Stupendous stuff from @samleggs22.bsky.social - meta analysis of human strontium and oxygen stable isotope data from southern Britain in 2nd half of 1st Millennium AD. Too rich to summarise but if your are into complex early medieval mobility, this one’s for you. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

And we go again: the treatment of ‘immigrants’ is how all sort of noxious shit gets into the bloodstream of the body politic. What they justify doing to foreigners now is what’s coming for ‘us’ in what, ten years on past form, but probably sooner with Farage.

Except of course the self-interest for a lot of these voters would be in relaxing rules around family migration, adult dependent relatives and that kind of thing. Now to take a sip of coffee and check on how that’s been going.

This. ‘The problem is not solely the LLMs, but scholars not checking footnotes and authors not reading the material they are citing. These behaviours… are more about the current crisis in universities worldwide, spurred on by governments who do not wish for an educated population’

This is it, isn’t it. This is the central problem. And no-one cares. ‘The present crisis is some evidence of an overstretched state that simply cannot or will not uphold both massification and quality’

oh no. oh no no no

This is one of my favourite clips because he really does pronounce English words like they were the local Irish, listen to how his ‘lamb’ is exactly how someone from there would say an Irish _leam_ [l’aum]

Also a wonderful piece on how AI is laying bare the structural problems in science, not primarily fixing or causing them. Much the same applies in teaching, I think. open.substack.com/pub/artifici...

Fantastic post here. A great perspective on how and why we write the way we do and judge people by how they write. ‘The very things you identify as the fingerprints of the machine are, in fact, the fossil records of our education.’

The holidays came early 🎉:*Bridging Child Language Research to Practice for #Indigenous #Language #Revitalization* is officially out! Makes great reading for your spring semester courses 🐦🐦, especially because it’s free to read forever with LD&C/U Hawai’i Press.

But the good news is, by doing this, we defeated racism in the UK.

Everyone is doing obvious dunks like ‘what about NI’, but — and I know I keep going on about this — the British state’s handling of Shamima Begum shows that citizenship has been a precarious status for some time now, for *certain kinds* of people.

Και τώρα τι θα γένουμε χωρίς βαρβάρους. Οι άνθρωποι αυτοί ήσαν μια κάποια λύσις What in the world will we do without barbarians? Those people would have been a solution, of sorts.

Current status: stuffed with absolutely delicious food from Uzbek Corner in Queensway Market. Do yourself a favour and get down there if you’re in That London!

No matter how tough you say times are, there’s always enough money in the banana stand to pay an external consultant to scope ‘academic efficiency opportunities’ www.theferret.scot/consultancy-...

The “protection, skills and study route” looks like a move to cherry-pick the refugees who look economically useful while driving the rest away. Rather like the post-war trawl of refugee camps for workers, while abandoning the most vulnerable.

“Four years ago, we suffered an earlier redundancy programme that we were told would secure the future of the university. That clearly was not true." #UKHE www.leicester.news/university-o...

Naomi is I think bang on here. I have said many times to many people that AI is like any other technology shift: it changes jobs and how we work. Naomi builds on that (and expresses it much better), and lands on "learn the skill of discernment". Do read this.

Why Edinburgh needs proper cycle infrastructure and can’t rely on railway paths. Cycling from Meadowbank to Polwarth on a dark, windy, wet evening. I’m a confident, experienced cyclist but I didn’t fancy either the wind on exposed Regent Rd or the goodwill of drivers in Princes St and Lothian Rd.

There is a certain type of person proudly belonging to what they called the ‘scientific-technological intelligentsia’ in the Soviet Union, which can read very positively (as in the Strugatskys’ Monday Starts on Saturday) but can also be negatively polarised into… well, this

Damn, if only 'hard men of Gondor' with their hollowed out, atrophying state, obsessed with the glories of the past and which was only saved from defeat by the actions of those it claimed to protect, could teach us anything...

Very good and normal!

Big school is exactly right, and is ultimately the source of the rot. Academics think they’re there to produce new knowledge and transmit it, *along with how to generate it*, to perpetuate the cycle; everyone else thinks they’re there to teach bigger school.

Completely insane but an inevitable consequence of ‘benefit fraud crackdown means act first, mop up later, ideally not at all’ and the usual ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and oh wasn’t there something else? it’ll come to me I’m sure’

Timeline cleanse.

Child benefit, which is available to people earning well above her ‘contribute more than you cost’ boundary, is also sponging off the state apparently! Jesus Christ.

Did the thing, with the aid of nurse Vlad from Homiel. Maybe that’s enough contribution to not get kicked out?

Who are these people who come here and take more than they give? *goose meme*

Fascinated by the idea that the difference between someone she would kick out (with tears of great personal sympathy in her eyes) and someone she has a sacred duty to is the ability to pay a naturalisation fee (currently £1,605). Seems cheap for a sacred duty.

Real talk, ProQuest now has AI summaries of dissertations on by default and every one of them I’ve seen has been in the bad space where it’s not in-depth enough for me, so I have to look at the text anyway, but entirely cryptic for a student not au fait with the stuff already. Who is this for?

A-Level English is not an ESOL qualification, what are they even talking about.

Nicely put @kscanne.bsky.social! But boy do I hate things being worse than you thought they were ☹️ www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1...

Completely correct. The UK assessment (and reassessment) system is a ratchet that ruins the lives of students that can’t keep up with the expected pace for any reason, and everyone pretends this is normal.

Curious case of context collapse. There is definitely stuff going on with attention, which, not being a literature academic, I can’t speak to in a very informed way. But the piece being cited is actually only tangentially about that, it’s about ‘[British] uni’s not what it used to be’.

In a Sofia pub… good beer, and these here horseradish crisps totally slap. What a concept.

"The conditions that migrants will have to meet to gain indefinite leave to remain include being in work" then this is fundamentally - among other things - another attack on family visas. coming to the uk on a spouse visa means work is *not a requirement of entry*, so will labour be changing that?

Think I've just had my first encounter with LLM-fabricated language data. Some Indonesian paper mill journal just published a paper containing completely fabricated Siwi data, citing me as the source. (It could have been made up by a human, but it looks like what you get when you ask ChatGPT.)

Looking forward to years of Discourse from people who don’t understand the first thing about naturalisation, dual citizenship and other such things.

One of the surest signals of complete disconnection from reality in this ~fascinating~ piece is the idea of a ‘university focused on modern languages’ in a marketised system. I’m pro modern languages but has the writer met British schooling, British parents, or British 18 year olds?

Yes!

Whatever you think about AI this is just horribly inefficient, no? If you need to read the paper, write the summary, read the AI feedback, edit the AI feedback. All this presumably via endless wrangling of a clunky CMS. Where is the time saving?

This, to me, is actually the more central point. I’m not going to pretend my research into Slavic historical phonology or whatever directly contributes to applied breakthroughs or economic growth. But it gives me a reason to stay in my job where I can teach people things.

The best chapter of "Abundance" is the one on research funding. Nobody really knows what works, but the approach of "more detailed pre-approval by funding bodies" has had a fair go and really failed to deliver the goods. And that's research that is.

Oh sod off. But really, another one into the pile of evidence marked ‘these people won’t know what they had until it’s gone’

Memory unlocked: When I was in grad school and one of our colleagues was leaving, we got them a t-shirt that said Prolixity is the Mother of Obfuscation

New podcast! @dannybate.bsky.social and I chat about Scottish Gaelic, mediaeval sea kingdoms, the spread and retreat of Gaelic in Scotland, influence from Pictish, sounds borrowed from Old Norse, and much more 🐦🐦 podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a... or wherever you get your podcasts :)

Basically: unless you can get into a high-tariff university, modern languages and classics are gone, especially if you‘re not in the south-east. Linguistics is going. Drama is going. English is next. Does anyone care? (No.) Hello? (Silence.)

Should undergraduate students pick their specialisation from Y1 (like the UK) or Y3 (like the US)? South Korea just moved to an earlier specialisation (like the UK), which reduced student wages because they were less able to adjust to a changing job market www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This entire post mentions ‘staff’ and ‘students’ once, as recipients of an ‘open’ and ‘creative’ narrative of the ‘governance story’. This is fine and normal.

I feel like this is a proper British @mtsw.bsky.social ‘because they like them and want them to win’ moment.