Bijan Parsia

So proud of Mark and the candidates who ran alongside him. Hoping for positive news later this week.

Echoing thanks to all who voted and encouraged others to as well! RIP postal voting system, we loved all the red postbox pics but...

Our union can and should be so much better. #UCU

This is sad, Garangao has been cancelled. Garangao is a Gulf tradition celebrating the halfway point of the holy month of Ramadan and is beloved by children especially. They go around and collect candies. It’s got a bit of a Halloween vibe to me sans the mischief or Goth element . It’s great.

This

I'm white, but I was a queer "woman" scientist who was literally harassed out of my science writing career by naming names with an Epstein associate (Krauss)

When you're a grad student threatened with lawsuits, stalking, rape, and death, you shut up

I'm never shutting up again

Looking forward to an article about all the Black women scientists who thrived despite Epstein and friends best efforts to shove us out of the field including by not offering us funding that our competitors were getting

Spring Statement 'betrayed the millions of graduates drowning in debt' Responding to the Spring Statement's failure to address the student loan crisis, UCU general secretary Jo Grady today said:

Spring Statement 'betrayed the millions of graduates drowning in debt' | UCU

At the insistence of the publishing companies, the UK govt prevents residents from accessing Sci-Hub, a free site containing academic literature, otherwise paywalled. Now they plan to let AI companies use any music, writing, art… to train their crappy programmes WITHOUT PAYING US A PENNY. Thieves!

Historically, no big.

Helpful primer on Conditional Indexation, one possible route for the future of USS.

Worth saying that this is not happening in the current valuation cycle and may never. But it has been explored and may be explored further.

So it is helpful for UCU/USS members to develop some understanding.

Hey, remember how we let a nazi near-trillionaire annihilate the US state capacity? I know it was a whole year ago, but it turns out that this has consequences beyond "murdering 14 million people by ending USAID" (which apparently no one cared about).

Heyyyy, someone* agrees with me.

*science

Tracking our *negative* voting intention (who would Britons vote AGAINST):

➡️ Ref 38% (+9)
🌹Lab 34% (-4)
🌳 Con 7% (-1)
🌏 Green 7% (+4)
🐦‍ LD 3% (-)
changes w/ Nov 2025

As Reform has plateaued in the polls, the number of people saying they would also vote *against* Reform has grown

One does not, in fact, have to suck.

Years of U.S., NATO miscalculations left Ukraine massively outgunned The U.S. Army and NATO made key strategic, funding and production mistakes that led to shortages of a pivotal weapon Ukraine needs to thwart Russia's advances.

Trump/Hegseth are hell bent on exhausting the last stockpiles of munitions we have left with no real ability to scale up production to meet demand.

Either 2 things happen, deescalation or it escalates to tactical nuclear weapons. I pray to god it's not the latter.

www.reuters.com/investigates...

Oh yeah, the munitions stockpile is completely cooked.

sounds like skill issue bruh.
publishing your self owns on the nazi sympathizer website---wild wild stuff.

Oh now I get it. Dubai is Golgafrinchan Ark B.

10/10 No notes.

The answer to problems in sociotechnical systems is not always "more software", "better software" or "open source software".
A lot of the time the best solution is _less software_ and sometimes even _no software_.

Supreme Court Declines to Hear Hamdi Mohamud’s Case Against St. Paul Officer Who Framed Her - Institute for Justice Today, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition for certiorari filed by the Institute for Justice (IJ) on behalf of Hamdi Mohamud. The petition asked the […]

A St. Paul police officer fabricated a massive sex trafficking case and had multiple people locked up under false charges. The Supreme Court yesterday affirmed a ruling that she can't be sued by her victims. She appears to still be employed by the St. Paul PD. ij.org/press-releas...

Because she was working with a federal task force, she was considered a federal officer, and thus protected by SCOTUS rulings making it all but impossible to sue federal cops, even for egregious abuse.

Now consider what this means for Trump's immigration thugs.

Democrats had two years to fix this.

This is a good example of the alternate civic sphere they have built. Their own institutions credentialing almost entirely for signal instead of skill. It’s not strange historically. Think being a member of a faith to become a professor at religious institutions.

We follow them when they apply?!?

Teens in households making under $75K are more likely to use chatbots for help with all or most schoolwork % of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 who say they do all or most of their schoolwork with the help of AI chatbots U.S. teens — 10 Household income <$30,000 — 20 $30K–$74,999 — 15 $75,000+ — 7 Note: Those who did not answer or gave other responses are not shown. Source: Survey conducted Sept. 25–Oct. 9, 2025. “How Teens Use and View AI” PEW RESEARCH CENTER

According to PEW, teens in households making under $75K are more likely to use chatbots for help with all or most schoolwork. I read a comment on another platform that said this is amazing news because we are "finally going to close the achievement gap." That is not how I would interpret this data.

Oy.

College students, professors are making their own AI rules. They don't always agree More than three years after ChatGPT debuted, AI has become a part of everyday life — and professors and students are still figuring out how or if they should use it.

It's just wild to me how AI profit potential means ZERO discussion of cheating and stealing. But regular old plagiarism still punishes students for messing up a quote and citation. These two ideologies exist side by side right now and it's blowing my mind.
www.npr.org/2026/03/03/n...

The logic is: LLMs stole from/plagiarized human authors. So by using them, you are plagiarizing. The fact that it’s a step removed or that the bot sloppily “puts it in its own words” makes no practical difference. Anyway, you didn’t write it. So there’s that too.

Definitely. Which is why the best academic AI policies I’ve seen make it clear to students that “submitting work that was produced by “AI” (chatbots, LLMs) *is* plagiarism and will be treated as such.”

“Many of their commanders are especially delighted with how graphic this battle will be zeroing in on how bloody all of this must become in order to fulfill and be in 100% accordance with fundamentalist Christian end of the world eschatology.”

Accusing Jamelle Bouie of "exaggerated nastiness" and "hateful, uncharitable commentary" is absolutely insane.

Jamelle Bouie clearly and quite publicly works very hard to be informed and even-handed and anyone talking about him as if he’s not doing either of those things should shut the fuck up and definitely be widely ignored