Thursday, 13th February (Cambridge)

Posted on February 13, 2025 by roycross

1. Here’s what appears to be an open-access article from the Times Higher Education, The UK’s redundancy crisis: four views from the front line https://www.timeshighereducation.com/depth/uks-redundancy-crisis-four-views-front-line

Higher education news feeds are currently dominated by near-daily announcements of large job cuts across the UK. But what effect is all this having on the atmosphere within the departments affected – and, indeed, across the sector in general? Four scholars give their takes.

And pretty grim takes, they are.

2. Another useful set of resources has just been published by the ECML (European Centre for Modern Languages), Building blocks for planning language-sensitive teacher education. Introduction to the concept here  https://www.ecml.at/ECML-Programme/Programme2020-2023/Buildingblocksforplanninglanguage-sensitiveteachereducation/tabid/5529/Default.aspx and a wealth of resources here https://www.ecml.at/ECML-Programme/Programme2020-2023/Languagesensitiveteachereducation/Resources/tabid/5882/language/en-GB/Default.aspx

Building blocks help teacher educators and curriculum planners working with teachers of different languages and subjects to embed language-sensitive education into teacher education curricula and courses of all languages and subjects. The aim of language-sensitive teacher education is to enable practising and future teachers to meet the language and communication needs of their learners.

3. Decolonising English language teaching: what does it mean and how can it be approached? was a TeachingEnglish online event on 28th January that I’m afraid I missed. Here’s the recording https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/news-and-events/webinars/webinars-teacher-educator/decolonising-english-language-teaching-what-does

Ursula Lanvers, Programme Leader for the PhD Programme in Applied Linguistics at the University of York and Tetyana Lunyova, Researchers at Risk Fellow at the University of York, discuss the meaning of, and approaches to, decolonising ELT. With reference to their 2024 British Council English Language Teaching Research Awards (ELTRA), they talk through how considerations of decolonisation impact on pedagogy, the relative positions of different languages and teacher identity and wellbeing, with a particular focus on insight gathered from the secondary school context in Ukraine.

4. Here’s some challenging reading for the weekend, three open-access articles from the latest issue of the Language and Intercultural Communication journal https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rmli20

‘Blocks’ and ‘threads’: Chinese students’ constructions of ‘culture’ in their reflections on ‘critical incidents’ experienced during a short-term study abroad programme in the UK by Jane Carnaffan and Caroline Burns from Northumbria University https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14708477.2024.2436902?src=exp-la

This article thematically analyses 65 written reflections on ‘British’ culture by Chinese science and engineering students on a short course on intercultural communication at a UK university. Teaching centred on a ‘critical incidents’ approach (Brislin, 1986), Gibbs’s 1998 (2013) ‘cycle of reflection’ and Holliday’s (2016) non-essentialist concept of cultural ‘blocks’ and ‘threads’. Student reflections evidence ‘block’ thinking, arguably inherent in ‘critical incidents’, yet some present promising ‘threads’. The study contributes to an understanding of student outcomes of short-term study abroad and advances non-essentialist pedagogies in intercultural competence.

Hospicing Gaza ( ﻏﺰﺓ ): stunned languaging as poetic cries for a heartbreaking scholarship by Khawla Badwan and Alison Phipps from Manchester Met and Glasgow University respectively https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14708477.2024.2448104?src=exp-la

The article explores the notion of stunned languaging in the construction of poetic cries as a genre of grief in times of unspeakability while witnessing the online streaming of the Gaza Genocide. Weaving together conceptual, experiential, and poetic threads and traces, the article presents a hospicing project of heartbreaking scholarship as a form of bearing witness, collective accountability, and a caring commons. It discusses the role of language in mobilising the immobile through poetic cries that speak to failing intercultural projects and argues for the need for attending to the languaging of mourning and grief as hospicing work that is both post-human and post-secular.

The varicultural, translanguaging and deCentring by Adrian Holliday from Canterbury Christchurch University https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14708477.2024.2430485?src=exp-la

Inability to discern separated cultures or native–non-native-speakerhood in a hugely diverse hospital setting allows deCentred observation of how cultural practices and values cross socially constructed cultural boundaries within a seamless varicultural flow. This enables inclusive and translingual threads of hybridity resourced by the everyday small culture experience we bring with us. Beginning with the small helps resist being colonised by the ‘us’–‘them’ essentialist blocks derived from the dominant separated cultures model. Much of this struggle is unspoken in the perceptions of silent onlookers, influenced by grand, personal, institutional and workplace narratives, and in how we perceive how others perceive us.

PDFs of all three articles below.

Blocks and threads Chinese students constructions of culture in their reflections on critical incidents experienced during a short-term studDownload
Hospicing Gaza stunned languaging as poetic cries for a heartbreaking scholarshipDownload
The varicultural translanguaging and deCentringDownload

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5. And, finally, let us eat Moldovan cake https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/baba-neagra-moldovan-cake

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Tuesday, 11th February (Richmond)

Posted on February 11, 2025 by roycross

1. Time flies! It seems only yesterday I mentioned a Macmillan online teacher festival (but it was November). Their 5th annual Global Teachers’ Festival has rather crept up on me: it started yesterday (it was all recorded, don’t worry!) and continues until Friday 21st February. More details and registration here https://www.macmillanenglish.com/global-teachers-festival-2025 and PDF of programme below.

Global_Teachers__Festival_Programme_2025Download

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2. I had very nearly finished that piece on The Future of TESOL that I mentioned last Thursday when this popped up in my inbox yesterday, a post by Sam Altman on his eponymous blog, innocently entitled Three Observations https://blog.samaltman.com/three-observations

In a decade, perhaps everyone on earth will be capable of accomplishing more than the most impactful person can today. We continue to see rapid progress with AI development. Here are three observations about the economics of AI:

1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. These resources are chiefly training compute, data, and inference compute. It appears that you can spend arbitrary amounts of money and get continuous and predictable gains; the scaling laws that predict this are accurate over many orders of magnitude.

2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.

3. The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.

If these three observations continue to hold true, the impacts on society will be significant.

3. Another excellent Talking ELT video from Ben Knight of Oxford University Press and his guests, this time Sarah Mercer and Charlotte Rance, Compassion, critical thinking and the human connection https://youtu.be/O0lHU1SZ_Dc

Compassion isn’t just about being kind to people! In this episode of Talking ELT, we look at how compassion requires both criticality and courage to understand other people’s experiences of the world. We also discuss the impacts of AI and technology on compassion-based approaches in ELT.

I wonder whether Ben and his guests’ discussion of AI might have been just a little different if they’d had chance to read Sam Altman’s blog post? Maybe not!

4. That Letby bee in my bonnet continues to hum: here’s two recent podcasts questioning her conviction – the latest issue of The Story podcast, Is there ‘new evidence’ in the Lucy Letby case? https://shows.acast.com/storiesofourtimes/episodes/letby-ep and the latest issue of The Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast, Lucy Letby and the medical experts who believe she is innocent https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/lucy-letby-and-the-medical-experts-who-believe-she/id1440133626?i=1000690990007

5. And, finally, the Natural History Museum’s 2024 Wildlife Photographer of the Year People’s Choice Award https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5ypn8jz9q7o I love the Michael Forsberg photo of a disguised biologist approaching a whooping crane!

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Tuesday, 4th February (Richmond)

Posted on February 6, 2025 by roycross

Not quite sure what happened on Tuesday! Better late than never?

1. This one has been around the social media block several times but it’s still worth a read, The Anglo-EU Translation Guide https://polish2english.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/55551980-anglo-eu-translation-guide1.pdf  Do you hear what I say? Very interesting? Do you almost agree? PDF below.

Anglo-EU translation guideDownload

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2. Frank Heyworth died last month. Frank started work with the British Council, went on to be the Director-General of Eurocentres, co-founded Eaquals, for the last thirty years of his life worked tirelessly with the European Centre for Modern Languages in Graz, and was a good friend. Here’s Sarah Breslin’s interview with him on his (notional) retirement in 2019, in which he shares a great story about inkpots in Ghana!  https://youtu.be/bPw9EmRNTvk And here’s his Eaquals obituary https://www.eaquals.org/2025/01/16/remembering-frank-heyworth/

3. Here’s one from The Conversation, The weird psychology of airports by Steve Taylor from Leeds Beckett University https://theconversation.com/the-weird-psychology-of-airports-248357

Years ago, when I was doing my MA at Lancaster University, we did some work analysing conversations in a car between hitch-hiker and driver, which I think was presented as an example of a ‘pragmeme’ – a situation where the normal rules of conversation were relaxed, given the two participants were unlikely ever to meet again. Someone will know better than me, but I think Steve Taylor’s airport example is also a pragmeme. And forty years on, I still wonder how Chris Candlin obtained reliable data on hitch-hiker driver interactions!

4. Here’s a 2024 article on the topic, Pragmemes revisited: A theoretical framework by Alessandro Capone & Roberto Graci from the University of Messina https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1329291/full#h6

PDF below. This is a sit-down-with-a-cup-of-coffee one; here’s the abstract (and it’s an easier read than the abstract might suggest):

In this paper, we take up an old issue that of pragmemes, broached by Mey and further explored by Capone. It is not easy to define pragmemes and distinguish them sufficiently from speech acts (units of language use broached by Austin and Searle) or from Wittgensteinian language games or from macro speech acts (see van Dijk on macrostructures) or from Goffman’s scripts. The best idea we could develop about pragmemes is that they instantiate the triple articulation of language, proposed by Jock Wong; being essentially composed of phonological-syntactic units, that have a certain content relative to a social situation and to a certain culture, pragmemes express a certain function (or illocutionary force), like, e.g., modifying society or some aspect of it. They are part of a chapter that can be called either “societal pragmatics” or “emancipatory pragmatics,” to use the words by Mey. In fact, knowledge of how language is used to diminish the rights of people and to propagate the “status quo” may be instrumental to give rights and power to ordinary human beings who are oppressed by political and economical structures.

I wonder if Alessandro Capone is a distant relative of the famous Al?

Pragmemes revisited – a theoretical frameworkDownload

5. And, finally, here’s a great piece from The New York Times, Read Your Way Through New York City https://tinyurl.com/2nxhjr8e Takes you there, it really does!

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Thursday, 6th February (Cambridge)

Posted on February 6, 2025 by roycross

1. Here, courtesy of The Lexical Lab newsletter, is the BBC’s history of its own involvement in English teaching, Do You Speak English? https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0026tw0 Even I’m too young to remember Walter and Connie, the first ‘English by television’ programme, but here’s two examples from YouTube:

Walter & Connie By The Seaside https://youtu.be/lhfcU9deYx8?feature=shared

Walter and Connie At Home https://youtu.be/kzLI2eIt85U

2. I’m doing a bit of work at present on ‘The Future of TESOL’, which I hope to be able to share in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, here’s some shorter-term predictions from the EdTEch Hub team, What will 2025 bring to the EdTech sector? Special predictions from EdTech Hub experts https://edtechhub.org/2025/01/31/what-will-2025-bring-to-the-edtech-sector-special-predictions-from-edtech-hub-experts/

3. Here, courtesy of the Carbon Brief newsletter, is the UK Met Office’s review of the UK’s climate in 2024, https://www.carbonbrief.org/met-office-a-review-of-the-uks-climate-in-2024/

I used to think the Föhn wind was (only) a Bavarian thing – the good burgers of Munich certainly talked about it a lot!- but it seems that lots of places, including Scotland, experience it.

4. Here’s Alexandra Mihai’s latest post on her blog, The Educationalist Learning across boundaries. On embedding interdisciplinarity in education https://educationalist.substack.com/p/learning-across-boundaries-on-embedding

Why do we need interdisciplinarity? It’s simple: the world is not neatly divided into disciplines. Every day we encounter problems that require knowledge and skills pertaining to different disciplinary areas. But our education is built around disciplinary silos that seldom interact. Or at least we are not being taught how and when they can interact. This artificial separation – and often oversimplification – though useful from a purely pedagogical perspective, does impact the way we learn to think about the world around us.

5. And, finally, Karl Muller and the fatal lemon https://beta.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/stories/karl-muller-and-the-fatal-lemon/

When can a lemon have fatal consequences? If it proves you are, in fact, a wartime spy …

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Thursday, 30th January (Cambridge)

Posted on January 30, 2025 by roycross

1. Here’s the UK National Archives (NA) video on the Beveridge Report of 1942 https://youtu.be/e-vGHp4P9LU Sir William Beveridge’s report laid the foundations of the modern British welfare state and the National Health Service (in the middle of the Second World War). It found extraordinary resonance among the population at large, with more than half a million copies sold in the first year after its publication and an extraordinary 95% of the population having heard of it – and by and large approving of it.

And here’s an equally good NA video on a much earlier document, the Domesday Book of 1086 https://youtu.be/72-w8ZhNV8I

2. The National Archives are also offering a free // pay what you can webinar with Alice Hunt from Southampton University, Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649–1660, at 19:30 UK time on Wednesday 12th February https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/republic-britains-revolutionary-decade-16491660-tickets-1088578941919

Events moved with giddying speed in the 1650s. After the execution of Charles I, ‘dangerous’ monarchy was abolished and the House of Lords was dismissed, sending shockwaves across the kingdom. These revolutionary acts set in motion a decade of bewildering change and instability, under the leadership of the soldier-statesman Oliver Cromwell. England’s unique republican experiment – imposed on Scotland and Ireland, too – may have been short-lived, but had a lasting impact on British monarchy, politics, religion and culture. Here, in thrilling detail, Alice Hunt brings to life the republic and its extraordinary cast of characters.

3. I’m reasonably confident that the London Review of Books blog is accessible to non-subscribers; I’m completely confident that it often has interesting posts. https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/

Two recent posts:

Ceasefire by Selma Dabbagh about Gaza (and President Trump) https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/january/ceasefire

Everyone has their reasons by Jan-Werner Müller about the recent epidemic of sycophancy in the USA (and President Trump) https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/january/everyone-has-their-reasons

4. And one last posting 🤞 about President Trump until March, a Time magazine piece on what is possibly his most far-reaching ‘Executive Order’, “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing” https://time.com/7210039/what-is-dei-trump-executive-order-companies-diversity-efforts/

DEI = Diversity, Equity & Inclusion: three notions with the promotion of which many of us, I imagine, have no problems whatsoever. (Hope that last sentence worked!) That said, I’ve just listened to the news and heard that Trump is blaming the plane crash in Washington on the DEI policy of the agency responsible for air traffic control …

5. And, finally and perhaps unexpectedly, an interesting piece from Himal magazine on The languages of tea-estate workers in South Asia: Part 1 https://www.himalmag.com/culture/india-tea-estate-workers

The establishment of commercial tea plantations in the region by the British engendered the migration of diverse groups of people to tea-growing areas to work there as labourers. Many of these workers belonged to marginalised communities, and they brought their eclectic languages along to their new homes. Labour migration to the tea gardens of colonial India fostered contact and convergence among diverse languages, prompting the rise of new lingua francas and the erosion of many mother tongues.

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Tuesday, 28th January (Richmond)

Posted on January 28, 2025 by roycross

1. Ethan Mollick has updated his guide to Which AI to Use Now: An Updated Opinionated Guide https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/which-ai-to-use-now-an-updated-opinionated

Every six months or so, I have written an opinionated guide for individual users of AI, not specializing in any one type of use, but as a general overview. Writing this is getting more challenging. AI models are gaining capabilities at an increasingly rapid rate, new companies are releasing new models, and nothing is well documented or well understood. In fact, in the few days I have been working on this draft, I had to add an entirely new model and update the chart below multiple times due to new releases. As a result, I may get something wrong, or you may disagree with my answers, but that is why I consider it an opinionated guide (though as a reminder, I take no money from AI labs, so it is my opinion!)

2. Mollick was quick off the mark in including DeepSeek, who launched only late last week and have since taken a staggering 600 billion dollars off the value of one of its main US competitors, Nvidia.

Here’s The New York Times take on DeepSeek from a business perspective, China’s A.I. Advances Spook Big Tech Investors on Wall Street https://tinyurl.com/bdd422b9

here’s their feature on DeepSeek, What to Know About DeepSeek and How It Is Upending A.I. https://tinyurl.com/4vhf9c6k

and you can sign up for yourself here! https://www.deepseek.com/

3. The next IATEFL monthly webinar, Bringing Linguistic Landscapes to the ELT Classroom, presented by Josianne Block, is this coming Saturday, 1st February at 15:00 UK time. More info and registration here https://www.iatefl.org/events/655 Anyone can join the live event; only members of IATEFL get a certificate of attendance and access to the recording.

This webinar will delve into the pedagogical potential of linguistic landscapes. We will explore how everyday language found in private and public spaces can be used as an authentic resource to enhance language learning, awareness, and critical thinking.

4. Free to view for this week only on the Paris Review website, their ‘Art of Fiction’ interview with James Baldwin from 1984 https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2994/the-art-of-fiction-no-78-james-baldwin

This interview was conducted in the two places dearest to James Baldwin’s struggle as a writer. We met first in Paris, where he spent the first nine years of a burgeoning career and wrote his first two novels, ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’ and ‘Giovanni’s Room’, along with his best-known collection of essays, ‘Notes of a Native Son’. It was in Paris, he says, that he was first able to come to grips with his explosive relationship with himself and America. Our second talks were held at Baldwin’s poutres-and-stone villa in St. Paul de Vence, where he has made his home for the past ten years.

5. And, finally, a fun film with which we can all emphasise, I’m not a Robot https://www.newyorker.com/culture/screening-room/a-woman-wonders-if-shes-human-in-im-not-a-robot

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Thursday, 23rd January (Cambridge)

Posted on January 23, 2025 by roycross

1. A lot of the stuff on tools4Dev you have to pay for, but their blog often has interesting (free!) posts, like this one,  How to Write a Monitoring and Evaluation Report https://tools4dev.org/blog/how-to-write-a-monitoring-and-evaluation-report/ and this one, Monitoring and Evaluation Tools for NGOs, with a number of useful links https://tools4dev.org/blog/monitoring-and-evaluation-tools-for-ngos/ including this one to the NCVO (The National Council for Voluntary Organisations) site which has a lot of free templates and guides https://www.ncvo.org.uk/help-and-guidance/

2. When I was working in Sweden in 2010, at a time when Swedish educationalists were beginning to be much less sure that the ‘free schools’ they had enthusiastically promoted were a good thing, we hosted a number of visits from UK politicians keen to learn more about free schools, which had provided much of the ‘evidence’ underpinning the English ‘academy’ system that had been introduced a number of years earlier. Here’s a piece for The Conversation by Stephen Gorard from Durham University that doesn’t mince its words, Academies haven’t raised pupil achievement – there’s no need for them to have privileges that other schools do not https://theconversation.com/academies-havent-raised-pupil-achievement-theres-no-need-for-them-to-have-privileges-that-other-schools-do-not-247023

3. Loic Menzies has written an interesting piece for the Cambridge journal PS: Political Science & Politics, Elite Interviewing as an In-Betweener https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science-and-politics/article/elite-interviewing-as-an-inbetweener/4578ED29D7C15ED739228F7FD11EBE8B PDF below.

Conducting elite interviews presents well-documented challenges, often linked to dynamics that are influenced by researchers’ status. This aspect of positionality is sometimes characterized as “insider” or “outsider” status, but scholars have noted the lack of nuance in this rigid binary. Drawing on experiences during interviews with policy elites—primarily in England—this article describes the author’s “in-betweener” status and reviews four methodological considerations from this perspective, highlighting the challenges and opportunities associated with different points on the insider–outsider spectrum. These observations are meant to stimulate reflexivity among researchers regardless of their status.

elite-interviewing-as-an-in-betweenerDownload

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4. Here’s the audio version of an elegant essay for Engelsberg Ideas by Alexander McCall Smith on the writer’s right to speak freely https://audioboom.com/posts/8627380-ei-weekly-listen-alexander-mccall-smith-on-the-writer-s-right-to-speak-freely

While we may think we have moved beyond the censorship of the past, writers’ artistic freedoms are still constrained.

5. And, finally and mysteriously, pursuing Tuesday’s thriller writing theme, a piece for Crime Reads by the historian of British crime writing, Martin Edwards on Rediscovering the Golden Age Detective Novels of Dostoevsky Translator David Magarshack https://crimereads.com/rediscovering-the-golden-age-detective-novels-of-dostoevsky-translator-david-magarshack/

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Tuesday, 21st January (Richmond)

Posted on January 21, 2025 by roycross

1. I guess we’re all holding our breath and crossing our fingers on Gaza right now. The New Zealand poet, David Howard, whose sequence of poems about a Croatian-Māori family, Mate, I included last year (on 30th April, to be precise, if you’d like to re-visit it), wrote We Have No Place In This Time at the end of last year. It will eventually be set to music by Alissa Long; for the time being, here’s the words-only version. David’s had criticism from both sides for not being black and white enough, which suggests he’s got things about right. The poem is an exchange between Major Abba Alterman, a member of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and Noor Mansour, widowed when the IDF shot her husband. PDF below.

Gaza – We Have No Place In This Time by David HowardDownload

2. Also on Gaza, here’s an open letter from a stellar line-up of big UK NGOs asking the UK government to ensure the ceasefire is followed by justice and accountability https://www.map.org.uk/news/archive/post/1690-18-ngos-demand-uk-government-ensure-gaza-cessation-of-hostilities-leads-to-justice-and-accountability

3. The first LanguageCert seminar of the new year, Engaging writing activities to inspire your classroom with Sylvia Karastathi, is at 14:00 London time this Thursday, 23rd January. More info and registration here https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/2617371044650/WN_veOE-HJ1S7ayIID-qyMWkw#/registration

4. Courtesy of The ELT Buzz Digest, here’s some forthright views from Mike, a recently-retired veteran of state school classrooms in the USA, for the Teacher Therapy YouTube channel https://youtu.be/IqNRwri8jDs I agree with some of Mike’s views!

5. And, finally, I’m a sucker for a good – or even a reasonably good or moderate – thriller. Here’s a recent guide from The New York Times to thrillers new and old well worth reading https://tinyurl.com/37zv3p8b

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Thursday, 16th January (Cambridge)

Posted on January 16, 2025 by roycross

1. No fewer than six online (and f2f, if you’re in/near Cambridge) seminars from the REAL (Research for Equitable Access and Learning) Centre here in Cambridge over the next three months. This is the Eventbrite page for the first in the series, Using data & evidence in scaling girls’ education outcomes in rural India; if you scroll down you’ll find three of the other five https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/using-data-evidence-in-scaling-girls-education-outcomes-in-rural-india-tickets-1119758972229

The last event in the series, Growing pains: Hip-Hop pedagogy confronts neoliberalism in Senegal, sounds intriguing!

The REAL Centre website’s forthcoming events listing is not perhaps quite as good as I’d expect, so here below is a home-made PDF flyer of all six events. The ‘register here’ links should still work on it, I think.

REAL Centre seminar programme^J January-March 2025Download

2. Two pieces from The Guardian that make one fear for the future of democracy (as we currently know it, at least):

Turnout inequality in UK elections close to tipping point, report warns https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jan/01/turnout-inequality-uk-elections-close-to-tipping-point-ippr

One in five Britons aged 18-45 prefer unelected leaders to democracy, poll finds https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jan/12/one-in-five-britons-aged-18-45-prefer-unelected-leaders-to-democracy-poll-finds

3. A podcast from Himal on a refugee crisis I knew nothing about. I’d always assumed Bhutan – with its Gross National Happiness (GNH) index https://tinyurl.com/vrj64vz8 – was all sweetness and light https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/susan-banki-on-the-battles-of-nepali-bhutanese/id1464880116?i=1000683742709

4. The top 10 houses of 2024 from Dezeen https://www.dezeen.com/2024/12/02/top-10-houses-2024/ There’s also an audio version.

5.And, finally and heart-stoppingly, learn about ‘heart-driven time distortions’ in this TED talk by Irena Arslanova from Royal Holloway, Does your heartbeat shape your sense of time? https://www.ted.com/talks/irena_arslanova_does_your_heartbeat_shape_your_sense_of_time

,

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Tuesday, 14th January (Richmond)

Posted on January 14, 2025 by roycross

1. John Kampfner’s latest post on his blog, Citizen of Everywhere, on the next – anything’s possible, he reminds us! – prime minister of Germany, Could the AfD seize power? https://johnkampfner.substack.com/p/could-the-afd-seize-power

2. A piece for World University News about determined (and successful) efforts to integrate international students in Portugal, Lesser-known HEIs: Ingenious models for student integration by Cristina Sin, Orlanda Tavares & Joyce Aguiar https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20250108092740153

Some polytechnic institutions, private universities or rural institutions are creating vibrant, multicultural campuses for international students, where integration efforts go far beyond traditional support services. Faced with the challenge of attracting national students, who are more likely to prefer other institutions, these universities have adopted innovative strategies that value belonging, personal care and community engagement. The promotion of a multicultural environment is central. The idea is simple but effective: make students feel at home. This is not just about providing academic guidance or accommodation support; it’s about fostering a campus culture which celebrates (my emphasis) diversity.

3. Here’s A survey of multilingual large language models for the Patterns journal by a team from China, Singapore and the USA https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2666-3899%2824%2900290-3 PDF below.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly transformed natural language processing (NLP), enabling machines to understand and generate human-like text. However, most LLMs are predominantly English centric, limiting their applicability in our linguistically diverse world. With over 7,000 languages spoken globally, there is a pressing need for models that can comprehend and generate text across multiple languages. Multilingual large language models (MLLMs) address this gap by processing and producing content in various languages, thereby enhancing global communication and accessibility. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of MLLMs, introducing a systematic taxonomy based on alignment strategies to deepen understanding in this field. By highlighting emerging trends and challenges, this survey aims to guide future research and development, fostering the creation of more inclusive and effective language models that cater to the diverse linguistic landscape of our world.

A survey of multilingual large language modelsDownload

4. I still have a Lucy Letby bee in my bonnet. Here’s an update from The Guardian, Lucy Letby retrial needed after ‘clear miscarriage of justice’, says David Davis https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/08/lucy-letby-retrial-needed-after-clear-miscarriage-of-justice-says-david-davis

5. And, finally, a mischievous piece for The Conversation by Glenn Fosbraey from Winchester University, Six covers of Bob Dylan songs that were better than the originals https://theconversation.com/six-covers-of-bob-dylan-songs-that-were-better-than-the-originals-246909 Links to all the songs included!

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