Simon Farrell

An empty broken piggy bank.

Why Anthology Unraveled

Four years after Anthology Inc. acquired Blackboard as part of its plan to become “the most comprehensive ed-tech ecosystem,” the company is bankrupt and selling many of its parts. https://bit.ly/4362TFR

#AcademicSky #EDUSky #HigherEd

One submission said leaders’ salaries could not be “justified by the quality of executive decision-making, nor by the scope of executive duties. The core business of a university – teaching and research – is co-ordinated virtually entirely by ordinary non-executive staff”.

Report on Australian Higher Education finds:

🔹️ Council members have no lived experience of universities

🔹️ Council members have COIs with consultancy firms

🔹️ Council meetings are closed affairs that lack transparency

🔹️ Leaders' exorbitant salaries could not be justified

Another HOT TAKE on Australia's 2035 targets, but also a comment more generally on rise of climate "realism" and "pragmatism", where simply giving up on trying to stop us being killed by fossil fuels is presented as the Very Reasonable and Very Serious thing to do.

has anyone checked in on the harpers letter / campus free speech panic people

Drop in WA Gouldian finch sightings sparks concern Numbers of the brightly coloured Gouldian finch appear to be dropping in Western Australia's East Kimberley.

Numbers of the brightly coloured Gouldian finch appear to be dropping in Western Australia's East Kimberley.

Cool!

Now the media is reporting that "significant progress" has been made on the negotiations and final approval could be imminent "subject to new conditions".

What's different? Has the level of pollution that would damage the rock art changed?

Alan Moore | Storytelling Learn the craft of storytelling with literary maestro, Alan Moore. Discover how to build story, character, setting and plot in this online writing course.

Just deleted that Alan Moore course I linked to, as it appears to just be the Maestro course straight pirated - that it's been up there in parts for a year makes you wonder why it hasn't been pulled, but doesn't seem credible. If you want to buy it, it's here...

www.bbcmaestro.com/courses/alan...

This is an amazing video! The clarity is remarkable. Not many of us have this gift in academia.
Conceptual frameworks from decolonial and postcolonial theorisation presented in a capsule.

AI Generated 'Boring History' Videos Are Flooding YouTube and Drowning Out Real History "These AI videos are just repeating things that are on the internet, so you end up with a very simplified version of the past."

AI "boring history" slop has taken over YouTube and is particularly insidious because it flattens history and drowns out the tireless work of creators who have been integral to legitimizing YouTube as a place for high-quality history videos

www.404media.co/ai-generated...

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery returns artefacts to Larrakia People - Museums Association Ceremony held to mark repatriation of 33 culturally significant objects to Australia

News | Bristol Museum & Art Gallery returns artefacts to Larrakia People – ceremony held to mark repatriation of 33 culturally significant objects to Australia

Rossiter coined the term "Matilda effect" for when women's scientific work is attributed to men.

It was a twist on the "Matthew effect," famously attributed to Robert Merton, but actually studied jointly by Merton and his wife Harriet Zuckerman, who was denied co-authorship

On Prolific, "we estimate that about 34% of online study participants use LLMs to answer open-ended questions atleast some of the time..."

Seems like a very timely paper for behavioural scientists using online samples: osf.io/preprints/so... ;

We really need more papers on this issue

ChatGPT tends to ignore retractions on scientific papers Study finds the chatbot doesn’t acknowledge concerns with problematic studies

“The study authors asked GPT 4o-mini to evaluate the quality of 217 papers. The tool didn’t mention in any of the reports that the papers being analyzed had been retracted or had validity issues.

In 190 cases, GPT described the papers as world leading, internationally excellent, or close to that”

We asked AI to make Indigenous art. What it produced shows its great threat We asked ChatGPT to create authentic Indigenous artworks and stories. Experts say what it produced — while "quick, easy and cheap" — represents a profound threat to First Nations cultures.

"It's colonisation 101, going for us as a resource [but] failing to invest in understanding the tangible and intangible elements of our cultural priorities,"

www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

YouTube video by The Australia Institute The Fight to Save Murujuga

By approving a 50-year extension to the North West Shelf gas project, the Federal Government has signed a death warrant for Australia’s most significant ancient artistic treasure.

Watch the full video report from @stephenlongaus.bsky.social
youtu.be/Bj9VOMKYxSI

Goddamn. What a sobering and poignant piece of conceptual art. What an amazing artist.

Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Position (80%) at the Cognitive Psychology Unit, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich. The ideal start date would be January 1st, 2026 but could be somewhat earlier or later. The position is for initially 3 years, with possible renewal for another 1.5 years. The successful applicant will work with the head of the Cognitive Psychology Unit, Prof. Dr. Klaus Oberauer, and the Cognitive Psychology team. The post involves research and teaching (one course per semester). Research at the Zurich Cognitive Psychology Unit focuses on capacity limits of cognition, in particular working memory, long-term memory, and attention, which we investigate with experimental, individual-differences and aging studies and computational modeling. For further information see: https://www.psychology.uzh.ch/en/areas/nec/allgpsy.html We offer: - An attractive research environment with close collaboration within the team - Excellent lab infrastructure - Salary according to Cantonal regulations We expect: - a PhD in psychology or a related discipline - experience with experimental research - excellent method knowledge and skills - very good command of English - interest in pursuing an academic career in cognitive psychology In addition, it would be desirable if you had: - experience with publishing in international journals - programming skills - experience with mathematical / computational modeling Please send applications including your CV and motivation letter no later than September 10, 2025 electronically as a single PDF to: Michaela Oestmann, michaela.oestmann@psychologie.uzh.ch For questions about the position please contact Klaus Oberauer, k.oberauer@psychologie.uzh.ch

🚨 PostDoc Opening 🚨 The lab of Klaus Oberauer is looking for a new postdoc, starting end of this/beginning next year. Research focus is #cognition, #workingmemory, #methods and #computationalmodeling or anything in that direction. I cannot highlight ENOUGH how great it is to work in this lab 🥰🤓

Australia Admits All Those Animals Made Up

Australia Admits All Those Animals Made Up theonion.com/austral...

I watched this with the kids on the weekend expecting it to be not good and it was actually great

How clear and simple data visualizations bring the climate crisis home Climate change is a slow-moving disaster. We need graphics that capture both its pace and its impact.

"there is growing evidence that more intuitive visualizations, informed by psychological research, can help people make better sense of climate data."
thebulletin.org/2025/07/how-...

International students have not driven rents and inflation higher, RBA says An RBA paper suggests the rapid growth in foreign students post-pandemic did not play a big role in pushing rents higher.

International students have not driven rents and inflation higher, RBA says www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07...

“Australia is continuing to collect more revenue from HECS fees than it gets from the PRRT."
- Richard Denniss, Executive Director

In 2023-24 Australian HECS/HELP revenue rose to $5.1bn while PRRT fell to less than a quarter that amount to just $1.1bn. @richarddenniss.bsky.social #auspol

The Biases in Captive Chimpanzee Cognitive Research: First Insights From the Ape Research Index (ARI) Database

Important new work (from Elisa Bandini,
@ctennie.bsky.social, @sofiaforss.bsky.social et al.) addressing an elephant in the room - how weird are our weirdest apes, and how is that skewing research efforts?

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I have a lot of concerns about the Binz et al. Centaur paper, but I'll start this thread with what I like: Matching human behavioral data is critical when modeling human cognition. Trying to match neural data is interesting and possibly informative, but not sufficient for modeling the human mind. 1/

Thank you for your attention regarding this matter

Albanese government criticised for ‘weak’ response to US attacks on Iran as experts decry ‘flagrant breach’ of law Former adviser to Penny Wong argues Australia should make clear ‘we are a country that stands up … for the rules-based order’

Well said by Allan Behm

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

the level of misinformation sparked because of this bananas EEG preprint is just really tragic.

By the way if you think that a researcher caused cognitive decline to happen to participants in a study you should probably be freaked out by that

The following thread contains 201 open access articles, books, chapters & reports written and led by First Nations’ researchers. We write our own research across all areas. The order is random and ranges across disciplines, because of course it does.
#201FirstNationsArticles