Almost half of EU’s busiest flight routes are ‘hard or impossible’ to book on trains – report ‘Stone age’ system of booking cross-border rail tickets holding back climate action by consumers, says thinktank

‘Stone age’ system of booking cross-border rail tickets holding back climate action by consumers, says thinktank

I agree with you, but also have strong memories of talking to undergrads who enthused about the new buildings. It’s unclear to me if a university could really have opted out of that destructive race once it started.

Dot matrix printout.

Can I just say how simultaneously amusing and heartwarming it is to get an invoice printed on a dot matrix printer with tear-off strips? My main interest here is which part of the process is still tied to 1986/7.

A far more elegant and entertaining take from @wonkhe.bsky.social on the things going through my head as I read the HEPI paper.

Geography and computers: Past, present, and future The discipline of Geography has long been intertwined with the use of computers. This close interaction is likely to increase with the embeddedness of computers and concomitant growth of spatially re...

When @darribas.bsky.social and I did our review for #GeographyCompass (compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...) I was struck by how much had changed methodologically, but how little had changed theoretically. Most of what we do today seems to have been anticipated by about 1970/75.

Why the English stopped opening the windows On 'House Burping'

Fascinating bit of history and demonstration of path dependency alongside contemporary public and energy policy: open.substack.com/pub/paradise...

CASA’s (shared) courtyard garden.

But the (shared) lunch space is the highlight!

Our old space was falling down so a definite step up!

CASA’s new office space.

And @casaucl.bsky.social has a new home! Goodbye 90TCR and hello Maple House

REF managers ‘could be freed up for creative things’ with AI - Research Professional News AI tools could help enhance quality of research by reducing REF workload, says Jisc director

Maybe if AI is the answer then you’re asking the wrong question? www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-i... REF is ultimately storytelling masquerading as metrics. I have no issues with ‘tell me a story about your unit’ but pretending it’s quantifiable+objective is absurd.

'“I really worry that if we don’t have tools to help people do the REF, then it’s going to become even more burdensome and cost even more money,” Lawrie Phipps...Jisc’s director of policy development, told Research Professional News.'

Or just slim REF down and state the rules at the outset? 1/3

Congratulations to CASA Professor Neave O'Clery for her appointment to the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) Vienna as external faculty!

Home to many CASA alumni, the independent non-profit research institute researches global systems by analysing large-scale data & complex networks.

https://csh.ac.at/

Honestly, only thing worse than reimbursing academic visitors to the UK, is trying to claim money from a US university. Especially when you discover that #starlingbank only accepts transfers in GBP/EUR on personal accounts. Entire morning wasted. Now have #Revolut /ht @darribas.bsky.social

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years, that gave us this atrocity

Powerful piece about how our obsession with ‘charismatic’ AI obscures (and breaks) institutional decisions and accountability www.theguardian.com/news/2026/ma...

Honestly, right now I’m not advising anyone to pursue a career in academia. I’m working with amazing PhDs and post-docs who would have outstanding academic careers at any other time, but all we talk about is their Plan B.

Our results are nuanced and both validate fears of existing low-income communities, while also showing benefits of new supply. I'll reiterate we support supply reforms, HOWEVER we are wary of when market supply is pitched AGAINST affordable housing and tenant protections when it's both/and (10/end)

Huzzah! Tomorrow's Sewage Spill Day when the full stats are released on how much was discharged into rivers, lakes and coasts last year. To whet your appetites I’ve mapped the 2025 spills at outfalls affecting bathing waters.
Here are the top 10 worst offenders in reverse order:

Bird's-eye view of London seen in 280-year-old map John Rocque's map provided a view of the capital that was unprecedented in its detail.

Mapmaking 18thC style: ‘A chain, 66ft long, a surveyor's wheel and a notebook, and they would go over, for example, a field, and they would measure it on all its sides, and they would draw that as accurately as they could’
Amazing London map to be reprinted 280 years on
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This made for good reading — whether you agree with all the points or not, it prompted a lot of useful chat on the departmental slack channel.

GitHub - virtualarchitectures/MapThing: Processing Library to support mapping and projection (including SHP, GPX, and CSV files) Processing Library to support mapping and projection (including SHP, GPX, and CSV files) - virtualarchitectures/MapThing

MapThing lives again! /ht to Ollie Dawkins for updating my old #Processing library for the modern JRE/geo-stack: github.com/virtualarchi...

The Enshitification of GIS Part One: How Proprietary Ecosystems, Cloud Lock-In, and Feature Glut Threaten Geospatial Innovation

Although Copernicus gets a mention in the comments, this feels like more of a US challenge than a global one: open.substack.com/pub/reimagin... Though, TBF, the ONS geo-portal is pretty poor (god forbid useable bookmarks!) and operated by… well, you can guess.

A presentation at AAG 2026

@casaucl.bsky.social’s Thomas Murat kicking things off in his #AAG26 session about simulating bus-mobility.

Why does #ClarityNoGo require my passport to make a booking but then not actually pass on my details to the airline??? I only discovered this 16 hours before my flight to #AAG26

Shoutout to MHCLG whose time series data on net additions changes header format *twice* in the same spreadsheet and includes new lines in attribute names.

Full house for today’s UCL Economic Geography Network seminar with Zara Shabrina - a superb talk on modelling Jakarta as a sinking city

Full house for today’s UCL Economic Geography Network seminar with Zara Shabrina - a superb talk on modelling Jakarta as a sinking city

I run a university - we're so much more than 'degree factories', here's what we do Access to higher education, made possible through student loans, is the difference between opportunity and exclusion

Nice piece on the contribution that HE makes to all things local: inews.co.uk/opinion/i-ru...

Oh, could use one of these for the allotment! *

* If allowed by council regs, alas.

I’m not sure government has any idea how impractical this is: no research intensive university could adopt it w/o mutiny, they haven’t actually asked students if they want it, so I just can’t see how it works. And that’s without even looking @ the much bigger question you ask here!

'It had been expected that many universities...would encourage more of their academics to focus on teaching, with research commitments, particularly at less prestigious universities, under threat.'

But 'the number of teaching-only roles fell by 3,555 across the sector last year'. 3/3

The MRes boom isn’t just an issue of visa policy Rumours of Home Office action on the dramatic growth in research master’s provision continue to swirl. Yet for Michael Salmon there’s a wider question about where responsibility lies for postgraduate-...

'The industrial strategy is heavily concerned with the UK workforce’s readiness to engage at the cutting-edge of science and technology. Skills England wants provision up to level 8 to be considered as part of local skills needs.' 1/2