Faintly threatening message on my tea this morning.

Guess what? The sign-up page for the next @aat-transcribes.bsky.social event is ready! Next week, I'm hosting a free workshop on Epistemic Injustice, Oppression & Ignorance for Social Researchers. Come hang out! funnels.academicaudiotranscription.com/august-works...

Misread this as 'a house haunted by Benedict Cumberbatch' so frankly relieved that it was just a ghost

Ray Newman@raynewman.bsky.social · 16h ago

“All the happiness in the world went away when she was there and she doesn't look at me in a nice way, I think she doesn't want me in there.” www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Medicine. Medicine has grown by leaps and bounds. You cannot introduce vaccines that crater cancer rates, cure AIDS, and cure sickle cell, and then tell me things have only gotten worse. Also: Food. To a HUGE degree. I eat what I once considered rare treats every day, now.

Constantine@ajaxsinger.bsky.social · 20h ago

Food, man. Food is so much better than it was in 1986. All of it. Poor-people food, restaurant food, fresh food, frozen food. Food is just a hell of a lot better.

"History involves sorting and organizing hundreds of thousands of facts" I remain astounded by how loud and wrong people are about what history actually is.

Brilliant letter from Stuart Thompson to Jeremy Clarkson about his comments that benefit claimants should write weekly thank you letters to tax payers detailing how they spend their benefits each week.

anecdotally, everyone I know who has managed to get an ADHD diagnosis - all of whom have had to scrape the money together to go privately because the waiting list is 18 years or some shit - have found the diagnosis and the meds generally life-changing. huge improvements in quality of life

SMD@anothersmd.bsky.social · 3d ago

can't stress enough this assault on neurodivergent people is fucking grim because of how difficult it is to get any kind of support if you're an adult. and that's not even including the hoops you have to jump through and frankly how western-centric it all is.

Gentle reminder for all that if you have books that are water damaged, crawling with bugs, physically broken, or giving you travel advice for a country that hasn’t existed since the 90s, you can safely throw them away, you don’t need to make them your local thrift store’s problem.

Definitely the case here. In two weeks we find which 9 of 12 in my group will be gone. The other 3 will then have a month to prepare and find hourly-paid replacements for all the classes across two degrees. And supervise 25 PhDs. Plus admin and pastoral care and research. Management doesn’t care.

Glen O'Hara@gsoh31.bsky.social · 4d ago

If you're arriving at uni this autumn, or maybe dropping your kids, remember that there could be a ghostly phalanx of absent redundant staff, lost modules and degraded degrees making it a very unhappy place. It may *look* the same, but it won't *be* the same. www.ft.com/content/e5b0...

In late 2023, the Society spent a day with Hertfordshire’s historians. We saw the quality, creativity and distinctiveness of teaching, research and engagement. We were told by a (now departed) senior manager that History was ‘a portfolio the university will guard very carefully’. bit.ly/4hLediN

Glen O'Hara@gsoh31.bsky.social · 3d ago

So it's farewell to the History subject area at the University of Hertfordshire, not the first nor the last to go. One of the best departments in the country, just extinguished like a snap of the fingers. Think of the waste. (1/2)

Once again I am compelled to remind everyone that criticism is a discipline with its own set of discrete skills and that people who do other kinds of writing are no more likely to be good at their first attempt than a guitar player who decides he’s good at the piano for some reason

Lindsay Beyerstein@beyerstein.bsky.social · 3d ago

None of these people are tricksters, they are only liars. "We have been living in an age of tricksters. Musk, President Trump, Tucker Carlson, Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes — the grammar of the modern right is tricksy."

Damn... 300% higher yields for peppers 200% for tomatoes. 65% lower water use for jalapenos. #agsky #agrivoltaics ,🌱🌞🔌..

hoergen@hoergen.bsky.social · 4d ago

*American farmers slid solar panels over 62,000 acres of farmland, and the biggest payoff had almost nothing to do with electricity* #Erneuerbare #Renewable #Solar #Photovoltaik energiesmedia.com/solar-panels…

August as an academic

We've been here so, so many times with this 'technical skills' argument, and the divide between lovely practical trades and silly old 'education'. For hundreds of years! And every time it proved to be... a load of old rope. Let's see this time shall we. theskillsagenda.substack.com/p/ministers-...

Ministers should first learn the history of British technical education

Andy Burnham is not the only newly minted PM to promise an overhaul of English technical education which all his predecessors have tried but failed over decades.

theskillsagenda.substack.com

someone PLEASE make Nightrider 2030 where the ai is stupid as fuck like real ai is and it gets micheal in all sorts of trouble. i would make it appointment tv

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 5d ago

What if KITT were wrong all the time and also gave all its insights about you to the government.

You might not have been expecting a parliamentary procedure/soccer crossover discussion this morning, but:

John Bull@garius.bsky.social · 6d ago

also weird but necessary sidebar to the uefa/fifa drama. in UK/International English, 'tabling' something means proposing it. so being 'on the table' means it is actively being considered. for some weird reason US English reverses the meaning. Uefa are talking in the UK, not US sense, here.

Trains are on the blink and we're stuck here for the next twenty minutes. Luckily I can get on with w- oh no, my employer doesn't consider my phone new enough to read my emails. Guess I just have to read my book instead 😈

If you're surprised Channel 4 is airing this, let it be known that they have, in their history, aired three films denying climate change.

Scott Bryan@scottygb.bsky.social · last wk.

Channel 4 has announced documentary “The Great ADHD Myth?” It “seeks to determine whether ADHD is a genuine neurodevelopmental disorder, or a social construct.”

Repeat after me: “social” is not a synonym for “not real”. This is dangerous (and false) framing and channel 4 should have done better.

Scott Bryan@scottygb.bsky.social · last wk.

Channel 4 has announced documentary “The Great ADHD Myth?” It “seeks to determine whether ADHD is a genuine neurodevelopmental disorder, or a social construct.”

PwC (like, among others, KPMG before it) found to be producing 'thought leadership' advice promoting agentic AI use that is larded with AI hallucinations. Worth bearing in mind if they are, for example, one of your university's consultants.

PwC published ‘thought leadership’ reports marred by AI hallucinations

Big Four consultant is latest firm found to have produced slapdash work while marketing expertise on the technology

ft.com

The fury with which disabled people react to "everyone is faking their alleged disabilities and even if they aren't, the accommodations for it are unfair and too easy to get" is because from our end, it's *not* easy to get them, and they often don't actually do what we need them to do.

The day I will pay attention to politicians guffing about "parity of esteem" is the day one of their children goes to an FE college.

If you're a freelancer working in heritage, you're going to want to come to this! We're setting up a branch of @prospectunion.bsky.social, and this is our first meeting, open to members and non-members. This Thursday, online from 12-1. Register for a link: forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/respon...

Not to mention that many built environment professionals have university degrees but still often wear hard hats

Chris Millard@chrismillard83.bsky.social · last wk.

there’s a bit of bait and switch going on here wirh “value hard hat as much as graduation cap” (fine) which then in the details becomes “reorient post-14 education to the needs of local businesses” which is not the same, or even close to the same

In 2018 I read about universities, libraries, and humanities councils in New England convening veterans to discuss The Odyssey to help them make sense of their own experiences and was blown away by what a good idea it was. Funding the humanities = good. www.concordmonitor.com/2018/03/14/h...

‘Homer can help you’: War veterans use ancient epics to cope - Concord Monitor

The trials of Odysseus are really not that different from the struggles of those learning to readjust after wars of today, modern veterans are finding.A small group of military veterans has been meeti...

concordmonitor.com

and falling birth rates, we need to make the most of people's curiosity and talents and interests. And I think there is a weird Labour fatalism that "business knows best", but businesses are made of *people*, and without cultivating people there'll be no business

You can move less than 100 miles and be in a completely diff jobs and skills environment.'The idea that a young person's interests, aptitudes and talents need to be moulded to fit their locality is A grade provincialism. I mean, sure, some people don't ever move but esp given limited immigration

One of the things I find odd about UK skills and jobs policies over the last 10 years is the idea that - for young people - place is destiny. It's like we've taken the Brexit memo and double stamped it into meaning you need to stay put to be a success. The geographical footprint of the UK is *tiny*

If this had been policy in the 70s (as it partly was), towns would have produced lots of mining engineers & metallurgists just before pits & steelworks closed. As the yanks say, you should skate to where the puck's going, not to where it is. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Burnham to tell schools in England to adapt teaching to local business needs

PM wants curriculums for students aged 14 and above to be more responsive to local jobs market

theguardian.com

As a PhD student I was on a panel about paratexts in early Am lit with a couple other grad students (didn't know each other, someone else had organized the panel). During the q & a a senior scholar declared paratexts a stupid concept, Genette a fool, and demanded we justify the panel's existence.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1.bsky.social · last wk.

As a Phd student, I used to get so nervous about presenting because of how vicious people are that I used to need medication to calm down. We are so incredibly unnecessarily mean.