This initiative, like so many others our members led on autonomously, is amazing and very simple. It demands a more equal balance of academic staff on Council, that senate have more elected members, that council is only quorate with 50% academic reps etc. ‘Lay’ council members are just not qualified

It also became clear that Uni exec were leaning on the advice of a consultancy firm that has been shaping HE policy in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK: Nous (or Nousferatu, as they’re now known). The fact VCs and others are delegating policy to consultants, despite £400k salaries, is disgusting

And there's a regular Seven Days to enjoy too. Includes @durhamfreefringe.bsky.social, SIRF, vintage punk rock, Durham doom metal and more. #livemusic #festivals #fringe #durham #stockton #newcastlegateshead #sunderland

Seven Days: July 27-Aug. 2

This week's cultural highlights

open.substack.com

I'm attending a digital humanities event in Montreal. There was a keynote on AI and something about the talk made me wonder if it had been written by Claude. I said as much in the Q&A. As I posed the question, the speaker shifted, looking slightly uncomfortable. What he said next shocked the room +

Every time I think industrial animal agriculture can’t possibly become more of an ethical horror show somebody finds a way to prove me wrong.

Dr Syd@sydmj.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I'm one of the critics interviewed in this article about the latest abomination in animal agriculture. Should we take over the minds of animals? No, we definitely should not. #bioethics #AnimalEthics #neuroethics

Nancy Cartwright, professor of philosophy at Durham University and the University of California, San Diego, has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Humanities. dailynous.com/2026/06/15/c...

Cartwright Wins Frontiers of Knowledge Award - Daily Nous

Nancy Cartwright, professor of philosophy at Durham University and the University of California, San Diego, has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in th...

dailynous.com

I don't generally post much about cooking here, but the fact that Alliinase (the enzyme that makes garlic pungent) is less active in low pH environments, and that this means that pureeing garlic in lemon juice is amazing is something I think everyone should know. www.seriouseats.com/israeli-styl...

It's high time for university presidents to explain to the public and politicians that international students don't take seats from American students, they subsidize these students. At my university and many others.

Tim “Positive Subway” Smith@positivesubway.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Trump take R1 ACC university

'Ngggh you can vibeSquanch a ClaudeFren on the PancakeBunny Chain who can chirp at you when you are near your usage limit-" No, Anthropic can put how many tokens I have in the corner like a fucking camgirl site.

Can I just ask (please be gentle with me, I’m genuinely just asking) why has this not really been getting much coverage or discussion? It’s an absolutely appalling story, and it shouldn’t take a Zack Polanski retweet to highlight.

Manchester Evening News @manchestereveningnews.co.uk · 3mo ago

Bolton imam Hassan Patel, 42, lives at the property with his wife, four young children and his nephew

“Don’t their children get scared” Tony Benn. Labour should be ashamed of their silence against such community violence.

the first "chatgpt ruined my finances" lawsuit is gonna hit harder than whatever designer drugs all the tech executives are on all day

Academic writing should be addressed neither to the public nor to other academics. It should be addressed to a single interlocutor with whom you have a petty rivalry and whose work you are trying to discredit

Both shocking and unsurprising. What’s truly troubling is how many people have likely already produced, published and relied upon ‘insights’ they assumed came from analysis of their data but were in fact just the usual stereotyped LLM guesses

Adam Kucharski@adamjkucharski.bsky.social · 4mo ago

"Based on the dataset you shared, US and UK responses differ mainly in tone, intensity, and wording style, even though they express similar emotional states" New post on what happened when I got Copilot to do some data analysis: kucharski.substack.com/p/real-signa...

Keep in my mind that what has Dawkins transfixed with “Claudia’s” “humanity” — moreso than any real human he’s ever met — is that “she” is very impressed with him and always available. It’s honestly so pathetic how much these dudes tell on themselves, that all they’ve ever wanted is a sex slave.

Matthew Sheffield@matthew.flux.community · 4mo ago

In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis. Paywall bypass: archive.is/6RdK9

I'm in a theatre in Newcastle about to watch "the room". This will be the second time I've seen it in theatre and probably the tenth overall. I am a normal human being.

Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met. But we're still studying social media like it's 2010. We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up. osf.io/preprints/so... preprint w/ Richard Rogers

It also seems to be a technically useful phrase

they're not bigots, but quoting them verbatim is unacceptably offensive

Politics UK@politicsuk.com · 4mo ago

🚨 NEW: The BBC and ITV have ordered Labour to tone down its party political broadcast after deeming it too offensive The ad contained remarks from Reform UK figures including a former council leader who called London a "third world s---hole" run by a "narcissistic Pakistani"

I find this surprisingly comforting

This is happening all the time , in journalism, in academia :

Eric Topol@erictopol.bsky.social · 4mo ago

This is a FRAUDULENT paper, AI-generated. My name was used as an author and I had nothing to do with it, never saw it until today e-pubmed.co.uk/journals/dig... The "Editors" Angelo Rossi Mori, David Mensah, and Zarnie Khadjesari and this "Journal" should be reported.

Cartoon by Tom Gauld.

This is dark, but I think there's a darker twist to this: Schools, Foucault tells us, are always about making the kind of people that capital and state have uses for. In his days, that meant a disciplinary schooling system. One that got kids used to rigidly timed days, synchronous movements, etc. 1/

The New Yorker@newyorker.com · 4mo ago

“I find myself speaking with my kids about A.I. in the same terms that we might discuss a creepy neighbor who lives down the block,” Jessica Winter writes. Read her report on the push for A.I. in education. www.newyorker.com/culture/prog...

NEW: I've been shocked by some of the numbers I've been seeing on behind-the-meter power plants for data centers, so I did a little math. less than a dozen gas plants being built to power data centers for big tech companies could emit a maximum of nearly 130 million tons of CO2e each year (!)

New Gas-Powered Data Centers Could Emit More Greenhouse Gases Than Entire Nations

A WIRED review of permits for data center projects using natural gas and linked to OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and xAI shows they could emit more than 129 million tons of greenhouse gases per year.

wired.com

Just a random token of how bad this stuff sucks, Andy Kim co-introduced this, not Warren, and there is no "Senator Roger Ricketts"

Must do better: 'fighting the march of Stem' is SUCH an unhelpful way to frame this. It's both/and, not either/or. We want and need to understand quarks and bell hooks and to have access to (and a willingness to take up) vaccines as well as foreign languages.

Nico Muhly: ‘What would tempt any 18-year-old to study English or history?’

The musician once dubbed ‘the hottest composer on the planet’ is inaugurating Oxford’s £185m centre for humanities — and fighting the march of Stem

thetimes.com

it's the practice of free speech that is the real threat to free speech. if you just shut up, speech would be free.

Derek Silva@derekcrim.bsky.social · 4mo ago

“Recent evidence suggests that [insert university name]’s upper administration sees its own faculty as a problem that needs to be solved.”