Come for the lovely Nan talking holiday baking and stay for the egghead talk about rising cocoa prices due to climate change, commodity futures markets and retail store concentration www.cbc.ca/player/play/...

"a [price] shock to food generates inflation 126% higher for the poorest than the richest" Weber et al show the re-distributional effects of inflation

The affordability crisis is an inequality crisis. When prices spike in key sectors, it's not just inflation—it's a massive redistribution shock that hits poor households hardest. In our **new working paper**, we identify the sectors that matter most. A thread 🧵 scholarworks.umass.edu/entities/pub...

Call for papers! @danielleresnick.bsky.social , @philbakernz.bsky.social and I are co-editing a special issue in the journal Food Policy on "Rebuilding Global Food Governance amidst a Crisis of Multilateralism" - Papers due Feb.1, 2026. For more info, see link! www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

AI slop is such a huge issue, as others have said, it's digital aspestos - easy and quick to generate - very hard to excise. The so-called time saver of AI generates more work and labour and it is dispiriting work

My dreamboat, the bollard

It’s the entire point. There’s no plan to make this meaningful for students. No plan to use it administratively. Its design and implementation signals its only real intent. It’s best and easiest use case is for systematic harassment and to scare faculty into complying in advance.

"Fake citations have turned into a nightmare for research librarians, who by some estimates are wasting up to 15 percent of their work hours responding to requests for nonexistent records that ChatGPT or Google Gemini alluded to."

I’m sorry, but it is disgraceful to be an academic who uses this technology to conduct research. It should be prohibited in all of our scholarly institutions, including universities and journals.

Another banger from @heavyweight.bsky.social "Warmongers are thieves" thank you, Deborah

Excellent post by Olivia Roanhorse (linkedin) "Friendship at work is nice, but it’s not necessary. Relational responsibility is." Full post, now with Alt Text

A new World Bank report calls on governments to create dedicated Livable Streets Investment Programs, steadily scaling funding to 10% of road budgets by 2035. Why? Because livable streets deliver some of the highest returns in transport investment—up to €16 per €1 spent: investinlivablestreets.info

people love to rag on canada post, but parcel shipments to newfoundland have been a mess for weeks and canada post is the only shipper reliably getting deliveries to me. i have packages with private shippers (including fedex) that haven't moved in over two weeks.

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

Super interesting piece on how DHS and ICE uses private data to track people. Remarkably cheap and of course huge legal issues #swampNotes podcastaddict.com/swamp-notes/...

In my 25yrs in the academy I 👀 the proliferation of expensive enterprise software that shifted the burden of sooo many basic administrative functions — reconciling receipts, paying honoraria, booking travel — from competent, efficient staff to faculty + students. I’d spend entire days on this crap.

someone should invent a thing that's like a university but it's goal is to facilitate learning

An excellent piece by @profsecchi.bsky.social

My colleague reviewed a paper for the journal Climate and discovered it has been written by AI (citations that didn’t exist). Not only did the journal keep the paper, they asked her to re-review it. We are so cooked.

I said it before, will say it again -- generative AI fetishizes "ideas" while sneering at effort, execution, and education. That, despite Gen-AI being built on and out of other people's effort, execution and education.

So similarly, when we see people who prefer ChatGPT or a similar synthetic text extruding machine as a source of medical information, that means those are people who are under-served in the current system.

Students, staff, faculty turning to ChatGPT? That means they are being asked to do things they don't have the time, resources, support, etc to do.

In early 2024, I got to speak to Deans from up & down the West Coast of the US & Canada about "AI". I told them that the only value of ChatGPT for university administrators is as a contrast-dye test to show where resources are lacking.

Intellectual work is human work that recognizes, builds, collectivizes, and connects. LLMs/GenAI are anti-intellectual and anti-human because it does not recognize, it breaks bonds, individualizes, and disconnects. Not a new observation, but one that must be stated over and over again

Agreed that we need to approach people with empathy and find ways to communicate the message that work. But what I'm saying is that "these products are dangerous to you & those you love" has to be part of the message. >>

This kind of bottle-shaming is a not-so-subtle way to push women out of the workforce.

Great @archive.org talk btw @samuelmoore.org + @hjoseph.bsky.social abt reimagining open-access through small, sustainable, scholar-led publishing (Heather reminds us that the commercial academic journal publishing market is an $11B industry, w/ 20-40% profit margins "because of the free labor")

AI is a climate issue. AI is a climate crisis.

Job - please share widely! Canada Excellence Research Chair in Comparative Democratic Resilience in the Global South. Research focus - grassroots movements, Indigenous sovereignties, and racial justice campaigns contesting and transforming public institutions www.mun.ca/vpacademic/m...

Another excellent episode of @academicaunties.com with @tungohan.bsky.social and @tariajadi.bsky.social . Fantastic discussion of the normalized, caustic, and shitty practices of academia.

Ghouls

In our dept, we have annual awards for writing our students have done. There are all kinds of categories & $$$. A student came to me for advising & noted that all her teachers assigned in-class writing exams. So she has nothing to submit for awards. 😳 AI strikes again. I hate it. #AcademicSky

I do a Christmas Card every year for the folks at work and this year I designed, printed, sanded, and painted a 3D model of the QEII Library, trees, and a little snowman. The library is hollow so I could stuff a set of fairy lights inside so it lights up. @memorialu.bsky.social @munqeii.bsky.social

No-strings-attached, zero-means-testing, no-questions-asked cash payouts have been proven, over and over again, to be the most effective form of charity/aid going. It gets people in housing, and it saves the state money. We know this. It's fact, not theory.

Requested a book through ILL over break. It arrived today. Libraries man.

We need to be able to see that the line "accommodations have gone too far" is an expression of the ableist notion that disabled students do not belong in higher ed. Its fundamentally an anxiety about the fact that disabled students get an "advantage" over abled students.

Fuck this guy

Am writing therefore must snack

The worst thing to happen to academia was the emergence of a nomadic administrative class like the one in corporations who just move from institution to institution setting fires and walking away. Say what you will about the flaws of faculty governance, but at least they believe in the mission.

Consumption of beef in China will decline this year and fall again in 2026, while pork has hit a "structural plateau", and the egg market is glutted. But chicken is everywhere. www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Your universe is a photocopy of a photocopy of a… on.ft.com/4ahkNKa

spanish flu was 1918........ the great wall street crash was 1929........... very cool stuff, history, very cool and not stressful

A “shift to looser regulation is ‘likely to reduce the resilience of the banking sector to systemic market shocks.’” A key lesson from 2008 was “heavily indebted banks lacked the equity capital to absorb large losses, leaving regulators [to let] banks fail or bail them out to protect depositors.”

The Internet Archive just released tens of thousands of seed catalogs, spanning over two centuries! They are both lovely and interesting. Check them out! archive.org/details/usda... 🗃️ #c18th #c19th #c20th #illustration

Newfoundland and Labrador percentage of people living in food-insecure households is almost one in three at 30.1%. News to me that food insecurity in Alberta is so high though, a surprise, same with SK.

👉 Our new paper uses daily mobility data to show that spatial isolation is much more common today among those living in advantaged neighborhoods than the converse. 👩🏻‍💻 Lots of massive data wrangling and careful assumptions about mobility data needed - but check it out here! doi.org/10.1177/0042...

The NL Government is throwing $626mil on a new health records system with "real-time AI technology" with the *promise* of "smarter emergency room coordination, predictive patient flow, & intelligent resource management" - dunno - maybe that money should go to workers like nurses, techs & docs?

"In August 2023, Iowa City eliminated its bus fare. The two-year pilot noticeably lowered rates of driving, successfully increased bus ridership and lowered local emissions." 👏👏👏