Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took at university (I had to make this up since it was an integrated curriculum! These were themes...) 🎓 Law & ethics in medicine 🏃Health promotion & knowledge management 🔍 Sociology of medicine 📈 Evidence based medicine ❤️‍🩹 Occupational medicine

It's only Thursday (of a short week) but already feels like Friday ... also, how is it the end of January??? I have also done a lot of writing and commenting this month but still seem to have a stack of papers to be worked on and submitted 😲

Since it’s Australia Day you might like this piece about how Australia makes young people hot. “Are They Hot, or Is It the ‘Australia Effect’?” www.nytimes.com/2026/01/20/s... (gift link)

The thing about the bloke who lost stuff bc ChatGPT shows the extent to which people still haven't understood that TECHNOLOGY IS NOT BUILT FOR YOU ANY MORE. It is purely, entirely self-serving, with zero obligation to, or care for, its users. Everything is on you; you cannot rely on software.

NeurIPS reviewers typically review 6+ papers, each with 100 or so citations. The reviewers can't possibly check that every citation is real. But why don't we have an automated way to do this checking (and desk-rejecting if fake citations found) *before* the papers are sent to reviewers?

NEW: NeurIPS,one of the world’s top academic AI conferences, accepted research papers with 100+ AI-hallucinated citations, new report claims fortune.com/2026/01/21/n...

Competitive drinking (beer bong, beer pong, boat race etc) probably isn't a work transferable skill (welll, maybe in the good ol' days) but the ability to skol a drink comes in handy when you have to do the oral glucose tolerance test...

lmao get wrecked imo www.nature.com/articles/d41...

In short, acetaminophen exposure during pregnancy is not linked to the risk of developing autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability. The study has been published in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). YES, it is PEER-REVIEWED. • jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... 🧪🧵⬇️

WELL NOW, would you look at that? A massive, 26-YEAR-LONG study of MORE THAN 2.4 MILLION people in Sweden found found NO EVIDENCE to support a causal link between acetaminophen (the API in Tylenol) use during pregnancy and increased risk of autism, ADHD, OR intellectual disability in children.

Córy Doctorow with another verbal bullseye: pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/n...

⁉️The ARC has delayed outcomes of ALL grants 1–4 months & increased scheduled outcome windows from 2 weeks to 3 months! This reverses 4 years of progress in providing greater certainty & ability to plan for researchers, their families & unis. Their excuse? Security checks under new ARC legislation👇

How's that even going to work with the 2x DP cap, given +1 yr on responses? Seems as well thought through as a paper raincoat. ECR/MCR precarity is already ridiculous, but this is only going to make it worse. Genuinely have to wonder if it'd be easier for the ARC if we all just left research.

What is the future of feedback in the age of Artificial Intelligence? Join our panel, facilitated by Prof Margaret Bearman, to discuss the manifesto for of feedback in the age of #GenAI and kick off our Seminar Series for 2026! Read more and register: blogs.deakin.edu.au/cradle/what-...

Let’s not let our analysis stop at the goonerism of it all. I’m begging for our view of this to be wider than some guy’s stained pants. It’s a labour weapon. A missile to bomb us out of public life. One email to a boss and a woman loses her job, her income, and her independence. That’s the point.

Getting grok to publicly strip a woman’s likeness online or alter her image isn’t just horrifying at the level of the individual, it’ll be used to get us fired, too. It’s a technique to keep us in the home popping out babies because we lost our teaching job when some guy sent porn of us to our boss.

Indexicality lesson for students and others who submit attachments. You need to label your file with your OWN NAME, not "Chapter 6" or "Paris conference presentation". The Paris conference will receive 400 files, 395 of which will have identical/similar names. Recipe for chaos. #academicsky #PhDchat

Websites need to realise that no one ever, ever wants the site to be able to send them notifications.

Wanted to eat a hot cross bun so dug one out of the freezer. Somehow, they appear to be almost fruitless 🙄 and also possibly homemade. I don't recall committing this atrocity, and yet here I am eating it....

"And I never say no" We need to have a serious talk about the way "AI companion" apps not only prey on the vulnerable, but are priming their users to ignore consent and to conflate love with control. We need AI regulations across so many sectors, but this area is particularly horrifying.

Funny Numbers xkcd.com/3184/

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)? Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

As it turns out, the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun *isn’t* a good guy with a gun—it can be a good guy *without* a gun. Just another NRA lie.

If you're in Australia - the ebook version of An Academic Affair is currently $4.99 on all platforms! It's got academic rivals,* a marriage of convenience, and staunch unionism, and I'm quite proud of it. *written by me, an academic

We're running a very short survey to explore why academics are increasingly turning to GenAI to do things that they know/feel they should probably be doing themselves (e.g. write peer reviews, draft papers, data analysis etc.) - please share (or fill in!): redcap.helix.monash.edu/surveys/?s=L...

More on ARC job cuts & restructure: ARC’s spending $374k on consultants for organisational “review” & “planning & development”. They’re also spending $765k on “risk management”. That’s $1.1 million on consultants being spent over 1 year. Un. Believable. Slow clap, ARC.

Commercial academic publishing profit margins typically in excess of 32% ... #AcademicSky #HigherEd #journals #libraries #scholarship

Wonderful to be at the final AI practice exchange at Deakin led by Sue Sharpe. One thing we can do differently from AI is to acknowledge where ideas came from. Reminds me of what @saraheaton.bsky.social talks about with attribution postplagiarism.com/2025/09/05/p...

The upshot is that we were able to knock results from the journal out of our article search and got the publisher's journals removed from Ulrich's. But this is clearly going to be an eternal game of Whac-a-Mole for librarians (and for patrons who contact us to report this stuff)! 4/4

In another, a student found an article that had seemingly AI-generated fake citations using our institutional article search (which searches our subscription stuff, but also beyond). It got picked up via CrossRef. Another sketchy publisher, but this one with enough oomph to be listed in Ulrich's. 3/

In one, a researcher told us he'd found himself cited as coauthor on a paper he hadn't written. We found a few years' worth of backlog on the journal's page (hijacked version of a legit journal) was AI-generated abstracts and titles to pad things out for the newer, dubious full-text articles. 2/

My colleagues and I (librarians at UW-Madison) just ran a two-hour presentation on the impact of gen AI on predatory publishing for library staff this week! It was directly inspired by a few patron interactions similar to what you're describing. 1/

I mean we are absolutely in a place now where the only solution to this information disorder is for everyone to constantly evaluate the source of information. Never trust a chatbot, but also don't believe a video unless you know and trust where it comes from. Unfortunately... that's a lot of work.

Here's the reality this example illustrates: It's not even just about people blindly trusting what ChatGPT tells them. LLMs are poisoning the entire information ecosystem. You can't even necessarily trust that the citations in a published paper are real (or a search engine's descriptions of them).

I used this as a framing example in a recent talk I gave about the "librarian's dividend" which is my probably-far-too-positive spin on this absolute garbage fire -- that at least maybe we're forced into more appreciation and value for the people and institutions who help us evaluate information.

I cannot evangelize enough for @zotero.org for citation management. It's a game changer. If you're a student, and you're writing a paper right now, and you're NOT using Zotero, I ask you...why? Why are you making things harder than they need to be?

Aargh. It's the first time this year past Jo has dropped the ball on planning ahead for presentations. Got one on Monday but my slides aren't done and it's already almost 5:30 on Friday afternoon 😅

Honestly, the great thing about AI is it’s going to free up so much spare time for us to be misinformed and out of work.

I have done so much writing this year. So. Much. #academicsky #resdevmemes #acwri

The reality of uncertainty: Dr Nicole Crawford shares her reflections and key takeaways from our last seminar of 2025, where Prof Margaret Bearman discussed the role that feedback cultures play in improving #feedback. Read Nicole's thoughts here: blogs.deakin.edu.au/cradle/the-r...

Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?

This banger from the academia / writing / research meme stash definitely has wider applicability but I do really like using it for coaching, mentoring, and workshop activities when we talk about the importance of saying 'no' to things as researchers. #academicchatter #academicsky #PhDchat

🚨 #DECRA #DE26 announcement: ❗️Outcomes announced publicly for Discovery Early Career Researcher Award 2026❗️ See ARC's RMS for list ➡️ https://rms.arc.gov.au/RMS/Report/Download/Report/a3f6be6e-33f7-4fb5-98a6-7526aaa184cf/285 /bot

We are having so many wrong conversations - this is a major one thepoint.com.au/opinions/251...

I reckon that should be banned. It's quite striking how much regulation surrounds authorship conduct (ICJME authorship criteria, can't submit to more than one place at a time, must declare AI etc) but almost none for what the reciprocal conduct of editors should be.

To go through minor revisions and then have the editor send out to a whole new round of reviewers is the absolute worst

There are those of us who have been saying that the best preparation for "prompt engineering" is likely to learn how to read, write, and think and, well, here you go.

Looks like LLMs are *very* vulnerable to attack via poetic allusion: "curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90% ..." https://arxiv.org/html/2511.15304v1