I believe the frame that minoritized scholars are helped by unethical tech is a trap to avoid. We better fight the system of inequities ourselves & not buy into industry frames trying to sell their discriminatory, polluting, and exploitative tech as "inclusion".
bsky.app/profile/iris...
You know what doesn't get its support unceremoniously pulled by a tech company? Fuckin' books, brother
Apu berating Skinner for "Billy and the Clone-o-saurus": "Then you give it a name that nobody could possibly like. Didn't you think this through?"
If you wrote a satirical novel about the Melbourne media and called one of your characters Chip Le Grand, your editor would ring you up and berate you for hours about how you possibly could be so stupid to come up with a name like that
Ok, so I knew it would be an anger-inducing and triggering watch, but OMG. Bravo ABC Four Corners, and the brave souls that spoke out on the show. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03...
Mmm. Freshly mopped floors feel so nice.
There's something particularly icky about being told I should have a 'playbook' for student engagement in higher education. It's not a game to improve statistics. If we don't recognise students as individual humans, it's not unsurprising they see HE as a customer service.
I saw a quote somewhere saying that it’s pointless dicking around with pedagogical strategies if you’re not going to address labour issues. That’s my paraphrasing. But I can’t remember who said it or where. #academicsky, any pointers? Feel free to make source recommendations.
... Still waiting for the moon to be visible from our house...
By some miracle, the bus was early and I'm on the 8:54 express train at Box Hill that skips Laburnum for no apparent reason. It's half empty, and early at Box Hill. Wonder when the last time they actually surveyed passenger load was? #melbournetrains
So, the new metro tunnel frequency is great. Not so great is the inter-peak frequency on Belgrave/Lilydale...15 mins between trains really kills the transfer opportunities.
Cartoonist Jon Kudelka has passed away, his wife Margaret has confirmed.
www.facebook.com/margaret.kud...
Vale.
Vale, Jon Kudelka.
And as always, Fuck Cancer.
Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took at university (I had to make this up since it was an integrated curriculum! These were themes...)
🎓 Law & ethics in medicine
🏃Health promotion & knowledge management
🔍 Sociology of medicine
📈 Evidence based medicine
❤️🩹 Occupational medicine
It's only Thursday (of a short week) but already feels like Friday ... also, how is it the end of January???
I have also done a lot of writing and commenting this month but still seem to have a stack of papers to be worked on and submitted 😲
Since it’s Australia Day you might like this piece about how Australia makes young people hot.
“Are They Hot, or Is It the ‘Australia Effect’?” www.nytimes.com/2026/01/20/s... (gift link)
The thing about the bloke who lost stuff bc ChatGPT shows the extent to which people still haven't understood that TECHNOLOGY IS NOT BUILT FOR YOU ANY MORE. It is purely, entirely self-serving, with zero obligation to, or care for, its users. Everything is on you; you cannot rely on software.
NeurIPS reviewers typically review 6+ papers, each with 100 or so citations. The reviewers can't possibly check that every citation is real. But why don't we have an automated way to do this checking (and desk-rejecting if fake citations found) *before* the papers are sent to reviewers?
NEW: NeurIPS,one of the world’s top academic AI conferences, accepted research papers with 100+ AI-hallucinated citations, new report claims
fortune.com/2026/01/21/n...
Competitive drinking (beer bong, beer pong, boat race etc) probably isn't a work transferable skill (welll, maybe in the good ol' days) but the ability to skol a drink comes in handy when you have to do the oral glucose tolerance test...
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...
Black text on white background. Screenshot of ARC’s Network Message regarding delays to grant announcements because of new security arrangements.
⁉️The ARC has delayed outcomes of ALL grants 1–4 months & increased scheduled outcome windows from 2 weeks to 3 months!
This reverses 4 years of progress in providing greater certainty & ability to plan for researchers, their families & unis.
Their excuse? Security checks under new ARC legislation👇
How's that even going to work with the 2x DP cap, given +1 yr on responses? Seems as well thought through as a paper raincoat.
ECR/MCR precarity is already ridiculous, but this is only going to make it worse. Genuinely have to wonder if it'd be easier for the ARC if we all just left research.
