There’s an article in the Guardian today which I was interviewed for: I wrote about it here, giving a fuller account of how and why I won’t be working with UQP anymore. sakr.substack.com/p/leaving-uqp

Read this essay. Thank you Omar and all the other authors standing against this despicable act by UQP and Dymocks to stifle voices critical of Israel's genocide and violent colonial expansion. How can it go on? We have to take more action. Australia is complicit in genocide.

I won’t be publishing with UQP any more and neither will Evelyn Araluen, Tony Birch, Melissa Lucashenko, Randa Abdel-Fattah, and Sara M Saleh, among others. The list is growing. The press is dead. I wrote about why here: sakr.substack.com/p/the-cultur...

#FourCorners #UniversityJobCuts #CampusChaos Did somebody say blood-sucking vampires⁉️ Deb Verhoeven & @beneltham.bsky.social have this covered in their article: “Nousferatu”: Are corporate consultants extracting the lifeblood from universities? h/t @seren.monster

I've been pulling at threads on Palantir's push into Australia for ages. Some of what I found is a previously undeclared new contract with Corrections Victoria for $9m and no evidence that Palantir has been assessed against the federal supplier code of conduct. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

AI vampirizing academic scholarship… another day in the university coal mines

'Researchers have amassed a data set of thousands of advertisements selling research-paper authorships online, shedding light on the global marketplace for academic fraud.' 1/2

'An analysis of the advert data found that a first-author slot on an article sold by a paper mill costs a median value of nearly US$800, with prices ranging from $57 to more than $5,600. The work is described in a preprint submitted to arXiv this week.' 2/2 zenodo.org/records/1968...

"NACC’s 3 current deputy commissioners as a group represent the least qualified combination of deputies permitted under the NACC Act .. DepComm Rose, the delegated decision maker who decided not to investigate the Robodebt Six, has a diploma of hotel management as her highest academic qualification"

@disabilitystor1.bsky.social oh goody this one is gendered female and named after the history of science’s Patron Saint of Having Your Work Ripped Off and Unrecognized By Dudes

How white male supremacy gets encoded. Technopolitics 101

The other day I was proofreading an article about women inventors and the depressing common thread for all of them was: – men took credit for their inventions & cut them out of the invention’s history – they never made any money from their inventions & died in poverty & obscurity

LOLWUT? Former ANU vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell has been suspended from the university and accused of serious misconduct after allegedly making a close friend a full professor despite him having no university qualifications. www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/educati...

Can we also get a refund when the government itself uses AI (without human oversight) to administer its welfare programs???

Here is some more embarrassing information they wanted to get out on the Friday before the long weekend. bsky.app/profile/maxi...

"A subscription shouldn't be a trap. That’s why we're banning subscriptions that lock you in because they're too hard to cancel." — AUS PM @albomp.bsky.social So, ... we're cancelling #AUKUS? 😏 #auspol #USPolitics

Yes! This article didn’t quite get the traction I thought it deserved. We reconsidered typical frameworks for understanding identity-based workplace discrimination (including intersectional approaches) and instead explored a relational approach: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Queen's in Canada has done some of the resource-gathering about Nous: qcaa.ca/resources/no... But yes, we need a list. Because Nous itself has become *very* evasive in whom they're selling their nonsense to, no longer naming even when using 'testimonies' in casestudies: nousgroup.com/case-studies

The Iran/Hormuz situation just reinforces my view that the US is run by people who cannot distinguish movies or computer games from reality. They think they've killed the "final boss" and don't understand why "YOU WON!!!" is not emblazoned on the sky. Now they're bored and want something else to do

Nousferatu are a sinister and pernicious organisation. I have no idea what the objective is, but their track record in Australia alone should have ended their influence. Their damage is playing out all over the UK, same playbook. www.theferret.scot/consultancy-...

the rare duck-billed platypup

Thanks! I put some more Dave-heavy charts here; it's an unstoppable force. www.annasyme.com/board-gender...

@bestqualitycrab.bsky.social you inspired me with that talk about Daversity years ago, now I'm playing around with Australian board members names and other things. Dave still going strong.

People close to Trump bought $1.5 billion on S&P futures market a few minutes before Trump’s Iran announcement on the weekend, and dumped $580m oil stocks. Insider trading estimated to have made them $60m in 15 minutes.

Is it a giant wooden horse

#AusVotes2028 #auspol

“Everywhere I went in New York people openly loathed the very sight of me. So naturally I concluded that the entire city had gone crazy and I left. There was no other possible explanation.”

Live possum found in Hobart Airport gift shop soft toy section www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03... via @abcnews

Happy St Patrick's Day! Here's one of my favourite bits of Newfoundland folklore. Back home it's said a snowstorm always follows on the heels of St Patrick's Day & we call it Sheila's Brush. It's Sheila, the wife of St Patrick, sweeping up after the mess he's made on his saint's day.

You have to be kidding ;)

Huge to have a woman win for cinematography, and Black and Filipina too. Autumn Durald Arkapaw paid homage to two cinematographers tonight, Ellen Kuras and Rachel Morrison. (in clip ⤵️) My claim to fame: I once coiled a box of cables for Ellen Kuras. She pronounced the result, "acceptable."

For anyone curious, this is the brilliant Professor Yvonne Chireau, who talked about her role in consulting on "Sinners" here: religiondispatches.org/2025/04/24/i...

So cool that people are still discovering this #Sinners syllabus, published by the African American Intellectual History Society, and composed by Jemar Tisby & Keisha N. Blain. Enjoy!

And so commences my annual #oscars accounting of award hoists versus clutches. www.publicbooks.org/a-brief-hist...

Everything is fine in higher education.

The NACC has been an utter waste of public money. Its sole achievement so far is to further persuade everyone that consequence-free corruption and bastardry are fixed features of government in this country.

Keeping my head down and distracted as the world burns down around me - a new kinomatics blog post emerges into the maelstrom: kinomatics.com/projects/aus...

This is good and important work.... it is also crying out for some network modelling à la @bestqualitycrab.bsky.social analysis of "daversity"

Yesterday the Post ran a story about the National Park Service censoring displays and exhibits critical of America's past. The NPS even has a database of what's being considered for erasure. I downloaded the 7GB database and turned it into a protest bot. Here's @nps-uncensored.bsky.social.

Sorry, Bluesky, but I have to say it: improv comedy groups can already do social science research better than most professors with PhDs

A colleague sent this along from the NEH. What an absolute joke. As they said, we’re in an era that is post-satire. I’d say it’s just rank stupid.

The Remote Labor Index (RLI) measures how well AI agents can automate real-world remote work projects — the current best automation rate is just 3.75%. The debate on AI and the labor market needs empirical indices like the RLI — real-world performance metrics. #AIandWork #AgenticAI #Automation

The trove of files released by the Department of Justice, illuminates Epstein’s deep interest and entrenchment in the scientific community. But the files also underscore how he used his power and money in ways that kept women out of places where they might succeed. https://bit.ly/4qWgPLz

Satire didn’t just die. It was autonomously executed.

Yes, I remember when I had my first child and had to build 30 data centers to feed them.

It's quite an achievement when a man is so immediately annoying on sight, that even knitwear cannot begin to mitigate it.

This! Stop batch labeling everything “AI” and start using the name of the actual tool. The AI hype cycle does nothing to help disambiguate the ramifying harmful effects of extractive technologies from everything else.

Heard an interview today where a guy said (and I'm paraphrasing) "LLMs have had years to train on every aspect of chess, read every book and article about it, review every match, but when they play, they STILL makes illegal moves. That tells you everything." And. Yup.

This ABC article states that NSW Police have admitted deploying a Long Range Accoustic Device at the 9 February protest in central Sydney www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02...