me: okay, nina, let's focus on the teaching prep, that's at least a distraction from the bin fire that is UK HE the textbook* i'm using to prep the lecture: *Meyerhoff & Strycharz (2013) in the Wiley Handbook of Language Variation and Change

love how we regularly have discussions about "cold spots" in provision and approximately 5 minutes later more provision is closed. what a terrible situation for everyone involved

i promise, i will never again ask myself how a typo has ended up undetected in a published paper. it was probably detected 3 times but the typesetting software refused to acknowledge any changes.

important (and perhaps obvious) sidenote to the recent Sheffield Hallam case — foreign governments are not the only groups who may want to discourage critical research conducted at universities

made an embarrassing typo, shoutout to the WILEY BLACKWELL handbook of language variation and change

one thing that is odd about variationist sociolinguistics is that we have established a certain canon of core studies but some of them are actually tricky to get a hold of??

you can tell i want to be an STS person badly by the fact that every undergrad lecture i prepare has a little section called "historical context for the theory we're about to discuss"

to bring the mood right back down, while i have stated in the past that tadej pogačar is my problematic fave, this is why states should be prohibited from sponsoring cycling teams and we really should make an effort to push them all out

signing myself up for those figure skating lessons today, it’s not too late

good morning. turns out good people can make good things happen together

to name and shame, it's Kortext but other software probably also does this. i would be so mad if someone butchered a textbook I wrote like that *in the interface people use to read it*

why does the ebook reader software my university pays for a "summarise chapter" tool??? why does it have a "generate study notes" tool that generates the world's most inane summary of the chapter???

preparing a sociolinguistics lecture on social networks (based on a colleagues' outline for a similar class) and revisting some classic graphs:

i love how every academic knows that phd studentships are absolutely vital for research and teaching and yet increasing the number of such studentships seems to be the one thing that’s absolutely not on the table anywhere

NHS Sussex are forcibly detransitioning trans people. These patients need full restoration of their healthcare, and everyone involved in doing this needs to be sacked.

one of the things i love about living in this country/period of history is theoretically having all sorts of rights that practically don't seem to be enforceable hope someone takes them to court/tribunal over this and eventually wins

how come november, the worst month, is also the busiest month

was just shown a zohran mamdani ad on my instagram feed and on the one hand, clearly not relevant to me, but on the other it did involve him speaking arabic to a cat

i think i've figured out the sourtce of my copy-editing woes last week -- while Elsevier requires authors to upload editable files, they seem to take the text (including references) from the PDF which is how you end up with misparsed references despite submitting a bibtex file??

This is VERY revealing about the “Office for Students”. A clear example of academic freedom being stifled. Yet “crickets” from the OfS. Why has Sheffield Hallam not been fined £500,000 like Sussex? Why has the OfS refused to take action. Is it because this case is not transphobic archive.is/ihVT3

spare a thought for everyone working on the train network on this island today, my god

Pretty extraordinary story here www-bbc-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.bbc....

you know who makes a lot of youtube money? the guys doing simple diy and bike maintenance

fascinating and reminiscent of the reports of seasoned anti-fascist/anti-racist protestors that the ‘local protests’ tend to be comprised of well-known racists who travel large distances a reminder that there are so many more of us than there are of them and we really should act like it

When children going missing from Home Office and local authority care was flagged couple of years back #r4today presenters uncritically repeated claims children were "voluntarily trafficked". It was an angle used by politicians, and still the idea of protecting kids is dismissed as a "pull factor"

a podium for cameron mason on a muddy koppenberg?? in this economy?? what a treat

there is no debate to be had about integration in the UK. The debate should be about what we do about the way we indulge delusional people by pretending their arguments are not bad faith.

controlling your heat pump with an app is all fun and games until there’s a glitch that prevents your app from connecting to the heat pump 🙃

i just remain astonished how openly and blatently the big LLMs are being advertised for cheating at school and university

i know news reporting should be very accessible, but did I just hear Radio 1 news go "the ministry of defense, that's the part of the government in charge of the armed forces..."

weizenbaum and dreyfus spinning in their graves

one of the ways linguistics twitter/bluesky has grown in recent years is that there's pinker and mcworther discourse today and we simply do not engage because we have better things to do

speaking as a (not really) dispassionate observer for a second, one of the things that's fascinating about LLM marketing is that they keep selling it as "let us help you make sense of this *already extremely structured* data":

we only have Vampire Weekend thanks to vampire unions

pals, if I had an impulse to get a bird feeding station for my garden because i like seeing wee birds -- would that a) be advisable/necessary and b) do you have any recommendations?

apropos of nothing, are there academic or journalistic investigations in how academic publishers do (read: outsource and manage) copy-editing and type-setting within the last decade or so?

i can cosign this unfortunately

about to do a final clean of the rented flat before handing back the keys and taking a video documenting myself removing the black mould as i did at least weekly for the last 2 years

hear me talk about how AI is *really* ruining your job, not by taking it but by undermining your autonomy, enabling (nay, encouraging) your boss to monitor and assess you all the time, and removing everything that sparks joy in your working day Edinburgh (🥰), 28/11!

question that just occurred to me and a quick google search doesn’t resolve: does tolkien’s estate have to give permission for (or would they have a right to forbid) the use of, say ‘palantir’ or ‘anduril’?

UK folks, this is why we oppose facial recognition cameras, live or otherwise

ad as i opened youtube just now, presented without comment

boring advice: write the introduction after finishing the paper exciting advice: rewrite the introduction in the proofs

well that settles something about the whole ‘is grammarly a use of generative AI and should be considered as such in the context of academic integrity’ debate, no?

wishing a good morning to everyone except the driver who yelled ‘it’s not your private road, you know!’ after i stayed in the middle of a twisty single track country lane in muddy conditions so she couldn’t overtake it’s not yours either, you know

the opportunism of a university that has enough assets to avoid job cuts while other institutions are genuinely at the brink of collapse is so insulting to everyone and such an unnecessary threat to people’s careers

one of the big German DIY chains uses the slogan ‘there’s always something to do’ (‘es gibt immer was zu tun’) and i truly did not appreciate how true that is as a kid

Instead of trying to green cars so much why don't we just invest in trains. city trains. under ground trains. above ground trains. trains between cities. trains between countries. TRAINS THE PEOPLE CRAVE TRAINS

nothing reminds you that Brains Are Weird than missing or getting on antidepressants of some sort why do i feel seasick sitting down because of one (1) small pill, incredible