💡 We're hiring for an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science Read more and apply before 11 October 👉️ jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

It amuses me greatly when conference organisers ask for slides a week in advance. Makes me want to attempt an “Awww honey, let me tell you a thing or two about academics…” To be clear, I will not attempt this, but I can indeed promise mine will be ready about 10 minutes before delivery

Creative & performing arts subjects received £16.8 million SPG 2024-25; £12.9 million in 2025-26; £ O million in 2026-27. The University of Creative Arts will thus lose half of its government funding this year; Art University Bournmouth 40.7%, Norwich U of Arts 40.4% and Leeds Arts U 30.3%. 1/2

Arts institutions hit hard as OfS details teaching grant cuts

University for the Creative Arts loses more than half of its funding after support for creative subjects reduced to zero

timeshighereducation.com

oh my god!!!! there's an actual answer!!!! Google Maps does hide Brighton!!!!!!! bsky.app/profile/robi...

Robin Wilde@robinwilde.me · 7d ago

I actually know the answer to this and it's slightly insane. Google pulls from Wikipedia to determine if a place is a city, town, neighbourhood, whatever. Brighton's first line describes it as a "seaside resort" so Google Maps thinks it's a neighbourhood and doesn't display it in the "city" font.

World-class UK anthropology, archaeology, area studies, chemistry, classics, English language and literature, geography, history, history of art, modern languages and philosophy, among other subjects, are also at risk, and have been for quite some time now. You don't need a telescope to see it.

Dr Dave Clements@davecl.bsky.social · last wk.

More on the UK funding cuts to science www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

Important points here for councils (looking at you #WalthamForest!) signing off major projects where businesses are 'temporarily' displaced: www.theguardian.com/cities/2026/... (hello #BlackhorseLane).

How Elephant and Castle risks becoming London’s gentrification ‘patient zero’

New £500m town centre welcomes its first tenant this month, but displaced traders say promises that they could return have been broken

theguardian.com

“What is unfolding is what climate and forest scientists have been predicting for 30 years. That as the world gets hotter and drier, we are exposing forests to more and more risk, and the old strategies of fire suppression are simply being overwhelmed.”

Canada’s Forests Will Burn and Burn

Once a wildfire starts, it can spread to an area too massive to control.

theatlantic.com

Under a Binface government, anyone who doesn’t accept human-made climate change as fact will be sent back to school, from Year 1 right the way to A Levels, to see if anything goes in the second time round. #VoteBinface

"This is a crisis for social mobility, young people’s careers, the skills our economy depends on and the opportunities available in communities across the UK" Our newest data covered by The Guardian this evening and dropping tomorrow morning to our SHAPE Observatory. shorturl.at/Qpa9Q

Humanities among degrees being ‘extinguished’ by hard-up universities

Exclusive: Experts fear rise in education ‘cold spots’ and social immobility as 4,000 academic posts lost in one year

theguardian.com

'"Dysfunctionaler and dysfunctionaler!", cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).' Well, not surprised, but rather horrified. 1/2

Levy to be charged even if student drops out, DfE confirms

Ministers decline to introduce more exemptions to new tax in its response to consultation

timeshighereducation.com

Fascinating read about why fee reform has been so hard: it’s an accountancy trick with the same rationale as PFIs but probably orders of magnitude larger. post18.co.uk/silence-of-t...

Silence of the Loans: How Loan Book Fictions Prevent Higher Education Reform

New thinking, ideas & policy solutions for post-18 education in the UK

post18.co.uk

'More than half of the free school meal pupils in inner London had entered higher education by age 19, compared with just 18.4 per cent in the south-west of England.' (Research Professional News, 8 am Playbook) Great time to cut course provision in the south-west of England, then.

Widening participation in higher education: 2026

Annual statistics on participation in higher education by pupil and study characteristics.

gov.uk

'Meanwhile, UU announced in April it needed to make savings of about £25m and would be making up to 450 staff redundant.' 2/2

Ulster University to cut up to 450 jobs

It is not clear which parts of the university, which has campuses in Belfast, Londonderry and Coleraine as well as in Qatar, will be affected.

bbc.co.uk

EThOS platform restored! 'Following restoration work, all metadata records previously available on EThOS have now been restored, along with an additional 14,000 records added since the service was taken offline' - more to come https://www.bl.uk/stories/news/ethos-records-restored

EThOS records restored

We are pleased to share that EThOS (E-Theses Online Service) is now available again following restoration work after the cyber-attack.

bl.uk

Exciting new definition of ‘financially secure footing’ in which only one of your main sources of income has a substantial real-terms cut while everything else is flat after a decade in which it was *all* being cut: www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

1000 evaluators given identical resumes & told candidate used AI. Only difference on resumes was candidate’s name: Emily vs James. Study found women using AI are evaluated as less competent than men who use AI...To evaluators, women’s AI use signaled inability, while men’s AI use signaled initiative

David Ho@davidho.bsky.social · last mo.

Women’s use of AI is perceived as a sign of incompetence, while men’s use of AI is seen as an indication of initiative. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Very useful to have advance notice of UKRI calls.

UK Research and Innovation@ukri.org · 2mo ago

We’ve launched a new space on our website to help you explore upcoming UKRI funding opportunities. The page gives a longer-term view of more than 45 opportunities opening between now and December. Explore the page: www.ukri.org/apply-for-fu...

Revealed preferences suggest this 37% drop in small boat nunbers (first two quarters) is treated as ×10-x50 times less newsworthy than a 37% increase has been. Given high salience of the issue, should broadcasters try to check/balance that instinct?

a rightmove description.. with prompts included

The much vaunted study regarding welfare magnets from immigration misestimated the elasticity of welfare benefits to immigration by a factor of 4 at least. Migrants dont decide much on basis of welfare payments. vgeloso.substack.com/p/welfare-ma... Cc. @mclem.org

Welfare Magnet and Immigration in Denmark

An AER:Insights paper shows a smaller elasticity once replicated

vgeloso.substack.com

Love getting car ads next to my news article on the fact that SOUTHERN BRITAIN IS 12° ABOVE THE SEASONAL AVERAGE. 🥵🤯

Reform UK councillors have introduced a motion to rescind King's Lynn and West Norfolk's climate emergency declaration and deprioritise decarbonisation efforts The council were going to vote on it on Thursday But the meeting has been postponed due to extreme heat

Londoners, there is a webpage for you to see where your nearest "cool spaces" are when the extreme heat hits - places with water, air-conditioning & shade. Have a look and spread the word, especially to those who may need this but might not think to look for it: apps.london.gov.uk/cool-spaces/

The study authors say that continuous exposure to such tools can cause clinicians to become "less motivated, less focused, and *less responsible* when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance". My emphasis: I think “less responsible” is the most worrying bit. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in — and they’re not good

Reliance on artificial-intelligence tools degrades the abilities of physicians and software engineers, studies show.

nature.com

Via a colleague. Posted without comment.

What new devilry is this? First, why are tech companies obsessed with LoTR? This in-school, anti-shooter drone company is apparently called ‘mithril defence’. Second, whaaaaat??? A “nest” of drones that fan out in the event of a school shooting to recon and, potentially, ram into shooters. 1/2

I don’t have strong views on the u16 social media ban but if these platforms are so harmful, why does the govt still use them for comms? Likewise, while kids (and everyone else!) should be encouraged to socialise in-person, they now have far fewer options following brutal cuts to youth services

So I've tried to take up my (mostly technical) blog again as a way of processing/reflecting upon the experience of (slowly) become better at using LLMs. This one is about trying to teach Claude how I write presentations: www.reades.com/wp/?p=458

Well that's a bit of a wake-up call: ** WARNING: connection is not using a post-quantum key exchange algorithm. ** This session may be vulnerable to "store now, decrypt later" attacks. ** The server may need to be upgraded. See openssh.com/pq.html

Not of a grilling on university finance: wonkhe.com/wonk-corner/...

The Treasury Committee gets nowhere near the real issues with student loans

Well that’s two hours I won’t be getting back.

wonkhe.com