I don’t really know what I expect in posting this, but maybe some people see it and can learn from it. I’ll call it “lessons from an unwilling immigration attorney.” 1/

www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chi... Some good news!

University of York latest to decline offer from publisher Elsevier, with several more expected to walk away after previous agreements expired #highered #AcademicSky https://ow.ly/zUjv50Y9maa

This is an incredibly vague article from the BBC about UKRI funding changes, but concerning nevertheless. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... #AcademicSky

US pauses leases for five offshore wind projects over radar concerns www.reuters.com/business/ene... Anybody know if these are the same wind farms that a court recently ruled Trump couldn't stop on other grounds?

Interesting #PhD opportunity that I have minor role in, for people who want to get into the detail of modelling individual #tidal turbines. Funded for home students only (NB if you've lived here a while you may count), deadline 18th Jan. www.findaphd.com/phds/project... #energySky #renewables

I see this as a sort of validation that I am not slacking when I avoid working evenings/weekends and fail to get much research done. Unfortunately that choice of not working the majority of evenings/weekends may mean I don't have a longer term career in academia.

"GPT-5 could mimic the structure of a peer-review report and use polished language, but that it failed to produce constructive feedback and made factual errors." Yep, that matches the recent review I had, on the basis of which my manuscript was rejected. #AcademicSky

Deutsche Bahn signs contract for 3300 electric buses. 🔌💡 www.sustainable-bus.com/news/deutsch...

Students: 'Have a lovely Christmas, see you in January!' Me, staring at the 150 coursework submissions they just uploaded: #AcademicSky #MarkingSeason #StrangerThings

I can grade. I can do hard things. I can grade. I can do hard things. I can grade. I can do hard things. I can grade. I can do hard things. I can grade. I can do hard things. #academicsky

Look, I've been teaching in some way for two decades now. So I know that there are always going to be students who don't care, don't understand, and some combination thereof. But each term, dealing with them, makes me less and less inclined to teach. Death by paper cuts.

What experiences can people share about sharing PhD interview questions with the candidates in advance? Apparently starting to be considered best EDI practice. Pros/cons? I'm concerned about wasting interview time on pre-planned / scripted responses. Thanks #academicSky

They should invent a university that prioritizes teaching and research

NEW: I heard from a bunch of NREL employees after the announcement of a name change yesterday. They're not thrilled. "Morale is bad. Funding is tenuous.... I've been through two W administrations, many R congresses, and [the first] Trump admin. This is the worst."

Crylaughing at the replies to this post #AcademicSky

...until you try to submit to an Elsevier journal and encounter things like "all files must be in the root directory, as our system is unable to follow links into other directories". And thus replace all your worries about formatting with worries about fitting into a system from maybe 1987.

What exactly do we pay those senior managers all those six-figure salaries for? They claim it’s for their big strategic thinking, but all they do is hand a bunch of money to external consultants to get the exact same PowerPoint as elsewhere.

Everybody has their hot take re the #UCU ballot. Everybody who is posting apparently expected it to fail. But that perhaps isn't surprising, when it followed a consultative ballot that clearly said it would... Personally, I voted (because screw the Tory threshold) but voted No. That was because...

And they should have been asking that when the indicative ballot that they ran *told* them that most members didn't want this. Before they spent £250k and a lot of crediblity to ask anyway.

I'm not sure that core activists appreciate how badly UCU damaged its reputation with the MAB debacle. Ordinary members don't see it as "ooh, that bad faction made bad decisions"; they see it as a union which is addicted to starting fights that it has no idea how to finish.

Going to chuck this into UCU's "period of reflection". Nobody I spoke to in the corridors believed that we had achievable goals or a plan to deliver them; nobody trusts national decision-making; lots of people wanted to save our resources for local disputes. Like it or not, that's where we are.

Something which feels relevant here: The grad student is a trans woman. Not that this affected her conduct - the essay should obviously have failed, and the feedback given was really generous - but it may give some necessary context for the university's response...

The vast majority of academics do not want artificial intelligence used to assess the next Research Excellence Framework, according to a new report. Patrick Jack reports #REF #academicsky https://ow.ly/mobv50Xz6AF

Well this is a problem! I'm very dubious about the amount of hydrogen use that the fossil industry pushes, and that the UK government currently plans, but we *are* gonna need CCS. I wish this article didn't conflate the two, which screams "blue hydrogen" to me.

Close to 1 full goddamn gigawatt of gas (open-cycle, so the most inefficient kind) for the "Project Jupiter" site in New Mexico. This whole article is a stunning illustration of how data centres are incentivising new fossil infrastructure: eastdaley.com/daley-note/p...

In case you had any doubt that peer review doesn't work in pay-to-publish journals, including those with a Nature badge.... #academicSky pivot-to-ai.com/2025/11/28/n...

www.nature.com/articles/d41... HAHAHAHA But also, conference organisers now using AI to decide whether reviews were done by AI, so it's gonna get that wrong as well. #AcademicSky

www.nature.com/articles/d41... HAHAHAHA But also, conference organisers now using AI to decide whether reviews were done by AI, so it's gonna get that wrong as well.

Happy thanksgiving to them as celebrate it.

www.ft.com/content/23e5... "The latest two deals add an extra four gigawatts of compute power to OpenAI’s requirements, bringing the contracted amount to 36 gigawatts." Can anybody think of any company, in the history of the world, that has needed 36 GW for anything?

NEW from me: A recent study finds that fully electrified homes in Handsworth, built to adhere to a draft version of the Future Homes standard, put less pressure on the grid than researchers expected. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

How many older journalists and papers look back at their role whipping up hatred against gay people like me in the 80's and 90's with pride and a sense they did right? Very few. So what do *you*, today's journos and papers, think your prospects are after re-running same campaign against trans folk?

Seriously, MS? seems you can't update an Outlook appointment that has a Teams meeting associated without an Internet connection. Other gripes aside, Outlook used to be pretty good at letting you work offline and then syncing up. But with recent features they seem to have given up on this.

Q for those who understand elec markets. This is pitched as encouraging data centres to be built in places with constrained generation. But shouldn't PPA market do that anyway? Is gov intervention needed? #energysky

www.theregister.com/2025/11/18/u... UK to subsidise electricity for AI data centres. Errr...

Reminder about this #PhD project with me on #tidal #renewable #energy! Applications close on 28th November.

Heat pumps news! DESNZ is expanding the Boiler Upgrade Scheme to cover air to air heat pumps and heat batteries. Both will be eligible for a £2,500 grant if it fully replaces a gas or oil boiler… www.businessgreen.com/news/4521952...

Universities: "everybody gets rejected for funding, there's a lot of lucky involved, you just have to keep on trying" Also universities: "we will punish you if you don't increase your grant income by this date" #AcademicSky

Funders can drive change. Authors can't. Authors are producers, not consumers. Producers don't decide demand, consumers do. Funders and research institutes must demand change of their authors, or withhold their funds. It's that simple. Funders have all the cards. 10/n

Back on track: Funders hold all the cards. There's this flawed view that authors are consumers and journals are producers. Wrong. Funders and institutes are consumers. They contract authors to produce research, and they pay for journals to QC the work. Funders are the consumers. 8/n

Fundamentally, what we need is leadership. But we break with the chorus of most #OpenScience initiatives here and emphasize very strongly that this leadership must come from funders and institutions. We researchers can support the battle, but we cannot lead the charge. Funders hold the cards. 6/n

More fundamentally, every active scientist has been brought up in a system where The Drain was already normalized. This system hasn't always existed. For-profit publishers are a recent invention. Their value proposition has always been awful, and now they are actively eroding trust in science. 5/n

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

#PhD with me, using numerical modelling to study how large-scale #tidal #energy farms will affect one another. www.findaphd.com/phds/project... Contact me on [email protected] if you have questions or would like an informal chat. Please send to anybody appropriate, & circulate to networks!

Scholarships to study with us in #Orkney next year! Register your interest here: www.hw.ac.uk/study/fees-a... Eligible programmes are, * MSc Renewable & Sustainable Energy Transition * MSc Marine Renewable Energy * MSc International Marine Science Please pass around appropriate networks :-)

UK university halted human rights research after pressure from China www.theguardian.com/education/20... #AcademicSky

Not unexpected, given everything, but not good. Hard choices for NOAA. I don't know how much of a hole this puts in the Pacific tsunami warning system further afield. It's so sad and frustrating to see America pull apart some of its greatest assets in real time. It will take longer to rebuild.

Cooking up some memes for a @reproducibilitea.org session on Open Research next week. This is gonna be fun!

TIL that if you try to contact a journal editor through Elsevier's web system, it sends an email on your behalf to an address that autoreplies "This mailbox is not monitored". Good to see those APCs at work! 🙃