Jon Reades

Wait until they discover that the method is probably about 20% of what you need for reproducibly in most of STEM. Less in the quant social sciences. Raw data. Code & documentation to run it. Software libraries & exact versions. Cleaning and curation explained. It goes on and on.

Pre-announcement: artificial intelligence humanities sandpits: Canada, UK and US AHRC and SSHRC plan to invite expressions of interest to attend a humanities-led, interdisciplinary research sandpit looking to put humanities insights and methodologies at the heart of artificial int...

Pre-announcement of a funding opportunity for "artificial intelligence humanities sandpits," supported by AHRC, EPSRC, and SSHRC. Expressions of interest by 31 Oct; up to four grants will be funded.

Just leaving this here, showing that educating overseas students is the only university activity that doesn‘t cost more to deliver than it brings in. Maintenance grants are very welcome, but the source of funding for them is not. They‘re making a broken funding model even more broken.

KCL had intermittent issues for much of the time I was there: the infuriating thing was seeing other people connect to eduroam _at_ King’s when I couldn’t! Geneva airport is my favourite “What???? Oh, ok then” eduroam area.

Peter Geoghegan · Short Cuts: Reform’s Disaster Capitalism Reform has been accused of lacking policy: its critics say it’s a party of Farage and his epigones, with few firm...

‘More than half of Reform’s donations in 2024 came from people with homes in low-tax jurisdictions or with offshore business interests; 40 per cent came from climate sceptics or investors in fossil fuels.’

@petergeoghegan.bsky.social at the Reform UK conference: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

I’d also like to know how you means test level 4-6 study: UK gov can’t even cope with working out joint HH incomes.

AI was also 87% certain that a recent mushroom find of mine was edible. Didn’t make it right.

Communities are self-organising increasingly to run their own local services. But why do some so-called ‘DIY urbanism’ projects survive and others fail? New open access publication by Zulfikar D. W. Putra & Mark Tewdwr-Jones now published in Cities www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Claire Wilmot | Fascistic Dream Machines Part of the misunderstanding of the deepfake threat stems from the idea that it is a problem of bad information, rather...

Government with no dreams repeatedly surprised to be beaten in polls by party pushing nightmares: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

UK ‘would lose 135,000 domestic places’ if fee levy introduced New modelling estimates that controversial proposals could wipe out around £2.2 billion from the UK economy in just five years

Mind the gap. More cheery HE news to digest: 'The introduction of a levy on overseas tuition fees in the UK could deter tens of thousands of international applicants and trigger 135,000 fewer university places for domestic students, a new report has concluded.' 1/3

Unfolded Walks Explore the work of young people from Bangabandhu Primary School, Bethnal Green and see the city through their eyes. A collaboration with UCL researchers and the Young V&A.

Join us on Thursday 25 September for Unfolded Walks. In this new collaboration between UCL researchers and the Young V&A, explore the work of young people from Bangabandhu Primary School, Bethnal Green and see the city through their eyes.

www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/eve...

What could possibly go wrong? <cough>

UKRI 'warned of a risk to publicly funded research. “With the collapse of research teams and long-standing collaborations, many of which support national priorities, longer-term research areas and UK research and innovation ambitions could be jeopardised,” it said.'

Thank you the @theguardian.com for reminding me to listen to the Dropkick Murphys. Angry banger of an album.

Car tyres shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment – urgent action is needed Tiny flakes of plastic, generated by the wear and tear of normal driving, eventually accumulate in the soil, in rivers and lakes, and even in our food.

Every year, billions of vehicles worldwide shed an estimated 6 million tonnes of tire fragments. These tiny flakes of plastic, generated by normal driving, account for 28% of microplastics entering the environment globally.

Heavy vehicles eg SUVs/EVs especially.

Via @us.theconversation.com

I start off with #virtualisation and why use #Podman / #Docker. After *that* everything else is easy peasy! But yes, underlying issue is that most everything goes into Documents/Downloads and is found via search. TBF, the only bits of my HD still organised are the #Git repos and research data.

📣 I'M HIRING! Please spread the word 📣

🔎 Looking for a 1-year postdoctoral research associate to support @sensory-lives-prj.bsky.social & UK-wide tour of a playhouse tent communicating neurodivergent children’s experiences of Temporary Accommodation.

🛜 www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOL488/p...

Do you have experience of driving a bus or a lorry but you'd rather carry books?

Would you like a job driving around #Orkney, going to schools and delivering books to people?

There's still time to apply for the job of driving #BookyMcBookface at:

myjobscotland.gov.uk/councils/ork...

Why ‘flag wars’ are scaring overseas students and risk deepening unis’ cash crisis ‘It’s mad in Britain. Will I be ok?’. International students about to study in UK universities are alarmed by the country's new political climate

“If the Government was really serious about growth, they would be promoting international students and international education, and decoupling them from the immigration debate and treating it as a growth industry.” (James Pitman, chair of Independent Higher Education)

Was just thinking of that the other day. I seem to recall it somehow impacted networking in the clusters because so many instances were running.

Parasol mushrooms and likely inkstain boletes. Plus random USB presenter dongle I found in a drawer.

One upside to the “summer ended the day school started” change.

Ah: bsky.app/profile/urba... Sadly, I don’t have access to RP (AFAIK) only THE through UCL.

FFS. ‘Unfunded’ is the main type of research I do because the chances of winning funding is, at this point, well south of 1-in-10. The bureaucracy to work out what is ‘low quality’ is 😱🤦‍♂️ unless you assume entire disciplines aren’t adding value which is stupidity.

Towards NetZero for hospital operating theatres | Journal of The Royal Society Interface Hospital operating theatre suites are a particularly resource- and energy-intensive component of the health sector. Reducing their carbon footprint presents a significant challenge due to the necessit...

"Switching off the theatres when not in use reduces energy consumption by a factor greater than the fractional reduction of time in use" New paper in Royal Society Interface from work last year supported by UCLPartners. cc @yrkalaji.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

University course closures leave students unable to study many SHAPE subjects close to home - report A new report shows that students are shut out of SHAPE education in their home regions, as large swathes of the UK are ‘cold spots’ for humanities, social sciences and arts degrees.

We've got a chunky @britishacademy.bsky.social report out looking at the emergence of 'cold spots' where you can't study arts, humanities or social science subjects close to home. We call for an urgent review of HE funding & monitoring of at risk subjects
www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/news/univers...

There was an app for OS6? 7? that allowed you to map sound effects to any key easily. We covertly attached Ren & Stimpy to common keys (the Happy Happy song to the space bar and the History Eraser Button to power) of a friend’s laptop just before he headed to the university library.

#EMCA

With the exception of the background all of this is dynamically generated from the CLI in ffmpeg — my Rube Goldberg node+Python+Ocen pipeline can auto-generate/-update pre-recorded videos from Reveal.js slides and an audio track. Quite proud of that even if it was likely a poor use of time.

@djdunc.bsky.social pointed me to a LLM seeing had developed to write ffmpeg code but I can’t seem to find the link. I get there in the end but it’s like trying to debug LaTeX — very little makes intuitive sense so you just much about until the results look about right. And fonts! 😱

Gah, some horrible autocorrect typos in there. s/too/tool/ and s/a white/people/. I don’t even know how that last one happened!