Sadly, my use of social media is via the apps on my phone: tech.yahoo.com/social-media...

Handles instead of push-plates on the doors: does it address an accessibility issue of which I’ve been blissfully unaware or an attempt to keep anyone from entering or leaving the building because they have no idea which way they open?

“By 2029, these systems are going to be so pervasive that unless you were to lock REF panel members in a Faraday Cage and force them to perform in real time, I cannot see how it does not become, by default, an AI REF." (James Wilsdon) Alternatively, it might suggest to some a UBI approach to REF...

A propos of nothing: a lingering legacy of lockdown is that both my daughters still ask me, of all people, to cut their hair. Given the price of haircuts in London I’m happy, if bemused, to comply.

This puts it in perspective: the importance of higher education for the economy of a place like Manchester.

Replacing the fully funded level 7 (MSc) apprenticeships is this inanity: strategic AI leadership at Level 5 (UG year 2) for just £750 skillsengland.education.gov.uk/apprenticesh... The learning outcomes look like a full Masters module but don’t worry you can get all this in 30 hours!

Have been using Claude Pro a bit this week. Hard to tell if I’m using it efficiently, but certainly is effective. Does it solve all my coding issues or find the best solution? No. Does it radically accelerate the speed with which I can reason about and apply solutions? Yes.

This is how pay has behaved in a UK university ( @edinburgh-uni.bsky.social ) since 2008. CPI, CPIH and the deprecated RPI are measures of price inflation. Tot WP and Reg WP are measures of other peoples' pay. Details blogs.ed.ac.uk/hughpumphrey... and linked posts.

contemplating a move to France for a life without Teams

‘Stone age’ system of booking cross-border rail tickets holding back climate action by consumers, says thinktank

Can I just say how simultaneously amusing and heartwarming it is to get an invoice printed on a dot matrix printer with tear-off strips? My main interest here is which part of the process is still tied to 1986/7.

A far more elegant and entertaining take from @wonkhe.bsky.social on the things going through my head as I read the HEPI paper.

Fascinating bit of history and demonstration of path dependency alongside contemporary public and energy policy: open.substack.com/pub/paradise...

And @casaucl.bsky.social has a new home! Goodbye 90TCR and hello Maple House

Maybe if AI is the answer then you’re asking the wrong question? www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-i... REF is ultimately storytelling masquerading as metrics. I have no issues with ‘tell me a story about your unit’ but pretending it’s quantifiable+objective is absurd.

'“I really worry that if we don’t have tools to help people do the REF, then it’s going to become even more burdensome and cost even more money,” Lawrie Phipps...Jisc’s director of policy development, told Research Professional News.' Or just slim REF down and state the rules at the outset? 1/3

Congratulations to CASA Professor Neave O'Clery for her appointment to the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) Vienna as external faculty! Home to many CASA alumni, the independent non-profit research institute researches global systems by analysing large-scale data & complex networks. https://csh.ac.at/

Honestly, only thing worse than reimbursing academic visitors to the UK, is trying to claim money from a US university. Especially when you discover that #starlingbank only accepts transfers in GBP/EUR on personal accounts. Entire morning wasted. Now have #Revolut /ht @darribas.bsky.social

Powerful piece about how our obsession with ‘charismatic’ AI obscures (and breaks) institutional decisions and accountability www.theguardian.com/news/2026/ma...

Honestly, right now I’m not advising anyone to pursue a career in academia. I’m working with amazing PhDs and post-docs who would have outstanding academic careers at any other time, but all we talk about is their Plan B.

Our results are nuanced and both validate fears of existing low-income communities, while also showing benefits of new supply. I'll reiterate we support supply reforms, HOWEVER we are wary of when market supply is pitched AGAINST affordable housing and tenant protections when it's both/and (10/end)

Huzzah! Tomorrow's Sewage Spill Day when the full stats are released on how much was discharged into rivers, lakes and coasts last year. To whet your appetites I’ve mapped the 2025 spills at outfalls affecting bathing waters. Here are the top 10 worst offenders in reverse order:

Mapmaking 18thC style: ‘A chain, 66ft long, a surveyor's wheel and a notebook, and they would go over, for example, a field, and they would measure it on all its sides, and they would draw that as accurately as they could’ Amazing London map to be reprinted 280 years on www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This made for good reading — whether you agree with all the points or not, it prompted a lot of useful chat on the departmental slack channel.

MapThing lives again! /ht to Ollie Dawkins for updating my old #Processing library for the modern JRE/geo-stack: github.com/virtualarchi...

Although Copernicus gets a mention in the comments, this feels like more of a US challenge than a global one: open.substack.com/pub/reimagin... Though, TBF, the ONS geo-portal is pretty poor (god forbid useable bookmarks!) and operated by… well, you can guess.

@casaucl.bsky.social’s Thomas Murat kicking things off in his #AAG26 session about simulating bus-mobility.

Why does #ClarityNoGo require my passport to make a booking but then not actually pass on my details to the airline??? I only discovered this 16 hours before my flight to #AAG26

Shoutout to MHCLG whose time series data on net additions changes header format *twice* in the same spreadsheet and includes new lines in attribute names.

Full house for today’s UCL Economic Geography Network seminar with Zara Shabrina - a superb talk on modelling Jakarta as a sinking city

Nice piece on the contribution that HE makes to all things local: inews.co.uk/opinion/i-ru...

'It had been expected that many universities...would encourage more of their academics to focus on teaching, with research commitments, particularly at less prestigious universities, under threat.' But 'the number of teaching-only roles fell by 3,555 across the sector last year'. 3/3

'The industrial strategy is heavily concerned with the UK workforce’s readiness to engage at the cutting-edge of science and technology. Skills England wants provision up to level 8 to be considered as part of local skills needs.' 1/2

"Thousands of uninsurable homes could be built in flood-prone areas if ministers press on with planning reforms [in the new draft NPPF], Britain’s leading insurers have said" www.thetimes.com/uk/environme...

A Brief History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore 🧵

Hah, would like to see this for Geography. Half the time it’ll probably be some other discipline’s journals.

Announcing {freestiler}: a high-performance vector tiling engine for R and Python. Generate vector tiles for your maps directly from R/Python spatial data, @duckdb queries, and local spatial files. Check out the docs here: walker-data.com/free... Some highlights:

Part of the issue is a lack of growth. A recent study showed that cohorts who experience more GDP growth in their lifetimes are more likely to trust the government and have positive perceptions of their living standards. academic.oup.com/qje/advance-... In Britain, such voters are dying out

‘We remain deeply concerned that universities will be unable to absorb the cost of the levy’s introduction. The loss of cross-subsidy for domestic teaching & research will harm universities’ ability to deliver their core functions’ Our response to the levy www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/60...

Only since having children have I come to understand the analgesic properties of plasters (‘band aids’ if you’re North American).

Well this is very interesting in all manner of ways. Unite have essentially become an asset speculator - build halls; earn rent; sell on before reinvestment is needed. Also, related, some towns are going to have empty student accomodation blocks soon www.theguardian.com/education/20...

My Instagram feed is like a series of outtakes from Force Majeure. #Alps #avalanches

We have had some amazing Masters students in previous years on this and the commonwealth scholarship! Come join us!

'Indeed, the disintegration of geography at the University of Leicester is premised on the pretence that it is possible to keep elements of physical geography and deliver undergraduate geography degrees without any human geographers. This fundamentally misunderstands what geography is'. 2/2

Geography's 'combination of STEM, social science and arts and humanities can sit uneasily within university faculty systems, heightening the risk that we are dismantled into separate components.' 1/2

Congratulations to CASA Research Fellow, Clara Peiret-García, on receiving a @sdruk.bsky.social Fellowship! Her project will combine smart mobility data with surveys to understand diverse travel patterns, using HASP and GeoDS to support fair post‑pandemic transport planning. https://bit.ly/4co5e4m

'The credit-based funding model means every student’s entitlement is now a bespoke calculation depending on how many credits they’re studying, what kind of provider they’re at, what TEF rating it has, what type of OfS registration it holds, where in the UK they’re studying....' 1/2

At each annual conference we have an early career plenary lecture and in Belfast this May that lecture will be given by Dr Ruth Neville @ruthneville20.bsky.social a research fellow in computational social science at @casaucl.bsky.social. Abstract submission deadline is Friday tinyurl.com/9szbc49y

A new paper on student housing, thinking through impacts of regulation on how much space students have to live in! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

An illustration of the benefits university campuses can have in local economies, but the risks of the model too, as I discussed in my blog last year: www.centreforcities.org/blog/branchi...