Not many people know this but the last US president NOT to have been alive at the same time as Herbert Hoover (POTUS31 from 1929 to 1933) was Abraham Lincoln. #USpolitics #POTUS #gerontocracy
@prof-alistair.bsky.social
I'm a regular Inter-Library Loans user as the library's been hollowed out somewhat. I couldn't find the link to ILL on our new merged Library website and when I asked I was told it was now named, 'Fetch'. "Fetch" is what I say to the dog, not to librarians who I regard ever so highly!! :-)
Interesting piece from @nytimes.com on AI companies employing philosophers. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/b...
The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors (Gift Article)
A.I. labs are hiring contrarian, chin-stroking, finger-steepling sages. Who’s underemployed now?
nytimes.com
An interesting piece, drawing on evidence, on Work-from-Home policies and practices, bosses, productivity and some of the nuances involved. #employment #WFH #Remoteworking #narcissism www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/o...
Opinion | The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week (Gift Article)
It’s all about them.
nytimes.com
I'm old enough to remember when science fiction was a genre you read for pleasure not something you try to bring into being for the benefit of an ultra-rich and amoral elite. www.bbc.com/news/article...
Meet the crypto billionaires building a world where money buys you a vote
They think democracy has run its course - so they're setting up their own nations instead.
bbc.com
Some murky stuff going on in the Faculty of Divinity at #CambridgeUniversity. #Reform #HigherEducation
Palantir Co-Founder Peter Thiel and Reform UK's Cambridge University Recruitment Pipeline Project Revealed
The world-renowned academic institution has nothing to say in response to a six-month investigation by Byline Times raising serious concerns about the safeguarding of students and foreign influence at...
bylinetimes.com
I agree with South Australian Greens leader, Robert Simms, that this is positively obscene. #university #highereducation #salaries www.indailysa.com.au/news/just-in...
'Obscene': Uni boss's extraordinary multimillion-dollar payday revealed - News | InDaily, Inside South Australia
The multimillion-dollar pay packet of a former university chief has been labelled “obscene” by a politician.
indailysa.com.au
We've all heard of Marshall McLuhan's seminal book, 'The Medium is the Massage' but did you know there was a companion LP to accompany the book? Neither did I until this week. Here it is: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SU6... Very 1960s. Well worth a listen by all sociologists and cultural studies people
Marshall McLuhan - 2011 - Remastered version of Medium Is the Message LP
YouTube video by mywebcowtube
youtube.com
Pottering through old copies of the BMJ for 1918 (as one does), I find in 'Medical News' this report on UK beer production in the previous year. Was it misfiled or just intended for a different journal (eg The British Journal of Advanced Arm Bending) the reviewers just not reading it properly? 😎
A quick take on my recent article on the development of PhD supervisor development in Australia and the UK. (The photo's of my local beach.) #PhD #PhDsupervision #universities #researchdegrees supervisingphds.wordpress.com/2026/06/29/w...
Why do we do supervisor development the way we do?
By Alistair McCulloch, Professor in Research Education at Adelaide University, Australia, and Convenor of the biennial Quality in Postgraduate Research conference (QPR) 2012-2026. As we look out ov…
supervisingphds.wordpress.com
Pleased to have quite a long (for me) review in the Journal of Learning Development in HE of a new book by Abegglen et al. Title-Stories of hope: Reimagining education. Open Book Publishers Hot off the press & free todownload! #SoTL #Universities #Hope #Optimism journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jl...
No. 40 (2026) | Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education
journal.aldinhe.ac.uk
As a Scot I feel obliged to share this repudiation of all the slurs that have ever been cast on my country's national musical instrument, the bagpipes. #Scotland #Jazz #bluesmusic
BluesMusic@bluesmusic.bsky.social · 2mo agoGunhild Carling is a Swedish jazz musician and multi-instrumentalist rockin'🎶'Bagpipe Swing' #bluesmusic
The world as we know it may not be ending! Employers are reversing many AI layoffs. "Studies find up to 50% of companies that replaced workers with AI are rehiring or expressing regret". Issues involve institutional knowledge, and disappointing productivity gains. www.techspot.com/news/112707-...
The AI boomerang effect: more data suggests employers are reversing AI layoffs
In some studies, roughly a third of companies that attempted to replace workers with AI have either rehired some of them or expressed regret over the decision....
techspot.com
Just watch my first Scotland World Cup match for 28 years and find, half way through the first half, a hydration break. I've never heard of this before. I can only think this is to allow the TV networks to have another advert break to the normal one that comes at half time.
Permanent suspicion? Recursion? Increased valuing of pre-GenAI artefacts? "Maybe poets will resort to composing their verse in glass boxes in the public square"? A fascinating essay on unanticipated consequences in an AI world. lareviewofbooks.org/article/fake...
Fakes of the Future | Los Angeles Review of Books
Literary credibility in the age of AI.
lareviewofbooks.org
#USpolitics Not so fun fact. The US has had more presidents who were born in summer of 1946 (three: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump) than presidents who were born in all the years between 1947 & 1991 (one: Barack Obama, born 1961). (1991 because 35 is the minimum age to run for POTUS)
"For the first time in human history, we have a technology that can generate words separately from the thoughts they represent." An interesting article on #GenAI and #creativity using evidence from 370,000 College Essays. The comments are also worth reading. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/o...
Opinion | What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity
nytimes.com
Just thinking ... What a strangely inefficient world we've built for ourselves all in the interests of increasing efficiency, isn't it?
Amidst all the noise about AI & how it is going to completely change the way we work, learn etc, I found myself thinking of two other game-changers, Second Life [the future of Higher Education as I remember], & Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) [the future of art]. Whatever happened to them, I wonder?
An interesting NYT article which includes a good idea for student assessment in a GenAI world. If students use AI, they submit 2 versions of the assignment — one completed without AI and one done with it, with a written explanation of how the chatbot was used. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/m...
A University System Went All In on A.I. Now It’s Tearing Itself Apart.
nytimes.com
Preventing the Wayback Machine from saving the news puts today’s journalism at risk of disappearing from history. 📝 Help push back. Sign the open letter calling on publishers to stop blocking web archiving 👉 www.savethearchive.com/NewsLeaders
Higher Ed curricula, etc have all been steered heavily towards preparing students for work with a focus on employability etc. Given everyone thinks AI is going to take all the jobs and leave everyone un-employed, perhaps we should re-orientate HE towards preparing students for a world of leisure?
GenAI is the future? Here are some saluatory tales. A short weekend read from a very good commentator on contemporary culture. #literature #journalism #reputation #AIslop www.honest-broker.com/p/how-to-des...
How to Destroy a Literary Reputation in One Move
Media companies invent a new kind of stupid
honest-broker.com
#GenAi or #humans? Research suggests human-written essays offered up to eight times more new ideas than those produced by A.I.' Another that after ChatGPT became available, their essays suddenly used diverse and colorful language, but lacked truly creative ideas.' www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/o...
Opinion | What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity
nytimes.com
Is there any universe in which this makes sense? #Research #authorship
Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 3mo ago“Units of the NIH are privately directing grantees to request permission in advance for any co-authorship with a scholar affiliated with a foreign institution, even if all the work was done in the United States.” Grantees also told to remove papers with foreign authors from progress reports.
As colleagues who know me will realise, this is further evidence of the reason why I refuse to publish with, cite articles from, or review for any journals published by MDPI. If not actually predatory, they're very close to that end of the spectrum. #publishing #journals #research
