We’ve opened the call for @britishacademy.bsky.social Postdoctoral Fellowships. We provide 3 years of funding to early-career researchers in the humanities and social sciences wishing to pursue an independent research project. Apply by 30th September www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/sche...

one of the many, many reasons I love owning books is that they're the last bastion of physical media that corporations can neither digitally repossess nor render technologically inaccessible due to regionlocking, subscription changes or phasing out the relevant device. you buy a book and it's YOURS

Everybody will be delighted to know that some very rich men are encouraging young people to do philosophy, major in the liberal arts, develop creativity and develop hobbies, since these people will 'benefit most' from genAI. www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/... #pairedtext

UK government visa changes are “driving universities towards a cliff edge”. www.scotsman.com/education/so...

NIH grants have been under political scrutiny since early 2025. But what does the screening process actually look like? What is being flagged? I spent a month digging into leaked docs and emails. We've published the 235-word list that are being flagged by an internal AI tool. And so much more. 🧵

“If the application contains one of the 235 disfavoured terms, it is classified as ‘not clean’.”

Wild. The limits of automation on full display, and the chaos that is modern academic publishing.

I understand the excitement about technology “rediscovering lost texts.” I do, & I get the media hype. But I wish people knew that there are hundreds of thousands of “lost” texts just sitting in manuscripts in libraries, which have never been published outside of those single manuscripts. 1/n

Also, the Obergefell ruling came 11 years after my home state, Massachusetts, legalized same-sex marriage. Much nicer anniversary than the Brexit referendum.

Today is the 11-year anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark Supreme Court case legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide.

I especially love this diagram.

Watching BBC News and they just did 5 minutes with a doctor about how this heatwave is life threatening and the interviewer closed it with "well, it's just an opportunity to have ice cream for breakfast!!". Amazing clip of how the BBC seems just blissfully unaware of what is happening

Reason #3743 not to use LLMs for lit reviews. Or for universities or research orgs to offer trainings for such a use. I am still angry about a training I saw earlier this year. Absolutely no criticality on display. After I emailed a list of reasons why I found the whole idea unacceptable.

Would love to see other UK institutions do the same tbh

E.g. any sort of action against a certain trillionaire for his role in stoking racist violence that is directly affecting people, young and old, in the UK? What a world.

📣 Only FOUR full days remaining to apply for this support! The University of Glasgow has launched its Dumfries Civic Grant Fund, offering up to £5,000 for community groups, charities and local projects in Dumfries. 🔗🌳 Read more in our Linktree, in bio. @uofgdumfries.bsky.social #socialenterprise

Since Google revealed its plans for an AI search overhaul, visits to our "No AI" search page have tripled…and they’re still rising! Want to make it your default on Chrome or Firefox? Grab our No-AI extensions and banish AI-assisted answers, chat, and AI images. (1/3)

How does this square with AFT's previous partnership deal with OpenAI? If someone could explain it to me...

We need better tech journalism. I am only asking for a teensy bit of criticality. Of course, even worse is the fact that, first, this guy was platformed by Oxford Uni and, second, that Oxford cut a deal with OpenAI in 2025.

Google, Meta, et al. can certainly create products that might incidentally support people with certain disabilities, but their overarching business models are incompatible with just, inclusive worlds. we need better tech and better tech companies.

USC said "it would use a *venture capitalist’s* $200 million donation to apply AI across academic disciplines." "The donation... came from Mark and Mary Stevens. Stevens... is among the largest individual shareholders of the chip giant Nvidia, where he has spent decades on the board." Screaming.

Particularly difficult to stomach how social scientists (billed as 'AI experts') can run workshops on going from 'using AI' to 'mastering AI' all while navigating ethical 'gray zones' and 'streamlining' social science research activities ('lit reviews, data processing, drafting'). Beyond parody.

There are people still living who fought — and watched their compatriots be murdered — for the passage of this act and to attempt to democratize America. To see it completed felled in the span of their OWN lifetime is just absolutely devastating.

French student data breach: The data of 3.5 million students implicated, including report cards and driving safety reports. This so clearly illustrates the risks of centralisation. We might want the state to take on certain roles, especially administrative, but as data gets more centralised...

In general, (re)orienting education wholly or chiefly to specific perceived market needs is always going to produce disaster once the near term passes. It also eviscerates institutions that might otherwise help people weather change, intellectually and in other ways

On this day in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson authorized overt racial segregation in federal employment. Federal endorsement of Jim Crow policies was a significant blow to Black civil rights.

no matter how you feel about them, prediction markets are growing more widespread, and it's important that educators understand how they could integrate these powerful gambling tools into their classrooms

an essential tool to get kids excited about (and placing bets on) current events. there could be class-level and school-level betting pools set up. the pedagogical possibilities are endless. we're about to see student engagement levels go through the roof.

For those who don’t know, the OU brought teachers like Doreen Massey, Stuart Hall, Margie Wetherell, Grahame Thompson, John Allen, Tony Bennett to design and write degree courses to anyone, regardless of prior qualifications often FOR FREE and until 2010ish for around £3-500 p.a.

Edinburgh staff urge university to ditch OpenAI deal: www.timeshighereducation.com/news/edinbur...

after much deliberation and giving AI the benefit of the doubt, Wikipedia editors have had enough of AI slop. New policy bans LLM generated content, periodt www.404media.co/wikipedia-ba...

"In the name of the University's final AI principle - responsiveness to the stakeholders involved (i.e. all of us ...) - we ask that the University of Edinburgh not renew its contract with OpenAI and stop using OpenAI as a supplier." docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

"While jailed and unable to pay bills, Lipps lost her home, her car and her dog, she said" www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Reading Mariame Kaba's newsletter and following her to Mary Oliver's "Messenger" and these lines: Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

I would like to remind people that AI has already been used to kill people OpenAI and Microsoft supplied Israel with AI models to track and kill people in Gaza which led to increased civilian deaths apnews.com/article/isra...

They should never find rest.

It would be fantastic if governments could get serious about regulation and, importantly, enforcement. There are so many ways that tech could be better for all of us. The focus on bans is diverting attention from systemic, obviously more challenging, solutions that require political will + stamina

Legendary founder of NPR programming Bill Siemering is enjoying Zoom visiting with students so much that he's asked me to put a second call out. No honorarium necessary. Any takers?

My employer, Univ. Colorado will pay OpenAI $2M/year under the banner of “equity”. That’s 54 full scholarships / year. Plus, our IT will be able to read our chatGPT logs, and our chats can be requested under public records law. No thanks. Surveillance is not equity www.axios.com/local/boulde...

If your (Canadian) university is buying subscriptions to gen AI like Copilot etc, can you send me a link (or the email you’ve gotten) about this? Collecting for a reflection… Example: it.ucalgary.ca/it-security/...

Yes it’s Valentine’s Day. But it’s also the chosen birthday of Frederick Douglass who was born in 1818 on a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland. He escaped from slavery & rose to become the most eloquent and forceful voice for the abolition of slavery & for Black voting rights in the U.S.

This is what happens when people think neurons are just doing a binary transmission of electricity around to "process information." Meanwhile even lowly bacteria are making and deploying stuff like this:

This reminds me of a provocation from @allartmarkets.bsky.social at a recent talk on aI: While we've all come to understand the narrative of inevitability, we must also explore the finance narratives. How do groups, money conspire to make all other narratives possible? Such a complex topic...

Most sources aren’t digitized. Sources that get digitized aren’t by that fact alone accessible or permanent. What is digitized is itself a deliberate sample not only of the archive as a whole but also of the digitized source. Understanding is a social process and takes shape over time and space.

This is right, firstly because it doesn’t just reproduce AI hype or AI critique (a dangerous binary-game to be party to) and secondly because it provides a viable, *livable* alternative. It produces a new narrative of what education still could be: a space to come together, to think together. 1/

Please be specific. What applications are you talking about?

NYC officials plan to reraise pride flag at Manhattan’s Stonewall monument after Trump administration removed it

1/ Refreshing perspective from @oii.ox.ac.uk scholars: "Meticulous citation is a marker of well-researched, serious scholarship." Dr. Roxana Radu and @rocher.lc outline the harms of citation by LLMs: the 'provenance' of generated texts cannot be determined or cited. #LLMs #epistemicjustice