‘Is university still worth it?’ is the wrong question ft.trib.al/EYhqm5I | opinion

This is emblematic of the consumer culture that fees have engendered. What the hell did the students expect? It was a ONCE IN A CENTURY PANDEMIC. There were LAWS against congregating in public. Staff worked themselves to the bone to get online delivery working. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

1) Today (23:59) is the deadline for submitting responses to the Home Office "consultation" on their plans to make life a lot more difficult for foreigners living in the UK: www.gov.uk/government/c...

I urge you to fill in this consultation if you can - with this very helpful support from Amnesty International - although AND because ! it is heart-breaking that this country has sunk so low that Amnesty suggest in a number of cases to provide no answer as the terms of the question are so evil

🚨🧵The 2024 UCU General Secretary was so corrupt that @vickyblake.bsky.social + I are fighting a Certification Officer case to re-run it, 10 Feb. Grady won by 182 votes from 114,310 members, turnout 15%. In secret, Grady ordered UCU managers to "Re-elect GS" +said she'd "destroy" her opponents...

BREAKING: UKRI shelves physics infrastructure projects worth £280m Major international collaborations with Cern and US Department of Energy in jeopardy, as agency pulls back funds Scoop by @francesjones.bsky.social www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...

The Royal Astronomical Society is gravely concerned at the drastic cuts to support for UK astronomy outlined by the Science and Technology Facilities Council. Read our statement 👉 ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre...

Given that the UK punches way above its weight in curiosity-driven physics research, hobbling it is short-sighted.

Carney: "American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, a stable financial system... this bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition... recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as a weapon. Tariffs as leverage ... "

The UK government is completely delusional. www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-priv...

When will this crisis get any attention whatsoever!? A THOUSAND ACADEMIC STAFF AT ONE INSTITUTION SERVED REDUNDANCY RISK NOTICES! And that's not counting what's surely being visited on professional services staff too. This is an economic catastrophe, to say nothing of the intellectual catastrophe!

The equating of income with "giving" is really irritating. So postdocs earning under the threshold are "takers".

New paper led by @annalenakofler.bsky.social: Extending our gravitational wave SBI code Dingo using transformers, making it adaptable to realistic data conditions and boosting performance. Congrats Annalena – a lot of hard work went into this and it produced excellent results! Great poster too!

1/ 🌀 New paper alert! We introduce Dingo-T1, a flexible transformer-based deep learning model for gravitational-wave (GW) data analysis. It adapts to different detector & frequency settings, improving inference efficiency and flexibility 🚀 #AI #MachineLearning #Physics #Astronomy #AcademicSky

Nottinghamshire MPs have written to @uniofnottingham.bsky.social, urging the university to reconsider proposed course suspensions and potential closures, which would significantly impact staff, students, and our wider city and county.

What a stupid government.

I find insane that shabana mahmood is going out there and saying "white british people cannot be asked to accept too many of us outsiders, it is not in their nature, and their pushback against all of us is to be placated". What???

Shabana Mahmood's proposal to stop being told to "go back home" is to send people "home". Her proposal to stop black and brown people from feeling like they don't belong, is to bake in to the immigration system that they will never belong.

Personal note: London has been home for a very, very long time, but as of today, I am also officially a Brit - that is to say, a British citizen. I feel relieved and I feel grateful - but not, perhaps, in the forelock-tugging way GB News/Starmer expect a new immigrant to be.

Govt scraps all electrification investment. Midland Main Line to stay forever diesel Leicester Nottingham Derby Sheffield. Hugely embarrassing and inexplicable www.ft.com/content/5ecd...

A policy this expansive would certainly mean mass stripping of permanent residence status from people with ILR (including pensioners and parents of British children) on a scale far beyond anything any democracy has ever done before. There is no public support for such an extreme policy.

Postdoc application deadline extended to Monday 13 October! Looking for experts in black hole perturbation theory, gravitational waves, or numerical relativity. Come join the growing team at Nottingham. Please share and apply if interested. Reach out with questions!

Happy to have such a good MP!

Job Announcement! Postdoc in Gravitational Waves at University of Nottingham * Two year position * Deadline soon: 29 September * Details and application form: jobs.nottingham.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

Retrospectively removing indefinite leave to remain would be immoral and economically damaging. It would tear families apart. Attacking it as ‘potentially illegal’ is completely beside the point. Argue with the (awful) idea. Don’t try ’well, actually you can’t do that’.

Solidarity with @uonucu.bsky.social members who are striking against compulsory redundancies and job losses at the University of Nottingham. I urge the university’s leadership to come back to the table and work with staff to reach a fair settlement.

Labour must finally stand up firmly against a Reform policy. Call it out for the obscenity it is. Starmer has recently finally spoken out against populism and division. What could be more populist and divisive than this? Nor for heaven's sake, don't dodge it, or excuse it. Challenge it.

It would signal the the de facto end of nearly all immigration to this country, from those coming to work to those who come for love. It would crater our economy, tear up relationships, remove status from millions of European, result in endless legal battles and leave us as an international pariah.

Reform are now coming after people with permanent residency. It'll be citizens next. No one is safe from authoritarian governments.

Let us name those who should take responsibility for this situation. The senior management of universities failed to negotiate a sustainable system of funding, and then sleep-walked into mess. But will they be held accountable? Of course not. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

I see people bleating yet again that "elections are won from the centre". Let's examine this claim. 1. Not long ago, the current Labour government, with its grovelling to corporations and oligarchs, extreme deregulation, island of strangers rhetoric etc, would have been classed as radical right. 🧵

Results from the first part of our fourth LIGO @egovirgo.bsky.social KAGRA observing run are out today! We're pleased to share the largest catalog of gravitational-wave observations with more discoveries of black holes and neutron stars 📰 arxiv.org/abs/2508.18082 🔭🧪⚛️☄️ #GWTC4

128 new mergers between black holes and neutron stars. Today we're revealing the biggest ever update to our count of gravitational wave detections. New data from May 2023 to January 2024 has more than doubled the number we've seen. 🧵 1/3 @ligo.org #Virgo #KAGRA #GravitationalWaves 🔭 #GWTC-4 #O4a

Still impossible to talk to @aircanada.bsky.social. The strike may be over but there are a lot of stranded passengers.

Assuming there would be zero negotiation—because of the assumption that Section 107 “would be enforced"—is the textbook definition of a bath faith negotiation. It’s the first thing that I learned at @utoronto.ca in a course about contract negotiations and difficult conversations.

No luck rebooking. To be clear, my anger is directed at Air Canada, not the flight attendants. They should pay their staff properly.

Dear @aircanada.bsky.social please assist with rebooking.

Stranded in Italy thanks to Air Canada. They say by email that they can't find any flights in the next three days and offer a refund -- ignoring EU 261/2004 regulations that they have to rebook on *any* airline. They do not answer the phone. AC has absolute contempt for its customers and employees.

there are 2 tried+tested responses to realization that staff costs are by far the greatest expense for UK universities: 1. recognize, value, and develop the people who “are the university” 2. cut jobs on the wishful thinking that those left standing can do other people’s 1.5fte on top of their own

I wrote about the state of Canadian rage for @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/o... The piece is a kind of capstone to all the work of Gloves Off. shows.acast.com/gloves-off

An abomination. An affront to free speech and an acute threat to the consensus on terrorism www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

Automated systems are “a complete and utter nightmare” for university staff, exacerbating rather than easing administrative burdens by trapping academics in a logjam of service requests, an Australian survey has found #academicsky #bureaucracy

🚨 UK universities are giving everyone a 2.1% real terms pay cut, as VCs take an average £340,000. A 1.4% "uplift" when inflation is 3.5%. 📉 Worse, UCU's incumbent has no vision, no strategy, no ability to explain the rip-off, after real term cuts over 25% since 2010👇 www.ucu.org.uk/media/15197/...

"With the passage of Trump's death bill, we face the prospect of many great harms, including an archipelago of concentration camps across the United States." snyder.substack.com/p/concentrat...

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

Why academia is sleepwalking into self-destruction. My editorial @brain1878.bsky.social If you agree with the sentiments please repost. It's important for all our sakes to stop the madness academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

Locating sources of gravitational waves using artificial intelligence could enable astronomers to point telescopes at stellar mergers before they happen https://go.nature.com/4hfgrmG

Great work led by @maximiliandax.bsky.social now out in @nature.com: Neural network deciphers gravitational waves from merging neutron stars in a second - new method could be instrumental in preparing the field for the next generation of observatories: is.mpg.de/news/neural-... #AIforScience 1/2

Two Weeks In The Death Spiral Of Cardiff University, by an anonymous academic. This is truly shocking read. The Cardiff executive board should hang their heads in shame. voice.cymru/two-weeks-in...

Congrats Bob! A great supervisor too!