Richard Carr
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richardcarr.bsky.social
Richard Carr
@richardcarr.bsky.social
660 followers 390 following 3K posts
https://www.routledge.com/Britain-and-Ireland-from-the-Treaty-to-the-Troubles-Independence-and-Interdependence-c-1921-1973/Carr/p/book/9781032879871

History/politics lecturer. My views only.

Books about British-Irish relations, Blair/Clinton, Chaplin etc
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richardcarr.bsky.social
Et voila.
November 28, 2025 at 6:43 PM
richardcarr.bsky.social
If my browser is accurate, google books just arbitrarily chucking the cover in the first image onto the book in the second it seems.

"Screw it, close enough"
November 28, 2025 at 10:10 AM
richardcarr.bsky.social
Levels of disrespect in these episode descriptions
November 27, 2025 at 9:36 PM
richardcarr.bsky.social
ChatGPT: pls can you mock me up some visual evidence for the most bizarrely humble REF impact statement?
November 27, 2025 at 5:15 PM
richardcarr.bsky.social
The concept of history messaging me after chasing some archival leads that didn’t pay off hugely
November 27, 2025 at 3:24 PM
richardcarr.bsky.social
Archive two: done. Less military hardware.
November 27, 2025 at 2:33 PM
richardcarr.bsky.social
Archive one of the day: done
November 27, 2025 at 12:30 PM
richardcarr.bsky.social
I guess this is a point where not being online really hurts things. Using online calculator to find its impact on me = yes please. Scenarios of made up other people written like a school maths problem = not really.
November 27, 2025 at 9:16 AM
richardcarr.bsky.social
Paper edition Guardian booking income tax as both an expenditure and receipt this morning
November 27, 2025 at 9:07 AM
richardcarr.bsky.social
Look do I now have to sacrifice my salary to The Times too????
November 26, 2025 at 8:35 PM
richardcarr.bsky.social
Not phoning it in on the flavours jam wise either
November 21, 2025 at 6:27 PM
richardcarr.bsky.social
Choose your poison
Tony’s Chocolonely advent calendar Bonne maman advent calendar
November 21, 2025 at 6:26 PM
richardcarr.bsky.social
Oh, the wokesters have arrived, jeez
Reply 4: Thanks for putting this on the table. It's, with no doubt, a matter of courtesi and education. and a serious problem in the student-professor relationship.. A few days ago, a student sent me an email asking me to supervise what he had done with Al so that he would not "waste his time" doing it himself. He literally wrote that. I have been speechless ever since. I honestly do not know how to respond in a manner that remains both measured and educational. He expects me to spend my time on something he is unwilling to invest his own time in learning... something I have spent years trying to master. This raises a serious concern about the point we have now reached in education. Constructive debate is needded here... So, as I said, thanks for your post.
November 14, 2025 at 8:09 PM
richardcarr.bsky.social
LinkedIn post: too many people are just AI-ing PhD proposals to me, this sucks, and I don’t think they’ll make for a good PhD student

Replies: err, excuse you, Your *Majesty*, ever considered that you are the problem here???
LinkedIn post: I am getting more and more enquiries for PhD supervision which have clearly been written using Al. It is very easy to spot. It starts with an abstract summary of my research, highlighting a few of my publications and how transformative the writer has found them. One recent enquirer told me how inspiring they had found one of my papers which has not been published yet, but which appears as in press on my profile. It is that (painfully) obvious. After that is a similarly abstract summary of the applicant's plans, welded on to the first bit like two halves of a dodgy second hand car, sometimes but not always peppered with a vague research question or two. Many clearly have nothing to do with my own research interests or expertise at all, the only connection being a few buzzwords. Don't do this. I will not even respond to such approaches. You are asking me to invest a significant proportion of my career in a close three or four year professional relationship, and I have to know it is going to work. Please therefore do me the courtesy of investing the time and effort to explain your motivation, qualifications and the backstory that has bought you to me in your own words. If you can't do this, I won't invest the time or effort to consider your request. Reply 1: "significant proportion of my career in a close three or four year professional relationship, and I have to know it is going to work"? Since it is their first step after graduation, is no the 3 or 4 years the entirety of their career thus far? Are you not a much greater risk in comparison? How do they know that you are going to "work"? I was under the impression that taking on PhD students was the process of investing in the future of research, rather than just the support of your research interests. Perhaps I am mistaken. Bear with me on this one. If they are making a fundamental mistake in using Al to identify the connection to you, perhaps you are making a fundamental mistake in only seeing the Al text, and not finding out who they are. I say this as I see that you are the Head of the Humanities cluster, rather than say geology, engineering, or my specialties. Like 49| Reply 11 Reply 2: Clearly you are not ready for the transformation to be provided by Al. Maybe time to get off the neocolonial horse and take a sabbatical to see the benefits of Al. Dont be stuck in the past like your archeological PhD. Like Reply Reply 3: What if some of those requests are actually legitimate, and the applicants are doing their best but don't understand the nuances of academia? Some of them might only have Al as a graduate application coach or advisor. I get the examples where there's clearly no effort. No argument there. But the critique feels a bit blanketed.
November 14, 2025 at 8:07 PM
richardcarr.bsky.social
Chris Mason interprets the government's tax kite flying
November 14, 2025 at 10:17 AM
richardcarr.bsky.social
Said it recently but the proofreading in tabloids these days is absolutely shocking
Daily Mail article on the investigation into the death of former footballer JLloyd Samuel which states he was involved in a *2018* collision that ended in his death A picture in the article claims to show Samuel playing in a match in August 2024
November 12, 2025 at 8:23 PM
richardcarr.bsky.social
By way of context I’d say this sentiment applies equally to anything triple lock-y
November 12, 2025 at 8:11 AM
richardcarr.bsky.social
I’m not saying they’re approaching it in the best of spirits
November 12, 2025 at 8:10 AM
richardcarr.bsky.social
Or horrendous
November 10, 2025 at 9:04 PM
richardcarr.bsky.social
I think my household is just slightly outside top decile and still we claim child benefit. These people are ludicrous
November 10, 2025 at 9:03 PM
richardcarr.bsky.social
I'll be honest, example one sucks.

1) why are we doing this again? I reckon the student working out what modules they want to do on their own is kind of a minimum bar
2) in the current and evolving financial landscape, what module choices and complementary extra-curricular activities anyways?
"For instance, we can easily envisage a world in which AI is used to aid student navigation of module choice, tailoring the availability of elective courses and complementary extra-curricular and developmental activities."
November 10, 2025 at 9:47 AM
richardcarr.bsky.social
Six year old party bag fillers: it’s on
Multiple copies of March of the Moderates by me
November 8, 2025 at 11:54 AM
richardcarr.bsky.social
I'll shut up now but no idea what service this even is
More ChatGPT: "Would you like me to show a short reconstructed excerpt (in paraphrased modern English) of what Whitaker’s 1959 briefing to Lemass said, line by line?"
November 7, 2025 at 12:23 PM
richardcarr.bsky.social
Don't drag me into this!
2. Why this kind of slip is surprisingly easy When explaining historical causation, models (and humans!) tend to produce schematic reasoning — patterns like “X usually follows Y, therefore it did in this case.”
November 7, 2025 at 12:20 PM
richardcarr.bsky.social
What good are you honestly?
ChatGPT's explanation: 1. It was a contextual mis-link, not a knowledge gap I “knew” that Britain was a founding EFTA member (that’s a fixed historical fact), but in the flow of constructing the causal chain — “Ireland’s policy shadowed Britain’s” — I generalized that pattern incorrectly across time. In other words: The statement “Ireland followed Britain in trade matters” is true in general, But I incorrectly applied that logic to the EFTA case, where the situation was more complex — Britain joined, but Ireland still didn’t. That’s a reasoning lapse in context, not a gap in stored factual knowledge.
November 7, 2025 at 12:19 PM