MellowMage

MD;medicine/technology/philosophy/economics/gym/music/film/art/beauty/(machine)consciousness
Nietzschean Prometheanism
Aristocratic vitality
Cosmic curiosity 🥕

[Jeroen Vandamme @Vandamme_Jeroen]

De gebeurtenissen rond de Universiteit van Gent zijn een prachtige, moderne uitvoering van "De nieuwe kleren van de keizer".

Een absurde situatie waarin de massa de waarheid ontkent uit angst of groepsdruk.

Totdat iemand, een kind, durft te zeggen dat er iets niet klopt.

[James West @James_West_PhD]

I will no longer consider publication in @NEJM to be a scholarly work. It is no longer a journal with standards, and as it has routinely published garbage and lies for years now, if you expect to be taken seriously you will not publish in it or cite it.
https://t.co/BaeFLrMMNN

[Morph @doctormorphh]

men given testosterone punished unfair players more severely and rewarded honest players more generously.

[MellowMage @MellowMageX]

Jason Arday’s most important work — his 2015 PhD thesis — contains extensive unattributed textual overlap that independent analyses describe as plagiarism. The awarding university formally cleared him of deliberate misconduct.
The core work
Arday’s foundational academic credential is his 2015 doctoral thesis from Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU):
“An exploration of peer-monitoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research.”
This thesis underpinned his later appointments, including the Cambridge professorship that made him the university’s youngest Black professor.
Evidence of textual overlap
Multiple independent analyses (Nathan Cofnas using Copyleaks, The Telegraph, and others) documented substantial similarity with Paula Zwozdiak-Myers’s 2009 PhD thesis (Brunel University) on a closely related topic of reflective practice and student teachers:
• Reports range from more than 100 identical or nearly identical passages to a statistical count of approximately 188 sentences that are identical or highly similar.
• The probability of such overlap occurring by chance has been estimated at roughly 1 in 100 billion in one analysis.
• Side-by-side comparisons show long stretches of near-verbatim text, sometimes retaining phrasing or minor errors from the earlier work. Zwozdiak-Myers is cited roughly 17 times, but the overlapping passages frequently lack quotation marks or clear attribution for the specific wording.
• Additional overlaps with other sources were also flagged in the thesis and in later papers.
Independent reviewers, including Purdue biochemist David Sanders (who examined a detailed dossier), described the pattern as extensive plagiarism or systematic close paraphrasing beyond isolated instances.

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

If you're an academic (and can prove it with an ORCID), consider signing a petition protesting the University of Ghent's suspension of a postdoc for exposing academic misconduct, a blatant violation of academic freedom (as always, regardless of your agreement with all of the whistleblower's views). https://t.co/bkZ98z609Q https://t.co/UrjFnA93Sk

[Mathias Vanden Borre @M_VandenBorre]

PS-gemeenteraadslid in Ganshoren Gael Muzika opgepakt wegens verhandelen van 100kg cannabis en lidmaatschap van een criminele organisatie.

@PSofficiel? Iemand een reactie?
https://t.co/KLtfIZvw7k

[Alexander Kustov @akoustov]

The whole Arday thing is absolutely breaking me. While many folks lament the loss of trust in higher education or the media, the bigger issue is clearly the loss of our trustworthiness.

Regular people are not supposed to do their own research on things like masks, plagiarism, or racism—they *should* just be able to take what institutions like Harvard, Cambridge, or BBC tell them for granted. But now they can't. And they seek populist alternatives on social media that are even worse.

I mean, I'm not sure I'd trust Cambridge administrators and many other universities myself now. And it's not just the replication crisis or DEI scandals—there are some disciplines like education where the standards are so low it's not even clear whether anything they produce can be replicated or falsified at all by design.

I'm still a professor though, because I believe universities can be valuable and because I see a lot of great people around me doing serious work in the pursuit of truth and the public interest, even within social sciences. But to change course for the better and restore trust, we should start by restoring trustworthiness and calling out bullshit on our own side even when bad people on the other side exist and attack higher ed for the wrong reasons.

[Yuri Bezmenov's Ghost @Ne_pas_couvrir]

When you watch old videos of high-trust societies, you notice how little coercive infrastructure they needed. Here, one elderly policeman was enough because shared norms, reputation, shame, and neighbors willing to intervene maintained order.

As trust declines, informal social control collapses and ordinary cooperation must be monitored and enforced. That invisible social infrastructure is replaced by an authoritarian state apparatus and private controls, such as more police, cameras, locks, barriers, contracts, rules, paperwork, verification, and surveillance.

[MellowMage @MellowMageX]

Laughing initially evolved as a ‘false alarm’ signal. Hunter warns group of predator; turns out to
be the wind. Hunter laughing is -very densely coded- hunter telling group ‘don’t worry, this turned out not to be a predator’. Then we got creative and developed humor 🥕

[MellowMage @MellowMageX]

@calotonterias Laughing initially evolved as a ‘false alarm’ signal. Hunter warns group of predator; turns out to
be the wind. Hunter laughing is -very densely coded- hunter telling group ‘don’t worry, this turned out not to be a predator’. Then we got creative and developed humor 🥕

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

The rector of @ugent is Petra De Sutter (photo below). This is the person who is ultimately on watch as @nathancofnas is fired for having pointed to the unimaginable fraudulence of Jason Arday at @Cambridge_Uni. Petra, who is a biological male and a gynaecologist, is a trans "woman." I presume that Dr. De Sutter does not believe that human beings are a sexually dimorphic and sexually reproducing species consisting of two default phenotypes: male and female.

This story understates the Orwellian and Kafkaesque world of academia in every conceivable manner.

[Visegrád 24 @visegrad24]

Danish government data show that immigrants from several Middle Eastern and African countries impose substantial net costs on Denmark's public finances.

Among immigrants and descendants from MENAPT countries, including Somalia, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, the Danish government calculated a combined net fiscal cost of around 24 billion Danish kroner ($3.7 billion) per year.

Net cost per person per year:

🇸🇴 Somalia: $27,900
2nd generation: $34,700

🇸🇾 Syria: $25,400
2nd generation: $30,600

🇮🇶 Iraq: $19,300
2nd generation: $32,500

🇱🇧 Lebanon: $21,800
2nd generation: $29,300

[MellowMage @MellowMageX]

@DVanLangenhove Maybe your wife asked some LLM ‘how expensive is wedding ring repair work’ or something like that; or she mentioned it to a friend and she did that. It’s mostly about metadata; networks; context. You are linked to your wife’s friends. Stay w iPhone (lockdown mode for you)

[MellowMage @MellowMageX]

@DVanLangenhove iPhone is the best there is for privacy + security + real-life practical usage. Probably your wife did something trackable and you and your wife are linked in ad databases. iPhone does not use the microphone to sell your data. Also check privacy > microphone access.

[Steve Stewart-Williams @SteveStuWill]

IQ scores only predict how well you do on IQ tests… and just a few other things

https://t.co/66QY2O6BdZ

[MellowMage @MellowMageX]

@PeterDiamandis 8 hours of sleep is BS, not even necessary for the average joe. I am fine with about 5.5h.

[MellowMage @MellowMageX]

Indexed the Jeffrey Epstein public record using Grok Build.

Check out falcon-fire-bamboo-iris https://t.co/pTwttZ3uei

#grok

[MellowMage @MellowMageX]

@benln 🪬🪬

[MellowMage @MellowMageX]

3F1 is the only Cambridge paper that names its three load-bearing topics.
I remapped them onto a 50 Hz notch that can invent VT, an OFDM symbol that is a DFT, and a house that lies if you sample the grid at 100 Hz.
A pole is not a homework mark. It is why the filter does not ring through a QT interval.
#grokbuild

https://t.co/LPfdDeTaf7

[MellowMage @MellowMageX]

@bot I have supergrok Heavy but cannot access grok Boy when using Heavy to acces it on the iPhone app?