Adrian Vickers

The Australian Tertiary Education Commission legislation, Part 5, ATEC, TEQSA and the Threshold Standards Under the legislation to establish the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, introduced into Parliament late last month, ATEC would advise the minister on the Higher Education Threshold Standar…

Under the ATEC legislation, academics would be removed from the advisory panel on higher education standards, and replaced by the ATEC Commissioners.
andrewnorton.id.au/2025/12/08/t...

Sumatra floods: Indonesia stuck in a cycle of crisis management President Prabowo must address years of institutional neglect to tackle the structural failures fuelling disasters.

“The true scale of the devastation reveals years of institutional neglect,” writes Hilman Palaon in The Interpreter.
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/sumatra-floods-indonesia-stuck-cycle-crisis-management

Guardian Aus headline: Queensland Museum accused of misleading teachers and children about the cause of climate change Education program sponsored by Shell’s Queensland Gas Company is ‘climate obstruction dressed up as education’, advocacy group says

Queensland Museum accused of misleading teachers and children about the cause of climate change with an "education program" sponsored by Shell’s Queensland Gas Company. This is fossil fuels industry propaganda. How is this allowed?! #qldpol #Climate #education
www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

I want jobs for humanities experts to kill AI systems.

They just needed to be able to catch

Agree, it’s just lazy: skip a few words and think people will understand

.@historytoday.com the world's leading pop history magazine, included "Early Southeast Asia" in its Books of the Year list!:

“Southeast Asian history sometimes seems at the periphery of mainstream historical interest [not to us!], but two books this year are exceptions... (contd.)

Alarm as Tennessee libraries shut down for Republican 'book purge' Public libraries in Tennessee have begun to shut down as they carry out an order from state officials to remove children’s books containing LGBTQ+ themes or characters.For Popular Information, Rebecca...

Public libraries in Tennessee have begun to shut down as they carry out an order from state officials to remove children’s books containing LGBTQ+ themes or characters.
www.rawstory.com/alternet-pos...

Good to see them following @asah-sydney.bsky.social’s lead

Business class if you buy at the wrong time will quickly get you to that figure

The archives are not only particular and various, they are widely and unevenly distributed

🗃️

Convincing people to move is going to be a hard ask. Coastal real estate prices continue to rise in Australia (and inland you have the threat of bushfires).

I bet that people who think AI can compensate for "archival silences" have never set foot in an archives, let alone worked with archival collections. And this is the hill I'll die on.

Horrific. Wanton destruction of what was a thriving faculty.

Thinking of my New School friends whose programs have been closed (~30 of them), whose PhD programs have been indefinitely halted, and who are now receiving invitations to resign + accept severance payments — with the threat of 🪓 if not enough folks take the offer. A ✨-if-imperfect place ruined 😥

Revenge of the zombies

Screenshot from The Onion, originally published October 9, 2002. Headline: Frank Gehry No Longer Allowed To Make Sandwiches for Grandkids Below it, a photo of a plate with multiple deconstructed sandwiches balanced precariously, vaguely resembling a Frank Gehry building.

Frank Gehry, 1929–2025 www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/a...

Worth experimenting, but I’d like to hear from an Armenian reader about the results

Over a third of animals lost in test deep sea mining - scientists The findings contribute to a controversial debate that pits green technology against the environment.

It’s Friday. May I be blunt? F*ck this. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Huge stash of WWII resistance documents found under floorboards in Warsaw

A large stash of documents from WWII, many relating to Poland’s underground resistance, has been discovered under the floor in a historic tenement house in Warsaw.

The collection also includes the diary of a young woman living under the Nazi-German occupation.

Stories in Stone: Aboriginal Oral Traditions of Volcanic Impacts in Northeastern Australia - Geoheritage Throughout Australia, oral traditions exist that encode memories of catastrophic and impactful events and landscape changes such as floods, meteor impacts and volcanic eruptions. In pre-colonization t...

Incredible work here tracing continuous oral traditions among Aboriginal peoples over a near-geological timescale.

The article argues oral traditions transmitted information about volcano eruptions from 9,000 years ago:

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Congratulations to the Australian captain’s husband

Revealed: Myanmar junta ‘crony’ given key role behind Fifa peace prize Inaugural prize expected to be handed to Donald Trump but ‘process’ for choosing future winners to be proposed by controversial tycoon’s committee

I'm going insane??
www.theguardian.com/football/202...

Southeast Asia Program - YouTube The Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) was founded in 1950 to promote the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge about countries, cultures, and languages of t...

For anyone interested, Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program posted my recent Gatty Lecture on Indonesia and the politics of the new international economic order. youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Licence-plate tolling is also unreliable. I have the same (NSW) number plate as an light truck in the ACT

Single frame. Parliament House in Canberra, with King Kong (marked AI) stepping over the building, holding a woman, looking menacing. Speech bubble from Parliament House: “Look, apparently it has a huge appetite, will put thousands out of work, steal copyright, dumb down education and facilitate abuse. But rather than try to regulate it, we’ll just see how it goes…”

What could go wrong?
My @smh @theage cartoon.

They should invent a university that prioritizes teaching and research

At last a good use of AI: abolishing influencers

Death toll from Indonesia's floods and landslide hits 753, disaster agency says The number of people killed by floods and landslides on Indonesia's Sumatra island rose to 753 on Tuesday, the disaster agency said, with 504 people missing.

753 dead in Sumatra www.reuters.com/business/env...

Unbelievably disgusting