I had such a great time at the stats seminar at Macquarie uni this week, got to meet lovely people from both econ and stats, and saw what is most likely the largest hologram on the planet www.mq.edu.au/faculty-of-s...

the brief moment of hope and suspense logging in while you wait to find out if you need 2FA

@mrjamesob.bsky.social Bedford CC dealing with the bigots like an absolute boss.

I can’t believe you lefty Luddites hate tech so much that you embrace mRNA vaccines, heat pumps, electric bikes, hybrid work, renewable power (and awesome advancements in storage), space telescopes, and hot/cold running water but reject the planet destroying plagiarism enrich the worst people bots!

I have a discomfort talking about "training" when we should prefer "education". In my mind, training applies to prescriptive knowledge about how to perform tasks, and education to propositional knowledge about the world and broader cultural reproduction. Education is usually more important.

This has gotten even sadder as I’ve dug into it. The agent can see that I’m the tech lead on the project that produced it, and that I’ve said its perf. on this task was poor (about a prototype from a year ago). These are citations to an authoritative primary source so they survive all critique.

Given the absolute push (speaking about Australia) across the school education system to have teachers use AI and to teach students to use AI, in a few years by the time any reach university the damage will be total.

The broader question is what exactly did anyone expect the politics of cultural resentment and austerity to do for them? By what mechanism was either supposed to improve anyone's lives?

We are lucky that the review quality in these core journals is pretty solid. My understanding is that other fields have a lot of low quality journals receiving fair % of manuscripts. Our poor-quality MDPI-afffiliated ones (e.g. "Galaxies": don't get me started) thankfully haven't caught on much.

If Labor nationalised Kayo it would do a lot to crush One Nation imho

When I describe how our field operates to people in other fields, from society controlled journals to arxiv to ADS, they are always shocked. It is easy to take our ecosystem for granted if you haven’t lived in a different one for a while.

why is anybody reporting the vile Hanson comments. the only respect in which you can't go to Lakemba is the metro isn't finished yet and I cannot wait until it is

Anti-vaccine sentiment - like so many other forms of contemporary right-wing populism - is a brutal war waged by the anti-social against the pro-social

Whoa: young scholar searching Florence libraries for how the ancient Ptolemy informed Galileo found a copy of Ptolemy's Almagest with marginalia in what looks a lot like Galileo's own hand. Like a frozen moment of torch passing, when a carefully tended fire from antiquity ignited something new.

Apply for Australia's national radio astronomy postdoc fellowship, the Bolton Research Scientist! Come work down the street from me at the CSIRO campus next to Macquarie and do science with us!

Every time I see people complain about doing peer review “for free” for community journals I lose my mind further. If you’re a salaried academic this is your job! The money would come from the community anyway in these journals! In every industry people fought to convert piecework to wage or salary!

For me the most heartbreaking aspect is the devastation of the creative arts — these courses are haemorrhaging, we’re losing a generation

We've contrived a student debt crisis in just a handful of years. And the government could fix it tomorrow - but won't, because they love the revenue.

Spoke to a promising rural high school student today about the prospect of going to University and they were straight up: 'I can't afford it.' 'The fees? Or living out of home?' 'Both.' It's been a remarkable, bipartisan effort to destroy the pathways people like me took into tertiary study.

Back to back (great!) Bluesky seminars this arvo by @economeager.bsky.social and @mjibrown.bsky.social in stats and astro - social media is real!

This is yet another example where astronomers don't realise how good we have it. I do actually have a GS account, but the profile is private, and I haven't looked at it for many years. Everything we do is via NASA ADS, which is - and has always been - vastly superior to anything Google offered. 🔭

My immutable metadata saying "not mad" has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my metadata

Australia is built on immigration. The economy *still* relies heavily on immigration. New migrants make it better, stronger. Building new housing and infrastructure would help everyone. Every major political party: We will cut immigration. Mainstream media: But can you be as racist as Pauline?

Chump change for a government managing a country as rich as Australia, but wait until I tell you how little it would cost to stop humanities academics from killing themselves through employment precarity and overwork

I know $1 billion sounds like a lot, but it's incredibly, astonishingly cheap to get the best minds to work over a decade on fundamental research critical to Australia. A decade!

What I’m seeing in some of the Epstein revelations about well known scientists who maintained contact after his conviction, is folks who always thought they were the smartest person in any room, sure they could shrewdly navigate a route that gets them what they want without getting dirty themselves.

🚨🚨🚨Job going at The Australia Institute 🚨🚨🚨 Sub-Editor, Digital Publishing "A detail-focused sub-editor to help produce The Point, an Australia Institute initiative, publishing research, analysis, explainers and factchecks from experts in their field." www.seek.com.au/job/90319309...

seen a new antisocial behaviour in the wild, guy watching an extremely loud video on his phone on the metro, on speaker, *while wearing headphones around his neck*

Australia’s national science agency needs “at least” another $1 billion in funding over the next decade to arrest an existential slide propelled by crumbling facilities and the “sovereign risk” of losing its position as a national and international leader in research. satpa.pe/TGSCfvn

Some of the brightest political thinkers in our country are early career journalists who don’t get let off the leash to write analysis like some of their colleagues who’ve been around a lot longer. This is for you.

We have PhD positions open in my group at Macquarie for radial velocity exoplanet projects!

There have been horrors unfolding in Sudan that deserve global attention, investigation and action. Contact your Foreign Affairs department and ask them what your country is doing about this. Australia, write to Senator Penny Wong here: www.foreignminister.gov.au/contact-fore...

among many things to draw attention to in this grim piece alluding to homophobia, sexism, and racism in sport, is this bit I didn't expect: "F--- you to every single gambler who’s sent me hate or death threats." This is so awful but we could pull the plug today on the gambling bit if we wanted

Oxford friends, go to the AoT Oxford launch event in a couple weeks!!! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/astronomy-...

Minns, a Law’n’order NSW Premier, all huff no fairness; “latest report by NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics & Research (BOCSAR) found 4,452 Aboriginal adults detained in prisons across the state make up 34% of total prison population - highest-recorded rate of Indigenous incarceration in NSW history”

i am entirely despondent about the state of australian journalism. the narrative that has emerged within a week is that the protesters were at fault, that they were rioting, and that the police were merely enforcing the law. if that's true, where's the footage of protesters rioting?

Yep! Excluding a few dinosaurs and traditional institutions that persist over on Twitter, I get all my science news, leads, and chats with scientists through here now. The feeds also allow me to monitor all the topics I’m interested in so as soon as any new paper drops … it’s in my TL! 🔭🧪⚒️

Of so many things to be infuriated about, this is perhaps my biggest gripe. Pancreatic cancer patients, who face a future without hope, are being denied a potential game-changing therapy www.mskcc.org/news/can-mrn...

They should have to have warnings on thirty year old movies that there are Trump jump scares

Blow up the Pokies is basically the easiest way to make the world better by banning one single thing

feeling attacked

Like most of your risible takes this one is based on a profound truth. Our eclectic fox-like racism has led to the two overlapping hedgehog-like ideas that now animate the rest of the racist world: boat-stopping is humanitarianism, and offshore detention is a disincentive. We really are the worst.

This is a terrific observation because it’s what a moral panic looks like. If there was a good article to be written on this topic, then someone would do it and there wouldn’t be a market for a million lesser follow-ups

the minute the fb algorithm clocks you as a straight man it immediately sets about trying to destroy your life & endanger those around you

In terms of what cures are being lost: - Epstein-Barr virus is perhaps the major trigger for multiple sclerosis - herpes simplex virus causes cold sores, genital herpes, infections in babies, deadly meningitis - shingles virus causes an intensely painful disease

I wish university presses would try to get some physics textbooks by women published Too much push for memoir, not enough push for “write about the thing you do”

Ok so I have had time to properly read and digest Hogg's paper in detail and it will not shock you as his former postdoc that I agree with close to 100%. But the spiciest take here isn't anything about LLMs, it's the assertion that astronomy lacks a right edge. This is true but you can't say it!

Just for reference, it is very, very possible to have a civil and productive conversation about AI and LLMs on Bluesky, and I do it every day, and people who say you can't do so are either lying to further an agenda or just have a massive skill issue. Feel free to point to this post if needed!

Found an additional graphic that gets even more of these quotes together. I've kept "I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees" pinned above my desk since I first started studying evolutionary biology as an undergraduate. So relatable to get extremely frustrated with your study system.

not sure given the state of the discourse that I'm very excited for the LNP to move even further to the right, seems like there's a bit of hubris on here thinking this will keep them further from government rather than eroding norms of decency and tolerance even further