosaur colouring book. This is a Christian home-schooling colouring book. And God made the dinosaurs. Yes, Adam and Eve hung out with dinosaurs because God created dinosaurs on the *counts on fingers* fifth day of creation (if they were water-dwelling or if they flew) and all the land ones on the sixth day.

#huxleysummit - @joswinson argues for a code of ethics for #AI. I absolutely agree. But how do we hold people to it? Last week's #CUKC roundtable tackled this. Conclusion? No conclusion. Because competing interests of business, academia, and law-makers mean it's hugely difficult. There are several approaches: I'd love to see an external ethics review conducted for any project (academic or commercial) using human participants or human data. Academia already does this but businesses are reluctant as their research is confidential/sensitive. #huxleysummit

LOL, NO. A thread. [1/10]

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I’m going to skip over all the (impenetrable, fittingly enough) wittering about the redistribution of sex - and omg, it’s an tenuous take - and focus on the sex robots. Because of course. [2/10]