Weird situation. AI adoption in the work world is stagnating, while higher-ed institutions are rushing to embrace it so that students will be prepared for…the work world?

“The Train” (1920) by Claughton Pellew (1890-1966) who I'm sure all my friends in Cornwall know well. I didn't know him well at all so here's a few notes for anyone as thick as me: www.bookroomartpress.co.uk/.../claughto... and trunchhistory.weebly.com/artists.html

The framework for teaching a class now increasingly involves a set of tasks the resemble nothing so much as preparing one's taxes and lend almost no educational value whatsoever to the classroom space.

This is *exactly* the same phrasing as the management used @qmul.bsky.social. This is work that has been withdrawn as part of legal industrial action. Management is demanding staff undoes their own industrial action and performs the work they have not been paid for, on top of their existing work.

I find it very strange how a legal decision which relates solely to gender recognition certificates – something under 18s definitively cannot have – is being used to justify changes to longstanding policies on including trans kids.

Universities *are* the modern equivalent of the heavy industry or manufacturing sector that used to accompany most large towns and small to mid-sized cities. You can't escape this.

Another morning out on the UCU picket line. At least the weather’s a little sunnier today. #UCU @sheffielducu.bsky.social @ucu.org.uk #UCU #supportthestrike

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... You can donate to our strike fund here ucu.group.shef.ac.uk/hardship-fund/

The Lost Jockey | René Magritte

University senior managers: Will negotiate with Reform. Won’t negotiate with their own staff.

Auckland Uni has responded to my OIA request re consultancy spending in 2024-2025 $600k to PWC and $500k to Nous Group for "strategic design, organisational change, transformation services" etc This is roughly what our whole faculty of science spent on internally funded postdocs in the same years

We're having a bit of trouble getting the workshop website for WiL 2026 to show up on google when you search for it. Can you help out by sharing the link and visiting it, hopefully convincing the algorithm it exists and is important? sites.google.com/view/wil2026/

From a review of gardening books. Highly relatable. www.ft.com/content/3a31...

Physicians and academics often believe that they/we are immune to being radicalised online, but the reality is the opposite. No one is immune, and I saw this happen to Prasad and so many other physicians and academics when covid started. It’s pure hubris to believe anyone is immune.

JK Rowling got a full *decade* of press as a martyr for being "cancelled" (declared passe by people online) and meanwhile nobody considers it very interesting that a prominent left wing author is basically banned from entering or publishing in the United Kingdom for her politics

The True Way (it's actually good in all it's form). One year my aunts weren't going to make green bean casserole and I rebelled, went shopping, and made it myself last minute. I'm sure it was still a pain for them, but some things are important.

Misheard the lyrics to SPRINTS's Up and Cover as "open cover" and now I have the urge to go do some proofs about compact sets...

Our branch report into SHU's finances calls for a public enquiry into decision making at the university. There may be sector-wide challenges but at SHU one of the issues is governance. The report is here: ucuhallam.org www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Few things bug me more than higher ed leaders saying that we lost our mission and lost the trust of the public, when we have actually been the target of a decades-long smear campaign by the right wing that worked. The moment we’re losing our mission is right now, in capitulation.

Health is a social problem, not a technical one. It will be solved socially and politically, or not at all.

One of the most important lessons you have to learn about what a university "is" is a very vulgar marxist distinction between its *managers* (directly or indirectly appointed by capital and/or state government) and its *labor,* who come to the university out of love and idealism.

"These cuts have probably already taken about 3,000 jobs out of the local economy" We report from the frontline as @ucuhallam.bsky.social members begin a fresh wave of strike action against @sheffieldhallamuni.bsky.social 🪧 ✍️ @rose-mason.bsky.social #Sheffield @ucu.org.uk @drjogrady.bsky.social

Parliament is recalled to save a steelworks with a few thousand jobs, but to the degree Universities closing and shrinking is thought of at all there seems to be gled. Some metaphor about not being able to just switch the blast furnaces back on here.

We’re going to need a bigger little treat

Peter Coviello isn't on Bluesky, but this definitely should be: lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

I saw a headline about this this morning, but only clocked now that it's just across town...

Yep the government will consider any possible tax except for re-instating the fuel escalator. Petrol is now cheaper than it was in 2003

i like big trunks and i cannot lie you other travelers can't deny that when a shattered visage lies in the sand with a sneer of cold command you get sprung from the passions read from a hand mocked and heart fed that pedestal tried to warn me but "look upon my works" makes (me-me-me so horny)

Mathematician Karl Weierstrass was born #OTD, Halloween, in 1815. 🧪 🎃 The fools at The Academy all said he was mad, but he showed them all in 1872 when he announced that he had created a MONSTER. Let's learn about the terrible thing he did. Image: Smithsonian Institution Libraries

Magisterial

Morning walk

One of the most psychotic both-sides headlines I've ever seen

In other news (because life goes on): my third-year students have, entirely without prompting, achieved a 0% response rate to the "module evaluation" survey. I could not be prouder of them.

I think about this a lot.

Student: Teacher, why do we learn? Socrates: For life! Freire: For liberation! Dewey: For democracy! Neoliberal EduWonks: To mitigate overhead costs for employers and increase future projections of GDP!

Books also. I am so tired of the text snapshot with no credit on any platform.

'Research by Public First warned that the North East could lose £87m in the first year of a levy due to projected falls in international student numbers'. Siri, what's an own goal? And why can't mainstream media find better images to capture what universities do and why it matters?

EMILY DICKINSON, JEDI KNIGHT Not so clumsy, nor so random - As a blaster - in its rage More elegant - the weapon More civilized - the age

Some recent attempts to transport the @longbarrowpress.bsky.social inventory to book fairs via public transport. You can help to make the return journey more comfortable by visiting our stall at @smallpublishers.bsky.social, Conway Hall, London, this Friday & Saturday (11am-7pm, admission free).

Stand six to ten feet back from the baggage carousel and move forward when you spot your bag coming, rather than all rushing up to block access and crowd the conveyor belt.

Just mentioned Thurston's "On Proof and Progress in Mathematics", and came here to share it with a joke that it was my Tom Holland Umbrella, the thing I had to always reshare. Then I remembered I've already done that with Kermit and Joey doing the alphabet. So what's your Tom Holland Umbrella?

Wow ok unfollowing now. I loved him as a loyal butler, did not know he was an unreliable narrator

wikipedia's data shows that AI is siphoning traffic away from the site, which is a danger to its sustainability. ironically Wikipedia is more important than ever to users who want reliable information instead of slop, and to AI companies that need it for training data www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

So sad to see the purposefully different, self-selecting institution I went to (they accepted 40some percent of the applicants then, instead of the 4.whatever they do now) turn into...whatever this is.

Combinatorics friends and math friends in/near Pittsburgh, I invite you to attend "Combinatorics at the Confluence" July 2026! #MathSky Jul 20-22, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, Combinatorics at the Confluence combcon.github.io

Promoting the editor-in-chief's personal side project. Zero named sources in a story that promotes the editor-in-chief's personal political position. Misspelling the subject's name. It took one day for CBS News to become a conservative blog. www.cbsnews.com/video/some-n...

I learned last Saturday that Gérard Laumon had passed away the previous Saturday. I deeply admire many aspects of his work, which I want to mention briefly. 1/ fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9...