Man, I remember those days. Scoring some Lyapunov exponents off a dodgy geezer in a pub; gathering at midnight on a disused airfield, five thousand strong, to bifurcate and bifurcate until the feigenbaums kicked in... It sounds so sordid now, but we were young and it was beautiful.

Several REF cycles in UKHE taught me this lesson. Once the submission has made everything is up for renegotiation. The REF protects no-one.

We are advertising a nice postdoctoral position at the Terrestrial Ecology Research Group at TUM. Ideally, we seek someone that focuses on land use change effects (particularly urbanization). Solid knowledge on the natural history of specific taxonomic groups (e.g. birds or insects) is desirable.

Years ago we were getting our house repainted. The decorator rolled his eyes when he saw the paint selection. "Everyone who works at the university chooses that colour" he said. "We call it academic beige."

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

Faculty Defect From Texas Publics, Citing Censorship Fed up with the state’s censoring of Plato, Joan of Arc and Romeo and Juliet, humanities professors are leaving Texas public institutions in pursuit of academic freedom.

'Texas A&M philosophy professor Martin Peterson is leaving the university after administrators told him in January that he couldn’t teach Plato’s Symposium in his philosophy class; they said the ancient Greek philosopher’s work violated the system’s restrictions on gender and sexuality content.' 1/3

The kampung air (water villages) are easily fetishised by visitors to Malaysia who see their sanitised versions. Most are ramshackle and act as unregulated spaces. A lot gets hidden in them because it can very quickly move offshore.

Fire destroys 1,000 ‘stilt’ homes in Malaysia’s Sabah, displacing thousands Blaze struck a ‘water village’ that is home to some of Malaysia’s poorest residents

For three years I lived only a short boat ride from Kampung Bahagia. The residents are not only poor, they're often migrants or lack documents, which makes them doubly vulnerable because it's impossible to access state support.

Places in Britain ranked by the shitness of their regional insults SHEFFIELD University has carried out a study of regional insults, most of which are stupid and make you sound like a halfwit yokel. Here is a sample in order of increasing shitness.

As the ultimate compliment it's even been covered by @the-daily-mash.bsky.social

Death Grips - Exmilitary [Full Mixtape] YouTube video by An0rhu

It's that time of year again. Share your best music for marking to. Right now I'm on this.

A typical "workshop" in UKHE has as its output a flipchart (or shonky online equivalent) with some phrases on it, a conviction among some participants that they have been Listened To, and a sense among others that they've spent three hours playing word association and waiting for death.

One for the Up The Arse Corner in @vizcomic.bsky.social

I had this exact conversation with a postgrad recently. It is an esteem indicator: you're now notable enough to attract academic spam. Congratulations.

Top panel: Happy Thor, 'Invited to contribute to a special issue' Bottom panel: Sad Thor, 'In an MDPI journal'.

how am i supposed to get work done when i can't waste time on here

a man says " i thought i sent you to birmingham " in front of a building ALT: a man says " i thought i sent you to birmingham " in front of a building

It's a blatant rip-off of Peter Capaldi's Aldis though.

really enjoying "blake morrison's bleak morrisons", the new podcast where poet & national treasure blake morrison visits increasingly foreboding branches of the popular supermarket

Snow was general all over Stroud. It was falling upon the Tesco Express from its toilet seats and, further westwards, falling into its car park. It was falling too upon the chained trolleys. It lay drifted upon the dashboard of James Joyce's BMW . . .

All the people here moaning about Bluesky downtime and making snarky comments: you get the service you pay for. Remember what happened to the Other Place.

Come and join our team! With an application deadline in 1 week, we're hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Ecology in the Department of Biology at University of Windsor: efhc.fa.ca2.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...
@ibiouwindsor.bsky.social

I've even lived with a few of them. "Why is there a dead badger in the freezer?" The reply: "Trust me, it's better in the freezer than out of it." And so that's where it remained.

OK, there are lots of reasons to dislike RFK, but I've worked with plenty of zoologists who would consider this to be perfectly normal behaviour.

A graph showing the connection between GDP and infrastructure in the EU. Ireland a massive outlier - one of the richest, with the worst infrastructure

This graph should be on the front of newspapers.

From Sinead O'Sullivan: www.butthistime.com/p/mind-the-gap

When career anxiety becomes gameplay: lessons from China’s ‘young-faculty simulator’ A popular online game simulates life as an academic — and throws the challenges of being an early-career researcher into sharp relief.

How can you gamify academic life it's not as though our work can be trivially reduced to a series of performance metrics and scoreboards ha ha ha

It pains me to say it but he was actually doing a decent job there. There's plenty to criticise him for but I won't be celebrating his departure.

I'm not sure where you're based but here in the EU the central research budgets have to compete with increased defence spending. We can shout all we like but the constraints are only increasing. Personally I think we need to shift institutional incentives and expectations instead.

True, but I've not seen many two-pagers. Most have been 5--6 pages for the research proposal, which isn't a trivial effort to prepare.

I'm complaining as one of the lucky ones: I already have funded work, time to write more proposals, and limited consequences for failure. For ECRs it's brutal and there's no point in pretending that research is a meritocracy.

COST Open Call attracts record submissions - COST Last week we closed our Open Call (oc-2025-1) for new COST Action proposals. Discover an interim analysis of our latest call.

Success rates in the last call for COST Actions will be <7%. MSCA Doctoral Networks are <9%. Another call I submitted to last year had a rate <5%. So much of our time and expertise is spent writing lottery tickets. www.cost.eu/oc-2025-1-in...

The new Master's programme in Ecological Forecasting at UBT and JMU Würzburg is looking to employ six lecturers and a program coordinator!

For more information, please contact Prof. Steven Higgins (www.pfloek.uni-bayreuth.de/en/team/higg...).