Every day we stray further from the light of god (complimentary)

Of the many things that piss me off about this, the fact that this also "participates" in discussion posts for you is disgusting. Using this damages your classmates learning without their consent.

Shout out for the learned societies keeping a beady eye on the state of the disciplines that university senior managers are so swiftly dismantling. Keep an eye on the state of UK university Geography with the help of the @rgs.org 's new report, published this week.

Reminiscing about the Australian consultants that were brought in to give us 1 hour of training on online teaching. Key takeaway: wear lipstick or a hat to seem more engaging.

love a bit of continvouclous morging

Just waiting on The National's reporting on this: Ally McCoist co-star dead at 95

It's #HeartUnionsWeek this week and you can join Prospect and get 3 months free membership if you join before the end of the week. @prospectunion.bsky.social represents us in @ukri.org and also a range of other technical and professional industries. prospect.org.uk/join/

America. not even once.

We are delighted to announce that registration and abstract submission for Gravel Bed Rivers 10 are now open! See our website for all information: www.gbr10.uk

This is a depressing example of the rot at the heart of capitalism. Nothing can ever be finished, but instead has to be constantly revised and "updated" to extract more rent from consumers. Notepad was feature complete 30 years ago and nobody can convince me otherwise.

Oh man. Just wait til Lucy finds out about the millions of others also in this situation. She's gonna be so mad!

It’s practically a work of art that he thinks we’re all that stupid.

ITS FINE - dashare.zone ADMIN

The UK *is* losing a generation of scientists. I know lots of brilliant people who have left their jobs / the country because of the limited jobs & funding. Once lost, they cannot ever be replaced. The UK government is overseeing the death of UK academic science, and it doesn't seem to care.

This is incredibly funny to try because even if it *was* true, then it would mean Streeting was defending Mandleson in September for the love of the game.

VC, founder, dumbass

So have we just given up understanding that the purpose of a literature review is not the production of writing, but rather the production of knowledge about a subject? www.timeshighereducation.com/news/new-cha...

Maybe this will be the piece of pointless cruelty that will convince reform voters to like Starmer!

"All staff from both universities will be employed by the university group" I will be interested to see if and how terms and conditions will change for all the staff being moved to new contracts.

AI does not magically infuse knowledge into people. "We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand"

This shit is galling. 14k isn't a massive sum in the scale of running a university, but think of the *good* that it could do: * Undergrad summer research projects * ECR travel grants * Student hardship funds These things would benefit people AND the university by improving research and retention.

Colleagues were interviewed on BBC Radio 4 about @qmul.bsky.social's sudden escalation in taking down posters & threatening disciplinary action. It is a great explanation of what's happening & its dangers. Listen from 22min in: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... or clipped: youtu.be/SJGnCrDaCf0?...

Starmer: I would never have appointed Mandelson if I had known full Epstein links. This suggests that there is an amount of hanging around with a paedophile that is acceptable. I'd be interested to know where he places that line. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.

If this is so great, take the human tutors away from the rich kids, give the human tutors to the poor kids and let the AI tutors "teach" the rich kids.

Physics is under the cosh, Astronomy and Chemistry in peril, Geography is losing territory, English, Modern Languages and History are among the many shrinking UK disciplines. Surely it's time to have a concerted, structured conversation about universities and the national research base.

At this point we can only assume that all government ministers hate the very concept of a university. My speculation is that the kind of person who becomes a government minister had a bad time at uni because they were too busy being a careerist dickhead (eg Streeting) and so are now lashing out.

There is money for "education" if and only if that money is being directly funneled to corporations. Anything involving actual learning, however, well there's no magic money tree

Using the language of inclusion to shill for AI slop is particularly distasteful. "women returning to work" can use the plagiarism machine that lies to you to get ahead. Also, suggesting that businesses should use AI to speed up admin tasks is gonna be great for compliance.

Writing - and the thinking that comes with it - is one of the parts of my job I enjoy the most. If you asked me to make a list of parts of my job that I wanted to outsource to AI, the writing up of research would probably be bottom of the list by a very long way. It's a giant NOPE from me.

It looks like ~1,000 accepted abstracts for #LPSC2026, down from >2,000 in 2023 (typical range seems to be ~2,000 ± 300 or so). www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lps...

This is one of the strangest and most screwed-up stories I’ve worked on. www.londoncentric.media/p/tiktok-lon...

Lol

A few years ago I was able to stay in our dispute thanks to strike pay. I've made a donation here, and encourage other folks to donate if they are able.

This brings back bitter memories of when I was in the same position with colleagues at @qmucu.bsky.social a few years back. Absolutely horrible behaviour from Sheffield management.

UK Universities cut 13,300 jobs, paid £300m+ in redundancy. Economic contribution of the HE sector, £265bn. Systematically destroyed by govts - foreign students not welcome, cut real-term grants, fees, students burdened with debts, low staff pay/morale. Govt want skilled labour. archive.ph/favYt

Reminder that gen AI is dogshit.

This shows how incompetent university senior management is: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... Students pay much more in England, and yet the sector is still a shambles down here. And yet that is their plan to "save" Edinburgh.

Counterpoint: The creator/funder/enthusiast of a digital nonce machine shouldn't be a member of the royal society

https://floppy.loop0.sh a write-only message board hosted on a bootable floppy disk! once it's full it's full!

🚨 4 days left to enter 🚨 submit your photos and drawings of geomorphological features by midnight on Friday tagging us and the tag #BSGAC25 to win up to £100 🥇 last years winners and runners up for inspiration ⬇️

"Academics literally cannot make genAI go away" we also can't make underage drinking go away and we're not advocating for installing bar carts in every classroom.

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. Just fuck you. Fuck you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry.