"The Home Office has identified a new problem with migrant care workers. The people presented as a burden on Britain because they earn too little have become so indispensable that they must be prevented from finding a better or higher-paid job." ukandeu.ac.uk/unaffordable...

Unaffordable? No, indispensable. The government tries to move the goalposts for care workers - UK in a changing Europe

Jonathan Portes argues that the government has flipped from treating migrant care workers as a problem to presenting them as a necessity,...

ukandeu.ac.uk

University of Nottingham, right now, is cutting 560 jobs. Do we need to rebrand universities as very large, very clean, land-based oil rigs to get government support?

Leo Hickman@leohickman.carbonbrief.org · 4d ago

From the govt's press release: "The developer estimates that Jackdaw will create 27 new direct jobs and safeguard 273 existing jobs that would otherwise be lost." Odd that so much is made about this being good for jobs. Your nearest out-of-town supermarket likely generates more jobs.

oh no

My overheads are around 160%. So for every £10k that goes to cover my salary etc, the university charges £16k for overheads. For that I am given a hot desk in an open plan. I have an email account that vanishes emails. I use my own personal laptop. I often wonder how much goes on 'leadership'?

Roope Kaaronen@roopekaaronen.net · 4d ago

From a researcher's perspective, it's also absurd. The last time I got external funding I was "paying" more than my salary in overheads. Yet: I did not always have a working space, my PC sucked so I used my own, the library could not afford my books. I literally didn't even *need* the university.

Can anyone recommend exam+test bank software that supports export to Word/PDF/Blackboard, isn't "AI"-laden, and is easy-to-use for non-techies? (I use R/exams but need a GUI recommendation).

This looks like a great event at Cardiff next summer:

Imagining Diverse Grief

Grief matters to everyone. It is a fundamental, universal experience in response to bereavement and non-bereavement losses, but it affects different people in different ways. Although philosophical re...

philevents.org

So we fly a pride flag in our front yard in a very conservative neighborhood and it’s been there for the last few years. Someone put this in our mailbox and my goodness…

End of an era!

A must-share every single time it comes up.

Odd This Day@oddthisday.bsky.social · 2w ago

There’s really only one way to mark the 99th anniversary of Roger Moore’s birth

subtle signs indeed, contempt and disgust

a haunted house where every room has to be booked through your institutional room booking system

Mar Hicks@histoftech.bsky.social · 2w ago

A haunted house where every room has several colleagues to whom you owe work, or email responses

finally some good news

Our Solar System Is Terminally Unstable and Will Be Completely Destroyed, Study Finds

The estimated lifespan of the outer solar system has been downgraded from 100 billion years to just a few billion years, according to a study that probed “terminal instability” during the Sun’s death.

404media.co

My spooky girls are ready for halloween #pigeonsky #doves #birds

So they asked me to delete half the deck: •screenshots of scientific articles •George Floyd’s autopsy report •med students holding signs for “White Coats for Black Lives” •a cartoonish image of Musk lest we offend the trillionaire •Butler quote: “choose your leaders with wisdom & forethought” ETC

Little Gator sitting in the water near mama catching a little sun.🐊

This salamander's mind has been completely blown by what they have seen above the water. They will try to describe it to their friends and fail. Their life is forever altered.

The One True Kat@theonetruekat.bsky.social · 2w ago

Good Morning from this muppet of a Cali Tiger Salamander (who was released back to the vernal pool, shortly after being shown off to the general public for a few minutes). Chonk.

One thing I find endlessly funny about the rise of AI is that it has revealed that there is a large number of people who believe that the reason they wrote essays at school or university is their teachers were desperately waiting for them to provide a definite answer to “Lear: what’s up with him?”

Dr Dean Burnett@drdeanburnett.bsky.social · 3w ago

"By using AI, tasks like essays that used to take hours can be completed in minutes!" Sure, like how if I arrive at the gym and immediately go for a shower, my workout is done in record time. And if I throw my sandwiches straight in the bin, I can finish my lunch in under 10 seconds.

I have been promoted to Professor, which means I can spend more time on my true passion: ancient tomes and contributing to the rise of the Old Ones

Anyone seen Brian Cox’s Emergence tour, and would you recommend it?

webrarian is a new R package. It turns a folder of R scripts and data into a static website where R runs in the visitor's browser, with no compute server and nothing to install. blog.thecoatlessprofessor.com/posts/introd... #rstats #webr #webassembly

In which the author disagrees with Mr Wolfers and discusses what it *really* looks like when you sit down and have a conversation with your ideological opponents. When you do not have the protections of the ivory tower it turns out to be a much darker experience than he imagines it to be.

Dining with wolves – Notes from a data witch

Polite discussion over lunch is not a reasonable option when you are on the menu

blog.djnavarro.net

if only there were a story in the Gospel where Jesus direct addressed executing people with stones

Rich Raho@richraho.bsky.social · 3w ago

The Keynote Speaker at the Annual National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in March, folks.

Teaching a research skills module this semester, and just set an exercise cleaning and recoding a hypothetical free text survey response for a demographic question. It's kind of evil (that is, realistic)

It is official: I am old. I bought this notebook weeks ago b/c I liked the colors, and someone today asked me "Are you a Blackpink fan?" to which I answered "I don't know what you're talking about". Apparently it is a K-pop thing.

the stupidest timeline

Justin Hendrix@justinhendrix.bsky.social · 4w ago

United States President Donald Trump issues executive order instructing federal government agencies to "use the terms 'Super Intelligence' and 'SI' in place of 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'AI' and will not acknowledge the usage of 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'AI' in any applicable setting."

To the original argument, Solving complex problems does not require thinking or understanding. It’s not a dichotomy whereby either humans have souls or whatever. It’s entirely possible that, say, thought as we experience it is a spandrel. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandre...

Thoughts and prayers for research data managers everywhere. You are not alone. We will get through this together techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/excelbl...

Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell | Microsoft Community Hub

Lists, arrays in cells, and nested arrays introduce new ways to store and organize related information, helping you keep data together without sacrificing...

techcommunity.microsoft.com