I'm looking into this as part of my book on the history of the British summer. No answers yet so will follow this thread with interest and let you know what I find out
Posts by Chris Pearson
We're hiring! 🌿 The Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger invites applications for a 3-year postdoc in Environmental History. See thread for more details. #envhist #envhum
Congratulations!!
My colleagues Annie Tindley and @drhick.bsky.social have funding 📣 for a Collaborative Doctoral Award with Museums Northern Ireland for a PhD on "Reawakening the Living Landscape: Integrating Heritage and Sustainability at the Ulster Folk Museum" - www.ncl.ac.uk/hca/study/hi... Deadline 20 April.
If you know any Medical Humanities PhDs, Uppsala CMH is offering a visiting researcher scheme during the autumn (up to 6 months from August 2026). International applicants (i.e. outside of Sweden) most definitely welcome.
As they say in Swedish: sprid gärna!
www.uu.se/centrum/medi...
This is such an exciting project! Do pass on to anyone you think might be interested.
Brilliant news. Congratulations!!
Congratulations!😍
Okay, this is quite outstanding from Bedford Council.
I was speaking to some Reform voters and when I told them about my job they "joked" about locking me up 🤨
more courage than every sniveling university president in the US combined
Our @meltingmetropolis.bsky.social article on keeping cool in summertime Paris, New York and London is free to read in the Journal of Social History. doi.org/10.1093/jsh/...
I'm sorry. As a technology writer, I'm supposed to be telling you that this bet will some day pay off, because one day we will have shoveled so many words into the word-guessing program that it wakes up and learns how to actually do the jobs it is failing spectacularly at today. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, one of them will give birth to a locomotive. Humans possess intelligence, and machines do not. The difference between a human and a word-guessing program isn't how many words the human knows. I'm sorry. I know that when we talk about "digital sovereignty," we're obliged to talk about how we can build more data-centres that we can fill up with money-losing chips from American silicon monopolists in the hopes of destroying as many jobs as possible while blowing through our clean energy goals and enshittifying as much of our potable water as possible.
Córy Doctorow with another verbal bullseye: pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/n...
Reposting this with alt text.
Delete your Twitter. Now.
It's been a pleasure being on the great organising team at York and Northumbria for next year's NEHN meeting - a collaborative worksop on the many histories of 'unwanted life'. Do see the CFP below, and send in a submission if it appeals!
congratulations - looks great!
📣 Applications are open for our 2026-27 Medical Humanities in Practice Research Fellowship scheme! The scheme supports professionals and researchers from health or voluntary and community sectors to develop research within the medical humanities.
Apply by 30 Jan:
Thanks so much Sam 🐶
Collared is out in paperback today! 🐶🐾
Hey authors, the official list of Anthropic works is available for searching.
secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/lookup
Hey there. Today we launch @g-ehr.bsky.social - an open-access, digital publication of the American Society for Environmental History and dedicated to publishing work that explores topics connecting the environmental present with its past. Let me know if you have questions! @aseh.bsky.social
This Climate Week NYC, read about the work of our NYC team Kara Schlichting and Daniel Cumming on the Gotham Centre blog: www.gothamcenter.org/blog/melting...
[with brilliant photos from our Urban Archive collaboration]
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.
Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).
Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.
Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Who is in charge of tackling extreme heat in New York City? Read about @queenscollegecuny.bsky.social intern Selassie Mawuko's reseach on our blog:
www.meltingmetropolis.com/teamblog/nyc...
#nyc #climatechange #heatwave
If you would like to review my book for a publication, get in touch! The book is a history of wind energy and I’m trying to get it out to as wide an audience as possible.
manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526182968/
A 2 year postdoc research assistant job to work on the early institutional history of Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, leading to the writing of a report to contribute to broader decolonising and reparative efforts. Around 40k, deadline 5 Sept 25.
app.vacancy-filler.co.uk/salescrm/Car...
bar chart showing deaths associate with extreme heat with and without climate change in 12 European cities
About 1500 of the approx. 2300 people that will have lost their lives across 12 European cities last week would still live, if it wasn't for our burning of oil, coal and gas. If we care about the right to life, we need to stop burning fossil fuels. www.imperial.ac.uk/grantham/pub...
Children escape the heat of the East Side New York by using fire hydrant as a shower bath
Op-ed piece from team members Kara Schlichting and Selassie Mawuko:
Does NYC need a heat czar?
citylimits.org/opinion-its-...
TLDR: yes!
Essential reading in @citylimitsnews.bsky.social given the high the temperatures #NYC has experienced this summer
#heatwave
📷 LoC