Dr Sharon Prendeville

US abandons Syria’s Kurds, risking regional turmoil and an IS resurgence Kurds are the casualties of a US Syria strategy that aims to keep America afar, Iran out and Israel and Turkey apart.

US abandons Syria's Kurds, risking regional turmoil and IS resurgence

theconversation.com/us-abandons-...

'Ghost in the Machine' Review: Documentary Delivers a Searing Takedown of AI, Elon Musk and Techno-Fascism 'Ghost in the Machine' Sundance review: documentary delivers a searing takedown of AI, Elon Musk and Techno-Fascism

Really enjoyed the @ghostdoc2026.bsky.social premiere today! A must-watch, as soon as you get the chance.

www.thewrap.com/creative-con...

A social media ban for under-16s would be popular. But would it actually help?

Our Big Tech editor James Clayton shares his thoughts 👇

more countries should do this, tbh.

YouTube video by Led By Donkeys Board of Peace - Season 1

The Board of Peace - Dallas mashup has apparently been taken down here and there. This video works for the time being at least:

Ireland among North Sea nations to sign wind power pledge to resist Russian energy 'blackmail' The EU’s Commissioner for Energy and Housing said the agreement was a ‘very clear signal to Russia’.

A great way to realise sovereign renewable energy infrastructure and alleviate dependence on despots, East or West, is to not invest billions in new #LNG infrastructure for fracked US fossil gas imports, Ireland.

www.thejournal.ie/ireland-nort...

I am just gonna say it, these guys are completely emasculated by the knowledge that they have been out-organized by a group that is significantly made up of women, and all the bullshit call of duty nonsense is cope for their wounded egos bsky.app/profile/jeet...

Neuroanatomical changes observed over the course of a human pregnancy - Nature Neuroscience Neural changes in pregnancy are not well understood. Here Pritschet et al. present an open-access precision brain imaging resource, mapping neuroanatomical change in an individual from preconception t...

However, my 'theory-of-mind processing' grey matter was significantly diminished at the time and I didn't think of it. Still is, apparently.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

and that this maybe tells us something important about how our contemporary penchant for #bioregions and #mining might play out.

When Extraction Comes Home - Future Observatory Journal The Critical Raw Materials Act, a new piece of EU legislation, will dramatically increase mining for rare earth metals across the continent, securing supply chains but damaging landscapes. Design rese...

If I was to write this article again, I would focus on how regions as distant and connected as the West of Ireland/Scotland, Newfoundland and Greenland have sisterly geomorphologies with research actively funded to observe this relation.

fojournal.org/policy/when-...

Compare & contrast. This is Trump’s demand for Greenland. And this is Hitler’s for the Sudetenland.

There is no difference. The language. The unstoppable need to dominate. The megalomania. It’s the same.

And Keir Starmer’s response is appeasement. We are in that moment.
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Thanks for the helpful read @malthusjohn.bsky.social - reductionism certainly has utility to me, and here a utility often/not always clarified by abstraction (as consensus, or values, or hype, conflation); complexity needs more specificity for sure.

Remember that the UK has far, far weaker protections against state power than did the US. And the latter folded up like a pack of cards. The US is a warning from the British future.

'If the bubble bursts we will be fine'—'we' doing a lot of work there.

""It’s hard to script a clearer emblem of what I’ve called education’s auto-cannibalism: universities consuming their own purpose while cheerfully marketing the tools of their undoing."

Google Q how long are cats kittens

a picture of a car with the caption "cat > length" 46cm without tail

Just discussing at what age kittens stop being kittens. Did a google search to find out and what on earth is going on here? I don't want to know the length "without tail" of an imaginary cat

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.

"But there’s a difference between tools and technologies. Tools help us accomplish tasks; technologies reshape the very environments in which we think, work, and relate. " #AI #Education

www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

"If complexity (in a broad sense) is not a new phenomenon, and complexity (in a narrow sense) is practically useless to us, why is it so present in conversations and articles?"
silviolorusso.com/publication/...

#Complexity #SystemicDesign

Design History Society 2026 Conference - Call for Papers now open - News - Design History Society We create, research, and teach in an age of uncertainty driven by war, mass migration, and climate change. In 2019, Nancy Fraser invoked Gramsci’s...

Design in the Age of Uncertainty—submission deadline 1st Feb. www.designhistorysociety.org/news/view/de...

Suppressed climate report warned of mass migration and nuclear war Unabridged document said disappearing forests and rivers drying up could drive people to Europe and lead to conflict in Asia

The published security assessment of heating's impacts on nature was abridged: “This government is hiding the true danger of climate change from the people. We need to have an honest conversation about the risks we face to our prosperity and how to mitigate them" www.thetimes.com/uk/environme...

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?

United States Completes WHO Withdrawal WASHINGTON —  January 22, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of State today announced the United States’ completion of its withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) due to the organization's mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states.Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a joint statement on the termination of U.S. membership in the WHO.President Trump on January 20, 2025, announced the U.S. plan to leave the WHO. During the yearlong process, the U.S. stopped funding WHO, withdrew all personnel from WHO, and began pivoting activities previously conducted with WHO to direct bilateral engagements with other countries and organizations. With the exit from WHO, the U.S. will be coordinating with WHO solely in a limited fashion to effectuate withdrawal.  The WHO delayed declaring a global public health emergency and a pandemic during the early stages of COVID-19, costing the world critical weeks as the virus spread. During that period, WHO leadership echoed and praised China's response despite evidence of early underreporting, suppression of information and delays in confirming human-to-human transmission. The organization also downplayed asymptomatic transmission risks and failed to promptly acknowledge airborne spread.After the pandemic, the WHO did not adopt meaningful reforms to address political influence, governance weaknesses or poor coordination, reinforcing concerns that politics took priority over rapid, independent public health action and eroding global trust. Its report evaluating the possible origins of COVID-19 rejected the possibility that scientists cre…

And just like that, the US has left the World Health Organization.

Link goes to the official announcement—lies pretending to justify a decision that will kill countless numbers—from people too stupid to even include a proper twittercard.

www.hhs.gov/press-room/u...

how many nights would you guess it typically takes to turn a boat?

The People's Republic of Walmart For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern soci...

Meanwhile the actual real economy is pretty focused in meeting its unambiguous objectives, at least according to some: www.versobooks.com/en-gb/produc...

I'm not alone in wondering where it takes us "...When confronted with one of the "wickedproblems" of the 21st Century, the average policymaker likely knows enough systems theory to be fearful of unintended consequences. Complexity thus induces paralysis.'
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/602...

The Medieval Imagination To write this history of the imagination, Le Goff has recreated the mental structures of medieval men and women by analyzing the images of man as microcosm and the Church as mystical body; the symbols...

You would have loved the craic. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Doubtful. Question came up last night with the book club re absence/presence of structural analysis in The Medieval Imagination, which includes a lot of spatial metaphors, which made me wonder about how we accept complex/systems as a biophysical spatial analytic and what that inevitable misses.

"History will one day have its say; it will not be the history taught in the United Nations, Washington, Paris, or Brussels, however, but the history taught in the countries that have rid themselves of colonialism and its puppets."

Art imitating my life this past week.

I'm reliably informed that 'for some people, it is'.