As an editor I've been increasingly compelled to run papers through crossref to ascertain references exist. This only works for journal articles though...

I’m crying. I asked him to send me a screenshot so I could use it in class and it literally says “Cocaine is a bad, bad drug”

We have colleagues who put their blood, sweat and tears into detailed proposals for this funding scheme, only to find out they will all go in the bin. We still have no clarity on what ARC funding schemes are going to look like next year either. www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

This isn’t the ARC, but I can easily imagine it happening to an ARC scheme: The Government cancelled the Australia’s Economic Accelerator scheme, **including the round of submitted proposals currently under review**. Absolutely gutting for researchers involved. Enraging, and outrageous!

"Students are uniquely at a disadvantage — required by their schools to use platforms like Canvas to get their assignments done almost from the moment they set foot in elementary school." Really bonkers that being educated has now become conditional on automatic enrolment into big edtech systems.

When a work has been generated by AI, there *is* no unifying intelligence.

Hey so if you’re a man with an XX partner or child that you care about, I need you to read this thread because shit is not going to change unless cis men start not being okay with this stuff.

Tooth Fairy admits she would also pay for other body parts

Astonishing Syme Oration by surgeon Mark Edwards, citing Maya Angelou before a careful exposition ending- 'one day even you will forget the details of operations you did... our legacy is not carved in stone. It is carried in people, who will never forget how you made them feel'.

😭 Why do so many episodes of Bluey make one cry??! Tonight's was just about chess...

I believe the frame that minoritized scholars are helped by unethical tech is a trap to avoid. We better fight the system of inequities ourselves & not buy into industry frames trying to sell their discriminatory, polluting, and exploitative tech as "inclusion". bsky.app/profile/iris...

You know what doesn't get its support unceremoniously pulled by a tech company? Fuckin' books, brother

If you wrote a satirical novel about the Melbourne media and called one of your characters Chip Le Grand, your editor would ring you up and berate you for hours about how you possibly could be so stupid to come up with a name like that

Ok, so I knew it would be an anger-inducing and triggering watch, but OMG. Bravo ABC Four Corners, and the brave souls that spoke out on the show. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03...

Tiny toot on the horn blogs.deakin.edu.au/cradle/three...

Mmm. Freshly mopped floors feel so nice.

There's something particularly icky about being told I should have a 'playbook' for student engagement in higher education. It's not a game to improve statistics. If we don't recognise students as individual humans, it's not unsurprising they see HE as a customer service.

I saw a quote somewhere saying that it’s pointless dicking around with pedagogical strategies if you’re not going to address labour issues. That’s my paraphrasing. But I can’t remember who said it or where. #academicsky, any pointers? Feel free to make source recommendations.

... Still waiting for the moon to be visible from our house...

By some miracle, the bus was early and I'm on the 8:54 express train at Box Hill that skips Laburnum for no apparent reason. It's half empty, and early at Box Hill. Wonder when the last time they actually surveyed passenger load was? #melbournetrains

So, the new metro tunnel frequency is great. Not so great is the inter-peak frequency on Belgrave/Lilydale...15 mins between trains really kills the transfer opportunities.

Cartoonist Jon Kudelka has passed away, his wife Margaret has confirmed. www.facebook.com/margaret.kud...

Vale.

Vale, Jon Kudelka. And as always, Fuck Cancer.

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...

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.