I’m pleased to share that our article on the origins of arithmetic, just published in Psychological Review, has been selected as an @APA’s Editor’s Choice article (open-access link below). Here’s a thread about it (1/17) @mathematics @mathcogsociety https://t.co/dO7kk8LjJZ

For admins, rankings are not valid measures of their Uni’s performance relative to others. Don't view overall or component scores as ‘key performance indicators’, but develop and validate own metrics of research and teaching quality. Interpret ranking data with caution! (8/x)

It suggests QS maintains a ‘pecking order’ that limits the changes in rankings. What are the implications? Students should do their own research on Unis they are interested in, and ought not to view changes in scores or rankings as necessarily reflecting changes in quality. (7/x)

This suggests that the overall and component scores are not measures of Aus/NZ universities in isolation – there is an ‘global’ effect on the scores as a group. What does this mean? QS uses a proprietary methodology so it’s impossible to say for sure. However… (6/x)

Now, there were changes in QS methodology that can explain some of this (in 2024 QS added component scores that Aus&NZ did well on, and the 2026 data were rescaled). But if you look at the component scores, a similar pattern emerges – the data are not fully independent (5/x)

The year-on-year changes are highly correlated! Scores for almost all Unis increased from 2023 to 2024 and then again from 2025 to 2026. Overall the % of shared variance is 83.3% - much more than would be expected be if these scores were independent. (4/x)

There is a stable pecking order – some Unis (e.g. Melbourne & UNSW) are generally at the top, others are consistently in the middle and some are at the bottom. Let's remove the pecking order by mean-centering the scores, so that each Uni’s average is zero: (3/X)

The year-on-year changes are highly correlated! Scores for almost all Unis increased from 2023 to 2024 and then again from 2025 to 2026. Overall the % of shared variance is 83.3% - much more than would be expected be if these scores were independent. (4/x)

QS compute rankings from an Overall Score which is determined by component scores (Academic and Employer Reputation, Citations/Faculty, Faculty/Student ratio…). Here are the Overall Scores for 29 Australian/NZ universities that were ranked in each of those years (2/x):

University World Rankings are used by students and administrators to make important decisions. But what do they mean – can we interpret them as objective measures of quality? I was curious and downloaded the QS university ranking data for 2022-2026 #QSWUR @TopUnis #HigherEd (1/x)

Congratulations to @RBodeker58583 who's just published an article in The Conversation on the implications for treatment of methamphetamine addiction of her PhD research with rats. Well done, Rebecca! https://t.co/uTmKyIY0wr

I remember watching Blue Velvet in a small arthouse cinema in Somerville MA during its initial release... a mind-blowing experience. When I walked out it felt like the movie hadn't stopped…. RIP Mr Lynch you will not be forgotten

There have been so many tributes to David Lynch, well out of proportion to his commercial success as a director. This is very heartening because it shows that people instinctively value an artist with an authentic vision. ...let me add mine (1/2)

For example: Philosophy of mathematics. How are we going to maximize the potential benefits of AI when we're not willing to ask questions about the nature of computation? Philosophy is vitally relevant for science (2/2)

The problem with this decision is that the deepest questions, those most likely to lead to breakthroughs, are interdisciplinary. The humanities are relevant for science because all knowledge is connected. That's why we have universities (1/2)

Today, I announced that the Marsden Fund would no longer be used for the humanities and social sciences. It is returning to its original purpose to fund science.

New article from Nicky Morton and our lab group shows that although all ratios aren't created equal, we can learn both 'big' and 'small' ones equally well in an implicit perceptual task @MCLS @MarsdenFund @UCNZ #psychophysics

And here are two short articles for The Conversation that describe and elaborate some of the ideas in our paper. Thanks for reading! (17/17) https://t.co/D0HR5s1nTK https://t.co/kPEhGTu4eH

Finally, we speculate that the ‘unreasonable effectiveness’ of mathematics in the physical sciences points toward nondualism - that the mind and world are part of a common unity (16/17)

Mathematics is thus both invented (uniquely human) and discovered (biologically based), an expression in symbols of the fundamental nature and creativity of the mind (15/17)

The evolutionary origin of MCCI explains why arithmetic is universally true - why all human civilizations that have invented numeral notation systems use the same addition and multiplication (14/17)