Corpus 2

As a mother of 3 near uni-age kids and auntie of 3 more I deffo will be advising all 6 to give Aston a wide swerve.

If the VC had acted in a swifter, more appropriate manner and the ethics FOI hadn’t exposed such jaw droppingly unrigorous oversight it might’ve been possible for Aston to pretend that it’s a localised problem in the linguistics department.
As is they can ALL eat a big piece of the ‘We’re Shit’ pie.

I’m yet to unflabber my ghast at the gall of the VC in that first phone meeting with Justine.

It doesn't speak well of Aston or any other HE institute and the staff involved in Eden's education that she go to PhD level without learning that.

I feel sorry for her only in the sense that she wasn't properly supervised - or supervised at all, really - because she set out to prove something bigoted and pretty ugly about MN/MNetters.

And as I've said earlier in this or one of the other threads, anyone in academia/science knows that if you're setting out to prove a hypothesis, your aim is to disprove it. Which rules out any bias you may have in your theories.

Given the specific field- forensic linguistics - is ostensibly all about ethics and language use, it's particularly shite that Aston have taken this long to click to the issues and only cave under legal pressure. Who watches the watchmen, really.

Excellent news about Aston's policy, but yes, I do feel for the PhD student - only a little bit - in the way they were badly advised & encouraged in their bigotry.

A good supervisor would have insisted on, and indeed, overseen & edited any ethics application (I have to do this for my PhD students - they're learning how to do it, and I monitor their ethics applications closely).

A good supervisor should also have asked the tough questions about the student's bias & potential bigotry.

Agree. Aston should fund they/them for an extra year so they/them can start over on a completely new project.

The MN PhD proposal should never have been accepted by supervisors nor passed the ethics committee so multiple Aston staff members shoulder blame.

Does this include Eden's research? If so, good, but I hope she can find a suitable replacement. She might have acted foolishly but her supervisor and others in senior positions at Aston have failed her.

Oh no! Are Aston discovering that behaving like spoiled toddlers doesn't work on mums?

wowzers

I hope @GrimbutGerbil won't mind me stealing her thunder on this, but over on the 2nd gerbils thread she says :
"To get back to where this all started, a well-connected gerbil tells me that Aston have sent out an update to their research ethics framework which says that the use of social media data sets in research is prohibited until further legal guidance is issued."

😂

It’s like one massive mansplain. Information incorrectly collated and extrapolated with great confidence and no experience. Mansplain.ai

Thank you @JustineMumsnet

Ovaries of steel!

Fuckinell!

Nice one, @JustineMumsnet !

Hear also:

https://shedunnitshow.com/thetealeaf/

Everyone needs to divest if they have shares in toilet brushes.

Hopefully! I'm hoping Aston's legal team opened up this thread this morning and though "oh bollocks". The thought that if they ignore her Justine might just go away is probably starting to look like a non viable option for them.

‘Hey ChatGPT is Mumsnet transphobic?’

’ODFOD’

I would love this to be a fad. Bastards at OpenAI and don’t trust those tech bro’s as far as I could throw my grandmother. She’s dead so not far.

It’s not just the wholesale illegal scraping. It’s also how they train the model. ChatGPT is definitely a proponent of GI and #bekind. So any possible insights that might have been taken from FWR is overridden by the developers.

An unfortunate outcome is that when university students turn to it to create content, it’s teaching them not just what to think, but how to think. It’s corporate, facile and full of empty meaningless rhetoric. The opposite of thinking critically.

So I’ll throw in my thanks to @JustineMumsnet too for taking these bastards on.

I loved TotU as a child, but don't remember that one. As soon as I've read Justine's linky I'll be having a look for it online. Thank you!

Lamb to the Slaughter, Tales of the Unexpected 1979.

That's fantastic news! Good luck @JustineMumsnet
I wonder if anyone from Aston is keeping up with this thread?

Brilliant. That would certainly be a novel, though somewhat illegal, solution to the issue of abusive partners.

David taking on Goliath! Well done @JustineMumsnet