last year the UN "ai for good" flagship conference mistreated me and censored my talk because i made the link between the ai industry (their sponsors) and genocide explicit. this year, ITU issues "content guideline" that, on a close read, sounds like a licence to silence criticism of ai/the industry

In Rip off Britain, education has been treated as yet another commodity. And those who work in education are treated badly over and over again. Awful for educators and awful for students. I'll be speaking tonight at the University and College Union 👇🏼

ja fragt euch mal

Yet more evidence of the malicious incompetence of MPs and the government when it comes to higher education policy. Staff and unions have been screaming about this issue for years and we are constantly ignored and sidelined. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

“Westminster needs to wake up…” An important statement from the RHS today on the unfolding situation in UKHE.

It's almost as if not destroying the university sector might be good for the economy?! www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-i...

I'm deep in marking at the moment, and I'd like to make two observations: 1) Not enough students are thanking their pets in their dissertation acknowledgements. 2) Where students do this. It should be compulsory that they include a photo of said pet.

This is deeply depressing

Yet another sign that the sector is in massive trouble. Remember when people thought that a labour government might do something about this?

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

ah they got this all screwed up, there

this graduation speech moment is notable, and her amazed shock at having failed to read the room feels instructive. when you're inside the bubble, you think everybody else is. but everybody isn't.

Predicting that if I bring this up at my institution in response to the push for more AI in education, the response will be to ignore it and plow on regardless.

Reform want to use detention centres as political weapons against opponents. Worth remembering we already have detention centres, outsourced to Serco and Mitie, barely discussed in parliament or the press. Yarl’s Wood have been holding women indefinitely, for profit, since Labour opened it in 2001.

There are 15 (!) PhD positions available to join the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin mission science team. Funded through the MSCA EXODOCS doctoral network: www.exodocs.eu Apply here: euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/432752

Some useful public speaking tips from Freud here.

NO NO NO NO NO - dashare.zone ADMIN

The trouble of reducing international partnerships to just the fancy photo-op and PR campaign about internationalisation, @qmul.bsky.social, is that you have no interest in listening to what happens after with the people on those scholarships, or dismiss those ringing alarm bells as trouble-makers.

Peatlands store more carbon than the world's forests yet fundamental questions remain unanswered. Today we publish 50 priority research questions, identified by 467 participants from 54 countries #PeatQuest #Peatlands www.nature.com/articles/s43...

mind boggling response from a Labour MP. She either: does not have a clue how important universities are to the local economy; knows but doesn’t care because of some sort of ‘anti-elitist’ brainworm; or knows but is too worried to admit it lest it upset Reform voters. none reflect very well on her!

Happy anniversary of this not happening

Bridget Phillipson will introduce new laws to make it possible for Universities to be fined millions of pounds if they don't silence students who protest bigots invited onto their campuses. It's like the Tories never left office.

The RGS higher ed section is now on bluesky!

It's important to remember that political genius Kier Starmer and his cronies ratfucked Faiza Shaheen on the eve of the general election, because they have more in common with Ian Duncan Smith than someone with morals.

The closure of Southend rips away jobs, education and the lifeblood of local businesses. The rationale? Barely fills an A4 page. In Westminister Yesterday MPs & union reps handed a vote of no confidence in Bowen to education minister Jacqui Smith.

I have been using powerbi this morning and I would now like to go live in the woods. I KNOW SQL, JUST LET ME WRITE A QUERY. I DON'T WANT TO CLICK ON ANYTHING.

Good news! Applications for the 2026 Fi Wi Road Internship are still open. An exciting opportunity for Black and mixed-Black heritage geography students, the Fi Wi Road project supports you to build networks, develop your voice, and gain experience. Apply by 20 April 👇 https://bit.ly/4undzvM

Copilot can fuck off. I've now deactivated it on outlook 6 times today. Take the hint, Microsoft.

I've been languishing on a waiting list for over 12 months, but seeing that private firms have made £0.8 billion during that period makes it all worthwhile.

Erm, they're called palaeontologists, actually.

This is so, so well-articulated.

Feb 14, 2025: Guardian Media Group today announced a strategic partnership with Open AI, a leader in artificial intelligence and deployment.

www.microsoft.com/en-us/micros... is it good to build an entire economy and software infrastructure on this

Remember when that dangerous maniac Jeremy Corbyn proposed investing in UK drug manufacturing to better insulate us from supply shocks like this? Thank god we put a stop to that nonsense

This is incredibly relevant for many of us in academia

What is needed now is not managed messaging but honesty.” Relieved to see politicians recognise & call out the terrible managerial practices so many have been gaslit in accepting. No, behind-closed-doors tickbox conversations aren’t consultation. No, evidence-free decisions aren’t acceptable. #UKHE

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This is deeply alarming and further entrenches inequality between research and teaching posts. It might be instructive to see what the differences in demographics are between those two categories of staff. Purpose of a system is what it does, etc etc

The troubles

i think this is an important point - not just the way ai coding tools can affect an individual programmer, but the way it interrupts a social practice / a community of people making software

Maybe this will be the performative cruelty that will finally convince reform voters to vote labour!

This is deeply suspicious. I don't believe anyone can turn around a competitive multi institution £40 million EoI in 2 weeks.

A lot of people say AI isn't very good for the world and its outputs are routinely unreliable, but these haters fail to see how it's revolutionizing how we incinerate schoolchildren.

Some quick back-of-the-envelope arithmetic indicates that this "cash boost" will support the National Year of Reading by giving each public library enough money for a one-time purchase of two (2) additional books for their collections or cover approximately three (3) man-hours of staffing.

I don't listen to predictions from a man who was so confident that the blockchain was the future that he named his company "block". See also, Mark Zuckerberg and Meta.

I heard today in a meeting that by 2028 my institution will be fully AI enabled. I'd love it if just once, managers were made to define their terms.

Feb 14, 2025: Guardian Media Group today announced a strategic partnership with Open AI, a leader in artificial intelligence and deployment