Zachary Kendal

Infographic with AI slop published in Nature Scientific Reports

"Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se

Upon receiving the news that Amsterdam University Press has been bought by Taylor & Francis, I have decided to step down as editor of the book series Transmedia effective immediately.

Exhausted junior doctors who didn’t claim overtime win $175m in backpay About 15,000 doctors who worked at 36 Victorian health services since January 2015 will be sent unpaid wages after a landmark legal win.

Wage theft is baked into our economy across the board -- from delivery drivers to doctors in pubic hospitals www.theage.com.au/national/vic...

‘Sign our own death warrant’: Australian writers angry after Melbourne publisher asks them to sign AI agreements Authors asked to allow Black Inc to use their work for ‘training, testing, validation and the deployment of a machine learning’ system

Good to see this getting some coverage -
www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

Clarivate issues "letter to the library community" - Research Information Company apologises for absence of consultation before previous announcement and is "committed to learning from this moment"

Sorry for not consulting the community but we thought they wouldn't be on board with our new business model so we didn't.

www.researchinformation.info/news/clariva...

Difficult to overstate just how concerning the new Australian university definition of antisemitism is — making criticism of Israel quite likely to constitute misconduct under Australian university policies www.jewishcouncil.com.au/media/jewish...

The big news that flooded my LinkedIn over the weekend. I had to go searching for a nice succinct summary and of course I found it @lseimpactblog.bsky.social

“Like how can you be a remotely competent historian without insisting upon a Great Man interpretation that actual historians rejected ages ago?”

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

from “Parable of the Talents” by Octavia Butler

Inquiry urges Australian universities to ‘closely align’ with controversial definition of antisemitism Report tabled by Labor MP Josh Burns finds there is an ‘urgent need for reform’ to ensure safety of Jewish students

Very worrying. There is of course a serious problem with anti-semitism in Australian society. But changing the definition of anti-semitism to outlaw protests by university students against the conflict in Gaza will do nothing to stop hatred in our community www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Uni Vice-Chancellors keep getting richer while those who teach and research are left behind. The pay of university Vice-Chancellors has soared well beyond that of the teaching staff for no improvement in management.

Australia’s Vice-Chancellors – the ‘CEOs’ of today’s corporatised university sector – are among the highest paid in the world.

Adjusting for inflation, Vice-Chancellors were paid about $300,000 per year in 1985; today’s figure is over $1 million.

@jack-thrower.bsky.social writes:
#auspol

This is an extreme version of what the Coalition did for years (and still indulges in). Limiting knowledge and human advancement because of feels

OpenAI has to be the most insufferable company in the world. They can steal from the whole world & guzzle all resources. But no one can give them a taste of their own medicine even a little bit.

How long till they use this to say give us even more resources & this is why we can't release anything.

Another example of how millions of dollars of taxpayer money goes to fund content that's locked behind paywalls. This is of course rampant in academia and scholarly publishing, but I'd not given much thought to how it also plays out in the film & TV space. Excellent article.