🚨Save Languages at the University of Essex 🚨 #langsky #linguistics UoE plans to cut German, Italian, Portuguese and Chinese + all evening classes and merge Language and Linguistics with a larger unit. Only 2 languages will remain next October. Please sign our letter: tinyurl.com/SaveLingLang...

This is pretty disgraceful.

well, one good thing is, I'm delighted to say I'll be sharing my work on "The Sound of Silencing: Identities and Ideologies in Commercial Text-To-Speech" with wonderful collaborators @ninamarkl.bsky.social @catlai.bsky.social @lhlew.bsky.social as a poster at @chi.acm.org 2026! ⛱️

so, as noted, salary caps will not save the sector — however, refusing to entertain a pay cut when 400 full-time jobs are at risk, and campus gets closed, departments are merged and the foundation programme is cut entirely… says a lot about the people leading our supposedly public institutions

Maybe Labour want to have re-think about who and what "grows" an economy.

good morning, #LangSky & #linguistics! University of Essex staff are on day 2 of strike action to stop proposed cuts to 400 jobs across all departments (200 academics/2000 professional services staff) our Language & Linguistics Department has been told to cut 50% of staff by the summer

It’s very painful to see the mainstreaming of truth-telling as division-stirring. The line of questioning is so horrendous I could hardly bear to finish watching this short clip but I’m glad I did manage to get to Zack’s sharp answer.

Watching this Labour government try to kill UK universities is like watching an animal disembowel itself. You just sit there thinking ‘Why?? Why would you rip out something that has always kept you alive?’

I've been a faculty member in #Linguistics at a high-profile US university for for over a decade now. Most years I've been involved in graduate admissions. As of this year I'm the Graduate Chair for my department. I thought it might be helpful to share some advice for grad applicants...

Also got to admire the chutzpah of taking a definition of machine learning - hardly an unstudied technology - from some dude's 5-yr-old Medium post, and lifting and shifting the image

The NYT reported many hours ago that the government account was provably false (which @bellingcat.com & others had already exposed in video) yet the BBC as of 11am UK time makes no mention of this fact and still centres the government’s false narrative, mentioning only ‘conflicting’ views. Shameful.

The special session on Queer and Trans Speech Science and Technology (or QT sesh as I personally like to think of it) was the highlight of Interspeech 2025 for me! Could YOU be there at the next one? September in Sydney!

I have some bad news. One, if you need to use ChatGPT for your graduate application letter, you are not ready for graduate school. Two, no, not "everyone is doing it" and those who don't do it aren't "losing out." ChatGPT is not an advantage.

Missing from the coverage of redundancies at Edinburgh: this was done in such a haphazard, uncoordinated way, there are now core teams who have gone from 5 people to 1 with no change in workload or pressure and huge loss in knowledge of institutional process. www.heraldscotland.com/news/2576321...

fellow linguistics pals, in case you missed it, this is where we’re at right now at Essex if you are a student or alumni, please please please make your concerns known to the university

it’s come to my attention that my tumblr post has been crossposted to bluesky, so I’m posting it on my account here #AntiAI #GenAI

Requested a correction from @princetonupress.bsky.social. Let's see what happens.

Wildly different things, tasks, techniques, subspecialties being lumped into "AI" and then being conflated with each other, doesn't help. Different types of models vs the techniques to train them vs the tasks they are supposed to accomplish, all under "AI".

“But that praise usually masks the reality that we’re absorbing stress the system refuses to hold. We become the buffer, the translator, the proof of concept, the person who makes things work without ever being asked what it costs us.” open.substack.com/pub/blckgirl...

Ahmed the Fruiterer being the everyday hero that saved multiple lives of mostly Jewish people today is the only politics worth a pinch of shit in this act of terrorism

This is fucking grim. Somebody invented a white guy, an "IT professional" named Edward Crabtree, who stopped the Bondi shooting and spread it all over the internet, which was picked up by AI agents and slop aggregation sites. The real hero is a fruit stand owner named Ahmed el Ahmed.

Now imagine sharing your private fantasies with what you believe is a bot that cannot judge or remember. Just that, on the other side, is a man in a one-room home in Nairobi, pretending to be an AI companion. That man is Michael, and this is his story: data-workers.org/michael/

One of my neighbors has been putting up these fish facts posters. All kinds of different fish, marine, freshwater, deep, shallow, all kinds. This is a good one. “Stg this real fish” took me out. Good work, neighbor.

Holy shit. Reuters reporting that new admin instructions on visas are if you worked at a platform in trust & safety or content moderation or on fact checking or online safety at an platform you *and your loved ones* are ineligible for H-1B visa. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

Words matter. Language matters. Languages matter. @spencerhazel.bsky.social on how universities cut their language degrees, AND stress the importance of language, AND use language poorly and offensively in communicating their decisions ("marketing-infused slop"). #AcademicSky #Universities

Auckland Uni has responded to my OIA request re consultancy spending in 2024-2025 $600k to PWC and $500k to Nous Group for "strategic design, organisational change, transformation services" etc This is roughly what our whole faculty of science spent on internally funded postdocs in the same years

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-...

🔴 NEW: The University of Edinburgh has quietly paid more than £750,000 to a controversial consulting firm amid job cuts - staff say bosses ignored "repeated" questions about its role. Read more about 'Nousferatu' 👉 www.theferret.scot/p...

Dismal framing. Every aspect of most asylum seekers’ lives is controlled & paid for by the Home Office. They can’t work, are told where to live & have no autonomy or dignity. So they aren’t *choosing* to use taxis & don’t need to be “banned” from doing so. The HO just needs to get its act in order.

Speech technology researchers are working to improve text-to-speech with the goal of accessible communication. However, TTS models are also being used to produce misinformation, deepfake pornography & more… Read our latest blog post from @alice-ross.bsky.social, CTMF PhD Fellow ▶️ edin.ac/4re6En4

this is how you lose the dish war

I used to handle interlibrary loans for a public library. ILL is a magnificent expression of the idea that readers deserve books, and books deserve readers. It’s libraries everywhere pooling their resources for the benefit of everyone. Killing IMLS could have killed ILL. This is great news. 📚

For those of you in the UK, especially if you are a UK citizen, can you please take part in the consultation on changes to Indefinite Leave to Remain (Settlement) that were just proposed by the UK government. We need as many people as possible to reject these proposals. www.gov.uk/government/c...

Back on the @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social picket line, standing with colleagues against senseless cu ts. Cover in The National by Lucy Garcia with quotation from @drjogrady.bsky.social pictured, and in The Herald, www.heraldscotland.com/news/2562598... #UCU #StopTheCuts

Just to say, I am a supervisor here: UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Responsible and Trustworthy in-the-world Natural Language Processing www.responsiblenlp.org/2026-student... If you are reading things like this and planning PhD project, do reach out: www.ft.com/content/e5b7...

🔔new paper alert🔔 I argue that language technologies are usefully understood as a type of language management (i.e., ways of changing how people use and think about language) -- especially in the workplace -- connecting critical work on AI with language policy www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"it is striking how many of the key players we have looked into — the people who have gone out of their way to put up hundreds of flags — seem anything but ordinary." manchestermill.co.uk/the-men-who-...

I'm unreasonably upset at this flattening of Garak into Fashion Lizard,he was the Enigmatic Fashion Lizard and this cannot be erased

You can't cut thousands of jobs through a chaotic and miserable process without affecting students. They see what is happening very clearly (and have already experienced course closures...) thetab.com/2025/10/24/u...

The is particularly true of current ukgov funded research on AI that starts from the premise “Yay! AI is Brilliant! Amazing! Woohooo!!!”

seems pretty obvious that only having ‘policy-driven’ research is a bad idea (looking at both UKRI and Horizon)

so many things happen in a single teaching day. trying to teach new perspectives & critical thinking while also juggling intense one on one interactions, managing entire classrooms with all kinds of personalities, people opening up about things, some students excelling, others silently struggling

ONLY migrants though, no one else is to study English because it's a rip off and a waste of time, am I getting this right.

LAVLANG! IN! EDINBURGH! 2026! 💜🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🪻🦩💬✨

So many Australian colleagues put through a year of worries and uncertainty. All because Nous Consultancy only thrives on a scarcity narrative? Bit if a reminder that those cuts can never be justified in pedagogical or academic term, whatever the spin.

@zackpolanski.bsky.social nails it: "Britain is not broken because of migration. Britain is broken because of inequality. Because of an economy that allows billionaires to hoard wealth while millions struggle to get by. Because of a political class that has lost its nerve and forgotten its purpose."

We have 20 years of UK evidence that says Rachel Reeves is correct about this. Deeply depressing that some in government (let alone other parties) seem incapable of grasping it. migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/br....