Nic Fox
Research: missing children, harm, vulnerability (exploit’n, exclusion, SEND) w/ ML+NLP, policing, matricide, women’s road safety
Papers:
doi.org/10.1080/10439463.20…
doi.org/10.1080/30679125.20…
Ex IT consultant. DMs ⛔️
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- Reposted by Nic Foxpouring one out for the systems thinkers who can see the abyss and have to live with the darkness
- Reposted by Nic FoxPalantir’s stated mission is to defend America. Peter Thiel is a radical libertarian who does not believe ‘freedom & democracy are compatible’. Yet, the UK is overwhelmingly dependent on Palantir’s services. As a national security threat, this is off the charts. @thenerve.news 2/
- Reposted by Nic FoxNEW: Our investigation for @thenerve_news reveals not only that Peter Thiel’s Palantir is completely enmeshed in our critical national infrastructure. It’s also the ‘cloud support’ for our nuclear weapons system 🤯 1/ www.thenerve.news/p/palantir-t...
- Reposted by Nic FoxThis is worth paying attention to particularly for those who have concerns about Palantir's involvement in NHS data.... www.bmj.com/content/392/...
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- Reposted by Nic FoxThere is still time to register for this event on school absences and crime!
- We're organising a webinar on 18 February to mark the end of my @adr-uk.bsky.social Fellowship on school absences and crime. With talks from top-notch colleagues including @iainbrennan.bsky.social, @foxnic.bsky.social, Mark Mon-Williams, and many others! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/from-schoo...
- The 2nd* paper from my PhD has been published as an open access Brief Report! :) Topics: SEND, exclusion, exploitation, missing children, machine learning ("AI") Paper: doi.org/10.1080/3067... The thread below attempts to explain what its about in a way that's accessible *first solo author paper
- 1/n Criminologists use police reports, court records, & other text documents to understand crime. But manually analysing these is slow, limits how much data can be studied, & delays insights. Machine learning (ML) could help, but many tools need huge training datasets and deep technical expertise.
- 2/n Many "AI" tools e.g ChatGPT are off-limits for sensitive crime data (privacy risks + unreliable). Fancy ML methods require resources/skills that underfunded agencies/researchers lack + complex models are hard to trust or explain their results, & aren't always better than simpler algorithms.
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View full thread9/n Paper: doi.org/10.1080/3067... Code & suggested resources: github.com/foxnic/acces...
- “GPS’s remarkable accuracy rests on years of meticulous mathematical labor done behind the scenes by scientists like West, who pursued the work not for recognition, but because it mattered” ❤️
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- “It’s much more about ‘how can we support you to meet the expectation’” “a “welcome hub” in which pupils can collect uniform they may need, eat breakfast and receive support from pastoral staff […] open every morning […] partnered with a charity to give parents, carers and children toiletries“
- Reposted by Nic FoxThis analysis of papers from 1980 to 2025 goes beyond LLMs, but notes one challenge that arises when research questions rely on the same tools and datasets: “the adoption of AI seems to induce authors to converge on the same solutions to known problems rather than create new ones.”
- Reposted by Nic Fox"The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build. [...] No other part of the work so cripples the resulting system if done wrong. No other part is more difficult to rectify later." Fred Brooks, "No Silver Bullet"
- Reposted by Nic FoxAn invaluable new report. A "premortem" is exactly what we need.
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- Reposted by Nic Fox'The Effect of Counting Rules on Cross-National Comparisons of Homicide', by @davidbuil.bsky.social (who came up with the idea & did all of the data analysis and most of the write up), myself & @marcelo-f-aebi.bsky.social, just out at Social Indicators Research (link.springer.com/article/10.1...).
- “Maybe not everything has to be digital or digitized, maybe the internet shouldn’t be inserted into absolutely everything, maybe we shouldn’t be constantly connected in the way we’re now expected to be, and generative AI certainly does not need to be forced into every facet of society.” ❤️
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- Reposted by Nic FoxOur work begins with a simple, but bold idea: powerful people using AI to decide our fates is not inevitable. At TechTonic Justice, we’re working for a better today and a better tomorrow. And, we want you to join us!
- Reposted by Nic FoxBig Tech is rapidly building out data centers to power AI—without adequate oversight, transparency, or accountability. @publiccitizen.bsky.social has released a new report revealing who truly benefits from the acceleration of AI across all sectors of society, and who is left to pay the price.⬇️
- Reposted by Nic Fox"Nobody is using this responsibly": @kevindeliban.bsky.social's warnings on A.I. and the lessons he took from beating the state of Arkansas in court after it denied benefits to Medicaid recipients because of decisions made by an algorithm.
- Someone has messaged me on here but I can’t read it without providing data to KWS which I’m reluctant to do. If you have my contact details please email/text me. If not, perhaps reply to this post.
- Reposted by Nic Fox📢 We’re hiring a Lecturer in Criminology & Criminal Justice 📢 Please do share widely 1/3
- Just a university web page… aimed at PhD students… seeking guidance on thesis submission… asking them to first ask “AI” for answers before contacting support staff, followed by a statement that the information provided by the “AI” tool can be incorrect 😧 Higher education 🤔
- Reposted by Nic FoxClosing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...
- Reposted by Nic FoxAcademics and technologists are sounding the alarm about a growing crisis in scholarship as we know it: AI-generated citations of nonexistent papers that have infested real journals. Despite being fake, the sources are widely assumed to be authentic the more they appear in published literature.
- "When the grades were released, for most of the modules they got better grades and were laughing at me.” "I am not proud of this degree anymore." 😔 “Would you want to travel over a bridge that's been designed by one of these students?" www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
- #AcademicSky Has anyone else experienced these errors on the Taylor & Francis submission portal or does anyone know how to resolve it? Seems it’s happened for others too (www.reddit.com/r/academia/c...)
- Hi @tandfresearch.bsky.social who can I contact about submission portal errors preventing manuscript submission, as well as a Captcha error preventing support query submissions?
- Reposted by Nic FoxIt’s good to see papers start to address LLMs as structural plagiarism — provenance, more hidden than the original words or training data. www.nature.com/articles/s42...
- “a source of trauma for a significant minority of vulnerable pupils”
- Astonishing summary of correspondence chscp.org.uk/wp-content/u...
- Reposted by Nic FoxAstonishing summary of correspondence chscp.org.uk/wp-content/u...
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- Hi @tandfresearch.bsky.social who can I contact about submission portal errors preventing manuscript submission, as well as a Captcha error preventing support query submissions?
- Reposted by Nic FoxFrom top AI coding user globally to completely stop using it because it's so much harder to review AI code than write it myself. And they say all software developers jobs will be replaced by LLM. Life comes fast at you. 🤣
- “There is a particular lack of understanding of neurodevelopmental needs and the impact of trauma and poor mental health on children’s learning and/or wellbeing. This results in children’s needs escalating and leading to reduced attendance or to them leaving school”
- ““They’re there because they want to be critical thinkers and politically engaged citizens.” […] they’re not paying for automation. They’re paying for mentorship, for dialogue, for intellectual relationships that can’t be outsourced to a chatbot”
- Absolutely devastating account of the CSU's $17 million capitulation to ChatGPT, from a fellow faculty member watching it happen www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...
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- 'If you want to be a whistleblower you have to be prepared to lose your job. I’m able to do what I’m doing here because I’m nobody' Old article but new to me. Loved it (Not just because it’s about a mid-life PGR from an IT background). Academic reality though: 😔 www.theguardian.com/science/2014...
- Reposted by Nic FoxWe're organising a webinar on 18 February to mark the end of my @adr-uk.bsky.social Fellowship on school absences and crime. With talks from top-notch colleagues including @iainbrennan.bsky.social, @foxnic.bsky.social, Mark Mon-Williams, and many others! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/from-schoo...
- Reposted by Nic Foxevergreen
- Reposted by Nic FoxMethodology
- “institutions reward publication volume and citation metrics above everything else” “Papermills are merely the black-market version of the same sickness: a culture that rewards output, not validity; novelty, not truth; publication, not knowledge.”
- “Overambitious […] underdelivered” Would be interesting to see an analysis of similarities with the Post Office IT scandal in terms of previous members of the board and management responses to staff/stakeholders raising concerns.
- “ambitious plan to digitalize the courts […] an IT system, introduced as part of a £1bn project, has been plagued with technical faults - causing crucial information to go missing, be overwritten, or appear lost […] was known about for years before action was taken” www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
- “ambitious plan to digitalize the courts […] an IT system, introduced as part of a £1bn project, has been plagued with technical faults - causing crucial information to go missing, be overwritten, or appear lost […] was known about for years before action was taken” www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
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- “Rather than choosing between two flawed approaches […] we advocate for explicitly acknowledging the model uncertainty they introduce. We demonstrate how this can be achieved…” ❤️
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- Reposted by Nic FoxWhy would someone pay $20k for a robot controlled by a human in a remote location to do things more slowly and clumsily when the median wage for a maid or housekeeper is $33k per year, which is typically spread across 10-20 households?
- Reposted by Nic FoxWhen people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same. Friction is an essential ingredient for learning! Convenience makes us shallow. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...
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- “In 10 years, who’s going to mentor the next generation? The developers who’ve been using AI since day one won’t have the architectural understanding to teach. The product managers who’ve always relied on AI for decisions won’t have the judgment to pass on.“
- “[AI] would generate something, […] I’d correct it, it would make the same mistake again, I’d correct it again. I was working harder than if I’d just written the code myself, but with none of the learning or skill development …I’d abdicated ownership while telling myself I was being innovative”
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- Reposted by Nic FoxNew report alert: Young people at risk of violence are too often excluded from mental health support — unless they offend first. 🔗 Read the full report youthendowmentfund.org.uk/reports/acce... #WMHD25 #WorldMentalHealthDay #EarlyIntervention #ViolencePrevention
- Reposted by Nic FoxWhat's galling is hearing AI leaders/boosters brush off overbuild or bubble risks as if they don’t matter The BoE warns a burst could dry up finance for households and businesses. When people with power say ‘don’t worry’, what they really mean is ‘we’ll be fine’
- Reposted by Nic FoxShort note with Fernando Miró Llinares published on @crimrxiv.com: 'Yet another problem for scholarly communication in criminology: The case of a Spanish journal turned into a paper mill' doi.org/10.21428/cb6...
- Current end of PhD and academic career planning feelings
- “P8 is […] skewed when children don’t attend well” “When we label schools as underperforming, we make it harder […] to recruit” “disadvantaged children can be concentrated in certain schools […], in turn […]these schools find achieving a positive P8 more difficult - and so the cycle repeats”
- “multiple factors contributing to disadvantage, many of which schools may not be able to influence. As some of those factors only […]start to bite at secondary school, it’s [common] for a school to be doing everything it can, only to still see little progress -a reality that P8 fails to acknowledge”
- “multiple factors contributing to disadvantage, many of which schools may not be able to influence. As some of those factors only […]start to bite at secondary school, it’s [common] for a school to be doing everything it can, only to still see little progress -a reality that P8 fails to acknowledge”
- Among the 100 schools with the highest % of disadvantaged pupils and lowest % of EAL pupils, just 7 have a positive P8 score. Nick Gibb claims it shows teaching needs to "improve"; the schools say P8 is broken. @ellencph.bsky.social gets behind the numbers www.tes.com/magazine/ana...
- Reposted by Nic Fox🥳Congrats to @oliveiratr.bsky.social, winner of the prestigious 2025 ESC Policing WG Early Career Researcher prize! @jacksojp.bsky.social said "this research on aggressive policing in São Paulo provides crucial insights into how confrontational police tactics undermine public trust and legitimacy"
- Reposted by Nic FoxA German teen told Meta's child safety researchers his under-10 little brother had been sexually propositioned multiple times on its VR platform. Meta deleted the evidence. New internal whistleblower docs indicate that was part of a broader cover-up: www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...
