Nathan Garland

Ironically enough there seems to be somewhat of a slight correlation between student satisfaction and poorer PSC scores! (Comparison to THE rank included also but not as interesting)

While AI Data Centres Boom, Public Research Hits a Wall For the last five years, the National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme (NCMAS) has functioned like a steady “electricity grid” for science: a somewhat predictable way to access national supercomp...

nathangarland.substack.com/p/while-ai-d...

Can bigger-is-better ‘scaling laws’ keep AI improving forever? History says we can’t be too sure

The world’s huge investment in AI relies on some big assumptions.

Look, the main thing we must be grateful for is that the space weather site style sheets haven’t been updated www.sws.bom.gov.au/Solar/1/10

Giraffe

a man in a military uniform says are we the baddies ALT: a man in a military uniform says are we the baddies

As a university worker, the last few years of shenanigans got me like:

Does it still count as citizen science identification if I claim I’ve seen one of those kangahoof creatures late at night after a slab of VB?

Another fun tidbit I saw, which to be fair is not as egregious as the gambling one, but in the most recent reported tax credit data Atlassian got about $200m for their for-profit software development and in the same period the total Discovery DP round budget was around $260m

Agree on the reluctance to do anything that risks lower property prices. Question - do you see any opportunity for either major party to take a brave stand against the weight of vested interest to keep house prices skyrocketing? Or is the risk of political suicide still realistically there on this?

Not to defend the universities - more to partition blame alongside them - but the international student fees also help support positive things like R&D since decades of both ALP and LNP governments have chosen to neglect fixing that, and so we've ended up with these castles built on sand.

And if the Senate inquiry into higher education governance is serious, they really should extend to look over any deals and works done by Nous Group et al. with any of the Aus universities who have frequently gone down that path.

Trump Admin Plans to Cut Team Responsible for Critical Atomic Measurement Data The team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology publishes measurement data crucial for advanced research in areas like astrophysics, nuclear fusion, and semiconductors.

Vandalism and spiting so many industries and technologies that rely on this institutional knowledge. What a deeply unserious country.

www.wired.com/story/nist-d...

www.news.com.au/entertainmen...