Jan K. Woike

The White House is taking new steps to undermine every international student at our universities.

It has approved a new rule restricting student visas to 4 years max. That's not long enough for PhD students, or about half of undergrads, to finish their degree.

Likely to enter force within days.

He may talk rubbish but Trump has an eye for beauty, and that is a breath of fresh air | Simon Jenkins The US president promotes classical architecture and loathes ‘ugly’ wind turbines. Keir Starmer would dismiss him as a nimby, but on this Trump has a point, says Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins

I sort of understand why The Guardian keeps Simon Jenkins on for "balance." But he is a clown nonetheless and I really wonder if there is not someone serious out there who could take an alternative perspective and make it credible.

So this is how democracies drift into dictatorship.

The organs of state nod along. The satirists crack jokes and do no more. The press and other appeasers simply turn a blind eye. The people... for the most part... just groan & let it happen.

And very soon the future is no more.

UK university job cuts put at 20,000 after full impact ‘hidden’ Number of roles affected could be almost double previous estimates when voluntary schemes and hiring freezes factored in, say researchers

Remember me telling you the university redundancy situation was far worse than it looked? Well, here's the evidence - not renewing contracts, forcing people to 'retire' and the like may not show up in the stats, but it cd double the losses number. (1/2) www.timeshighereducation.com/news/uk-univ...

🧵Introducing the Trump Action Tracker website!

Today I’m launching www.trumpactiontracker.info - a live, searchable list of authoritarian‑style actions from Trump’s second term (over 740 actions so far). 1/14

Chart from The Economist showing the contribution to California's energy supply of natural gas, wind, hydro, batteries, nuclear and solar. There's a huge jump in solar from around 8am to 6pm

We have a "never use yellow if you can help it" rule for our charts. We couldn't help it on this one
www.economist.com/united-state...

Sadly the people who most need to watch this whole thing won’t. But we sure will: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S-W...

(Mehdi is not the one you want to bring the weak sauce to)

Labour MPs challenge Richard Tice over Reform UK’s plan to scrap green projects Exclusive: Letter signed by 59 MPs criticises party’s deputy leader after his warned energy firms over new contracts

Climate change does not exist? "Clown-car economics" seems an appropriate term for this lack of basic insight. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Are LLMs truly intelligent? New study questions the ’emergence’ of AI abilities - TechTalks A new paper argues that "emergent abilities" in LLMs aren't true intelligence. The difference is crucial and has implications for real-world applications.

Very nice summary of our recent paper on emergence and LLMs:

bdtechtalks.com/2025/07/14/l...

Translation for HE: "With the time saved, we need fewer teachers." The question should be: Whose time do we save for what?

Table 1 Typology of traps, how they can be avoided, and what goes wrong if not avoided. Note that all traps in a sense constitute category errors (Ryle & Tanney, 2009) and the success-to-truth inference (Guest & Martin, 2023) is an important driver in most, if not all, of the traps.

NEW paper! 💭🖥️

“Combining Psychology with Artificial Intelligence: What could possibly go wrong?”

— Brief review paper by @olivia.science & myself, highlighting traps to avoid when combining Psych with AI, and why this is so important. Check out our proposed way forward! 🌟💡

osf.io/preprints/ps...

“Even the term 'Artificial Intelligence' … is widely misused, with conceptual unclarity coopted to advance industry agendas and undermine scholarly discussions. It is our task to demystify and to challenge 'AI' in our teaching, research & engagement with society.” openletter.earth/open-letter-...

UK HE shrinking a live page of all the redundancies and restructures happening across UK Higher Education. Page is updated regularly.

We have now reached 100 universities making redundancies - exactly on the scale and timeframe long predicted here. The madness rolls on and on. The disgusting, disgraceful waste of *your* money never stops.
qmucu.org/qmul-transfo...

New redundancies in Higher Education at:
*Anglia Ruskin
*Birmingham City
*Bristol
*De Montfort
*Derby
*Goldsmiths (yet again)
*Greenwich
*Hertfordshire
*Lancaster
*Leicester
Every single day in HE is like this. Nothing will be done.

As Floods Hit, Key Roles Were Vacant at Weather Service Offices in Texas

The United States government is no longer able to protect us from real hazards, such as flash floods, because it’s shifting funds to fake hazards, such as a non-existent immigrant crime wave. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/u...

A second child has died in the Texas measles outbreak Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to attend the child's funeral, which is scheduled for Sunday.

BREAKING—Second measles death reported in Texas. As of Friday, the Texas Department of State Health Services said 481+ cases of measles had been confirmed, a 14% jump over last week. 56 hospitalized with measles in the area since late January.

www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

Defense Department will stop providing crucial satellite weather data Hurricane forecasters and scientists rely on weather data collected and processed by Department of Defense satellites. The Navy has decided to stop sharing the data.

Hurricane forecasters and scientists rely on weather data collected and processed by Department of Defense satellites. The Navy has decided to stop sharing the data.

More jobs at risk as universities gear up to fight student levy Domestic student places and essential courses face axe as plan to tax international tuition fees could prove to be ‘final nail in a coffin’ for some institutions

'Plans to take a cut of overseas fees to fund education and skills blindsided vice-chancellors when proposed in the government’s immigration White Paper in May and, while many still hope to be able to block the idea entirely, there is a growing realisation that it has support across Whitehall.'

It’s so much crazier than that. A woman appealed a lower court ruling for her ex-husband, pointing out the court’s order relied on 4 hallucinated or real-but-irrelevant cases. Ex-husband’s lawyer then files a reply to the appeals court with ELEVEN hallucinated or irrelevant case citations!

NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya used sickle cell disease research as an example of something he would not call DEI and cut. It's being cut.

www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/n...

Oh, look! They're celebrating the Fourth of July in France as well.

‘A war of the truth’: Europe’s heatwaves are failing to spur support for climate action Voters may feel hotter summers are ‘too much’ but they appear to tolerate roll-back of policies to stop global heating

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

The new bill text goes way beyond eliminating @wyden.senate.gov's tax credits for wind and solar.

It actually **TAXES CLEAN ENERGY**

Needless to say, this is an awful idea. It's an immediate rate hike for consumers, and hundreds of thousands of clean energy workers are about to lose their jobs.

My (very) short story "Family Recipe" about food--past, present, and future--is out today in Nature Futures.

RFK Jr. says US won’t donate to global vaccine effort Kennedy ripped into Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, in a video address at its pledging summit.

This is a travesty & a nightmare. The US was a founder of @gavi.org. It lowers global vaccine costs, has vaccinated 1B children, & averted 19M deaths. This pull out will cost 100s of thousands of children's lives a year - and RFK Jr will be personally responsible.
www.politico.com/news/2025/06...

Sage Perspectives Interview:
www.sagepub.com/explore-our-...

DOI: 10.1177/09567976241267854
@shafenbraedl.bsky.social
@patkanngiesser.bsky.social

More than 700K Americans died from COVID after he wrote this. We still have not achieved herd immunity.