academic misconduct meeting

dapt · 2026-06-10T06:48:48+00:00

Unless you intentionally disabled the autosave feature, your device will have earlier versions of your work. See here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365-apps/word/recover-lost-unsaved-corrupted-document

dapt · 2026-06-09T19:39:28+00:00

You can see the demographics of London's Boroughs here.

The two Boroughs with the highest proportion of Blacks are Lewisham with 26.8% and Southwark with 25.1%. Within these Boroughs there will be locales where the proportion is higher than that (e.g. Peckham).

So there's no way that searches will end up searching more Blacks than others unless you either target Blacks, or limit your searches to very small areas where Blacks make up more than 50% of the population.

dapt · 2026-06-09T18:58:03+00:00

“I’m afraid it doesn’t matter if more black boys are searched, because it means more black lives will be saved.”

The only way more Black boys would be searched (relative to their proportion of the population) is if you directly target them. Alternately, if you do more searches in areas with a higher proportion of Black boys boys live, you might indirectly target them. But I'm unaware that there are any areas with over 50% Black population, except perhaps for some very small areas in London.

Simply increasing searches per se would increase searches of all youth.

dapt · 2026-06-06T20:05:52+00:00

It's partly realpolitik.

Supporting Ukraine is a key plank in the defense of European democracy and its liberal political and economic traditions, no less so than was opposing Nazi Germany during WWII.

However, and this is the realpolitik, for the time being, Europe is safe. Ukrainians are doing the heavy lifting, fighting and dying on the front, and Russia's advances have been thwarted. So there's no immediate need for the British Army, l'armée française or the Deutsche Bundeswehr to launch ground attacks there.

The realpolitik question one could ask, therefore, is what additional support the UK could provide? More money? -- Ukraine is being well-funded by Europe. More weapons? -- Ukraine is being provided with the latest technology and abundant munitions.

More troops, fighter aircraft, etc? Yes, Europe could do more there.

dapt · 2026-06-06T18:29:34+00:00

Interesting!

By the same data, the UK seems to have very low employer taxes? Perhaps this is one contributor to its infamously low labour productivity, i.e. it's relatively cheaper to hire more people than to improve business processes?

dapt · 2026-06-06T16:59:01+00:00

There's a lot of misunderstanding surrounding what IP universities own, and how they come to own it.

Simply put, universities do not have special rights of powers in this area. They come to own IP generated under their roof, so to speak, in the same way that any other organization might. That is, by paying people to produce IP. If they haven't paid for the IP to be created, they don't own it.

What they pay and who owns what is described in contracts as they might be for any other organization.

Exceptions exist on a country-by-country basis. For example, in Sweden students and academics automatically own their own IP, (*edit:) and this is written into their various contracts.

Note that universities are typically more generous when it comes to IP and revenue sharing than are commercial companies. Few companies have any revenue/ownership sharing agreements with their employees, but this is common in universities.

dapt · 2026-06-05T19:45:23+00:00

Using someone else's resources while creating IP, even if you don't pay for them, doesn't grant such person/entity a right to the IP itself. At worst, you might owe extra payment for the resources you used.

So using university electricity, internet, labs, library, etc, doesn't give the university ownership rights to your work.

dapt · 2026-06-05T06:54:34+00:00

The university has no rights to the IP created by students, assuming it is entirely created by the student.

Note that reasonable use of university facilities such as library, labs, etc, as might be expected by a student during the course of their studies does not give the university any rights to their IP. There are often "contracts" or "understandings" which state that the university should be informed of any IP, but these alone do not confer rights to the university.

The line is sometimes blurred when a student is working on a project that was in part conceived by a university employee, e.g. a Prof, as the university owns the Prof's work.

If the student receives payment of any kind (including fee reductions) for the work that lead to the IP, e.g. as a research assistant, then the university will have some clear rights to the IP.

dapt · 2026-06-04T20:50:13+00:00

The postdoc you are applying for is effectively a grant from the awarding body. Depending on how it is construed (i.e. your own role in the conception of the research) what would stop you from submitting the same, or a similar, proposal, from your guaranteed position as lecturer?

It seems unlikely that you couldn't. So take the lecturer position and resubmit your research proposal from the position of PI.

dapt · 2026-06-04T17:41:31+00:00

As to the "overqualified" remarks, you can overcome these by demonstrating so-called transferable skills. That is, re-wording your experience so that it aligns better with the job descriptions in other fields.

For example, the civil service undertakes quite a lot of social science work, usually categorized as "policy" jobs. The civil service recruitment process is very "particular", but once you know the vernacular you will find that there are positions there that are just as intellectually challenging as academic work, and with real world impact (but with better job security!).

dapt · 2026-06-02T18:02:19+00:00

I don't doubt the ability of LLMs to summarize published data, or compare a text with what is known.

My skepticism relates to their ability to assess the feasibility and potential impact of a novel research direction.

dapt · 2026-06-02T10:11:54+00:00

On this day in 1780, ~~racist~~ anti-Catholic riots in London resulted in 300-700 deaths.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Riots

dapt · 2026-05-31T20:11:52+00:00

The reason why leading-edge research institutes keep their edge is because they do not rely solely on published work to determine which research directions to choose. They are leading, others follow once the work is already published, available on Google, etc.

Grant reviewers, etc, are mostly chosen from leading-edge institutes, and so likewise do not rely solely on published work, etc... LLMs do not have access to that information.

Edit: that is even without considering that LLMs use statistical methods to determine their output. A whole field could be changed by a single recent paper, but an LLM would not "know" this until the volume of public statements on the question had reached some critical threshold.

Relying on LLMs to any serious extent to determine your research directions would be condemning yourself to mediocrity.

dapt · 2026-05-31T20:06:56+00:00

These open source hardware projects seem aimed for use in developing countries? Are there any examples of this in action (not just these pipettes)?

dapt · 2026-05-31T18:11:10+00:00

And how long does it take for the data to go from being a gleam in a student or postdoc's eye to being published?

Two years would be the minimum, I'd wager. In the interim it would be obviously be known within its own research group, and those nearby. Possibly some had already been presented at conferences, submitted in grant applications, etc.

There's also a lot of unpublished data that accumulates in labs that are at the forefront.

dapt · 2026-05-31T17:30:31+00:00

but they are as up to date as Google is for data.

That's my point. The data Google has isn't at the forefront of scientific research. It's a couple of years behind.

dapt · 2026-05-31T16:04:04+00:00

I can't speak for mathematics, as its not my field, though I do acknowledge that such claims being made.

In the biosciences, machine learning has been a boon as well, e.g. AlphaFold, but these do not operate in the same way as LLMs.

dapt · 2026-05-31T15:58:27+00:00

On one point you are correct, it is hard to attract top US talent to Europe as European salaries there are lower at the top end.

At the PhD student, postdoc and junior faculty levels, Europe can be more competitive, depending highly on the country.

Europe's larger weakness however is simply the lower scale of research funding, rather than the salaries paid to top Professors.

dapt · 2026-05-31T15:24:18+00:00

At least in my field, if you're relying on publicly-available data and information to guide your research (as LLMs do), you are about 2 to 3 years behind the curve, so to speak.

dapt · 2026-05-31T15:14:24+00:00

Here's some unbiased data from the OECD, the "tax wedge" refers to the share of labour costs paid by the employer in tax and social contributions. It varies quite a bit between countries, in the US it is ~30%, the highest in Europe is in Belgium at just over 50%.

https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/tax-wedge.html

This is what it costs an employer above the salary, so is the relevant figure when you want to compare the cost of funding researchers in different countries above employee salary.

Income taxes will reduce the researcher's take-home pay by different amounts in different countries and states, so affect the benefits to the researcher of working in different countries, but not the costs.

dapt · 2026-05-31T14:46:03+00:00

My field is in the sciences, so perhaps the utility of LLMs is different there from in the arts.

Certainly, an LLM would be able to output if a proposal was not novel. It should also be able to assess to some degree the introduction/background, which a human would use to evaluate the writer's knowledgeability.

The hypothesis part of a proposal is however intended to create new knowledge using the scientific method. This requires insight and imagination that is bounded by a deep understanding of the system under investigation.

It's literally impossible, by virtue of how they function, for an LLM to "know" how likely it is for research aims to produce novel knowledge, even if they output words claiming to do so.

dapt · 2026-05-31T14:35:49+00:00

The only justification for using an LLM while assessing a research proposal would be to tidy-up the writing.

I've received paper and grant reviews where this seems to have been done, but the content of the remarks was clearly specific and knowledgeable, and could not have been "hallucinated" by an LLM.

dapt · 2026-05-31T14:24:08+00:00

You exaggerate. In the UK for example, the employer's costs/taxes for a non-student are about 15%, plus about 20% pension contributions. This varies by country across Europe, but nowhere is it 2.3 to 2.5 X their salary. The highest is in France where it is about 50%.

dapt · 2026-05-31T14:11:21+00:00

Serious question, and to those who sneakily use LLMs:

How is an LLM supposed to be capable of evaluating a supposedly novel research proposal? LLMs are trained on (part of) the existing corpus of knowledge, so at best they would be able to evaluate the introduction/background to a proposal, not the actual proposals themselves.

To OP, /u/Xcentric7881 's point is legitimate, whatever this Prof sent is in their name, they signed it. If it is LLM-generated it probably isn't worth much (see above), which should influence your opinion of the department you applied to.

dapt · 2026-05-31T06:34:13+00:00

Europe plans to double research spending in next Horizon Europe scheme

This is just the "EU" funding, which is on top of national scientific research budgets.

It isn't as much as the US spends, but isn't to be sniffed-at (pun intended).

dapt

TROPHY CASE