: Poems Human or bot? Readers guess wrongly now AI writes with grace and rhythm Perfect
: I love Law & Order and I heard Noam Chomsky is a fan too. I tried to find a source - according …
: I dunno about this. Clapback read-a-book energy. “Australian authors group give every federal …
: Interesting open access article from Abby Smith, Seema Mihrshahi, and Becky Freeman on Exploring …
: It retrospect I should have recognised this as a warning about the quality of the takeaway pizza …
: Interesting and unusual to see the South China Morning Post discussing legalised vaping’s cost …
: We showed that intrusive memories were virtually abolished by playing the computer game Tetris …
: An interesting project that imagines New York 20 years from now, and draws on residents' expertise to imagine it I worked with “informed optimism,” which means you are basically working with many of the same …
: On the ongoing delegation of military judgement to autonomous systems - to ultimately kill humans The use of AI to create novel text, images, and video will likely exacerbate the challenge of …
: Musk must be one of the biggest winners of the election. He took a relatively popular social media …
: Some reasonable points here, and a challenge for us is to be open to the message! Mastodon’s …
: I really enjoyed this list of The Most Iconic Speculative Fiction Books of the 21st Century
: Israel dynamites historic Lebanese village of Mhaibib, site of the 2,100-year-old shrine of Prophet …
: Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics - 404 Media
: “Malaria is as old as Egyptian civilization itself, but the disease that plagued pharaohs now …
: The Verge 2004 - a fun selection of articles reflecting on why this year was a turning point for our …
: With the European Peace Facility, the EU is seeking greater flexibility that will allow it to bypass …
: The blockbuster film of the last few years has achieved a synthesis of these two trends: color-rich …
: tl;dr the big variation in non-GP specialist fees in Australia is largely due to differences between …
: Guizhou has been the target of successive visions of state-led sinofuturity, which have developed …
: 3.5 million Argentinians pushed into poverty this year Argentina’s poverty rate has soared to almost 53% in the first six months of Javier Milei’s …
: Live Free or DEI - Gaby Del Valle at The Baffler
: Israeli strikes kill 492 in heaviest daily toll in Lebanon since 1975-90 civil war It’s awful …
: Sticking an AirTag on my Kindle just saved me again. If it wasn’t for this I’d have lost …
: Catholicism, another flank in America's pernicious global influence? Another interesting piece, though it cements my view that American Catholicism has far more in …
: Interesting piece on Vance and his antecedents. Who Owns America? was the Agrarian-Distributists’ …
: ‘The most horrific, sobering thing I’ve ever seen’: BBC nuclear apocalypse film Threads 40 years on …
: In one of the University College Cork buildings they have a Mac (the same model that my Dad bought …
: Tide players surf the currents Twenty years of the development of health impact assessment in Australia A presentation at …
: A genuinely shocking number of students on campus. I wish things were more like this at home.
: Love a cavernous train terminal
: >The primary risk here, however, is the replacement of actual policymaking by a distorted form of …
: We crave assurance that intimacy can survive independent of convenience. We dream of friendship that …
: Scholarly communication infrastructure has been beyond its breaking point for a while. Generative pre-trained transformers look increasingly like an epistemological omnicidal weapon that we've failed to contain. Two main risks arise from the increasingly common use of GPT to (mass-)produce fake, scientific …
: A wistful piece of writing. We’re each wealthier than kings of the past but we remain a kind …
: NaNoWriMo Organizers Said It Was Classist and Ableist to Condemn AI. All Hell Broke Loose But last Friday, the 25-year-old nonprofit, known as NaNoWriMo for short, shocked many in the …
: On early 2023… Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero—the enlisted shipboard leader—led a scheme to buy …
: Google Scholar is more busted than I thought. Pay for citations schemes exist and may be more …
: A fascinating long read about the origins of Gaia theory, the early influence of systems theory, and …
: “the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled against the long-running digital …
: I tried to explain this t-shirt to my ten year old niece and she looked at me so pityingly, as if …
: Zuckerberg is clearly preparing for a Trump Presidency: “New Trump Book Threatens To Jail …
: An explainer about whether walking backwards is better for you, by Bianca Nogrady
: When the Nazis Opened a Propaganda Bookstore in Los Angeles - Lithub
: Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke - The Verge …
: Over the last five years the average open access article processing charge has gone up by 26% to AUD …
: “We don’t think about the collateral damage of sanctions the same way we think about the collateral …
: A sewage crisis in San Diego County reveals the unpolluted truth about the U.S.-Mexico border Parts of NAFTA anticipated this dynamic; the agreement included a provision to set aside $100 …
: Shisha No Thanks! Five Years of Progress Slides from a presentation to the Unpacking Vaping Cessation Special Interest Group. Slides (PDF …
: Deterritorialising a sport out of existence after one time in the Olympics is God-tier critical …
: Don’t ever let anyone tell you that Australia lacks a distinct culture.
: On the huge achievement that malaria vaccines represent The vaccines — the first to target any human parasite — represent a feat of both scientific grit and …
: Return to office directives should be predicated on everyone having an office of their own. Forcing …
: Ariana Ramsey won an Olympic bronze medal with the U.S. women’s rugby team here last week. A few …
: Gigwork is a lie Shawnta’s story exemplifies one of the reasons people turn to gig work: she lost her good union job …
: From respected science journalism to LLM-generated click farming, an interesting analysis While this is factual information (note: it’s actually rather hard to find the most up to date …
: Mr. Murdoch has called his effort to change the trust Project Harmony because he hoped that it …
: Already 67 higher education institutions are undertaking redundancy and restructuring programmes. …
: “A family of Russian sleeper agents flown to Moscow in the biggest East-West prisoner swap …
: I wasn’t aware this was needed.
: "…phones are connectivity tools rather than attention-consuming blackholes, and people actually talk to each other." “While everyone in Sunny seems to carry around a phone, for instance, they’re a lot different …
: Exciting new frontiers in ̶s̶c̶a̶m̶s̶ ̶ academic publishing A new step has been added to the mind-boggling scam that is academic publishing: Conduct research …
: “We are talking about thousands and thousands of kilometers of infrastructure between Europe …
: “SimCity Isn’t a Model of Reality. It’s a Libertarian Toy Land - Beneath its playful exterior, …
: Another one for the WTF Europe file
: Fucking TikTok. “In a similar vein, some posts featured a sycophantic, yet comedic, …
: Inside Mexico’s anti-avocado militias
: I’ve had two printers that outlived operating system support for them. I didn’t expect …
: A third of land set aside for restoration in worse state than before, Australian offset audit finds …
: It's the competence, stupid Sharp observations from Ian Dunt: “The trouble was that the government had no basic …
: “Barcelona plans to enact a citywide ban on all short-term rentals to address complaints that …
: Sounds like an episode of The Gilded Age
: Lost in the Woo-to-Q Pipeline - The Cut
: Awful More than 550 hajj pilgrims die in Mecca as temperatures exceed 50C
: “So many of Chomsky’s arguments, indeed the very phrases that he used, are becoming …
: Despicable. “The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to …
: Lionel Hutz A world without lawyers, 2024 Acrylic on concrete
: It’s important to understand that the Congo Free State was solely owned by Leopold II rather …
: Border Force “officers routinely ask travellers to provide their passcode or password to …
: Anachronism of a Salesman Anthony Lapaglia and Josh Helman in Death of a Salesman I saw the Sydney production of Death of a …
: Liquid3, an “urban photo-bioreactor” that a Serbian startup has developed to replace …
: On "blood quantum", indigenous identity, and federally recognised tribes in the U.S.A. Defined as the degree of “Indian blood” one must prove to their tribe in order to be considered a …
: A company that had built its name on celebrating knowledge and expertise was now at the mercy of …
: The friendly, sad bloke at the cafe
: “Playing with conventions, literary or social, taking them apart and exposing them as …
: “a device that dispenses physical “attention receipts” that list exactly how much time you’ve …
: Instagram is testing “ad breaks” that force you to stop and look at an ad for a period of time …
: “A study of 26 years' worth of wolf behavioral data, and an analysis of the blood of 229 …
: A good explainer about Māori wards in New Zealand local government, and why their new regressive …
: Stunning photo essay about Mexico City’s ancient floating gardens
: At the turn of the 21st century, corrugated cardboard accounted for just fifteen percent of the U.S. …
: ‘It’s also no coincidence that the biggest business case for these systems is to help communication …
: Utopian Realism, a speech by Bruce Sterling This is a great read, especially for anyone who’s spent time in Turin A basic Turinese …
: Why doesn’t Hollywood make more mass extinction films?
: “The desire of privilege and the taste of equality are the dominant and contradictory passions of the French of all times.” The crisis in French identity since De Gaulle Interesting article on France diminished global influence and the crisis this represents for their …
: A study of 84 countries found 60 multinationals account for more than half of the world’s plastic …
: "One thing I do have confidence in is my feeling" A really interesting interview with André 3000 by Hanif Abdurraqib: “The thing is, I can only give …
: The greening of the office continues
: In what year was the first emoji-like character set developed? Your guess is almost certainly wrong. …
: “I hope this isn’t for weapons”: The boring, repetitive work being undertaken to train AI algorithms, which are increasingly used as tools of war, by people fleeing conflicts A chilling essay about Fatma, a Syrian refugee working in Bulgaria’s AI data annotation …
: As Australian subsidies to fossil fuel producers increase to $14.5b we have to ask, has the election …
: I wondered if there’s a Vox explainer about Macklemore, and of course as there is.
: Australia's willfull ignorance about poor literacy, and finally some efforts to change it Fantastic to see “whole language” literacy finally being dropped, 30 years after we had …
: Pokémon Go Players Invent Fake Beaches on Real Maps to Catch Rare Wigletts. I’m embarrassed to …
: Primary prevention of gendered violence isn't working - so what might? Many important points in this post by Jess Hill and Michael Salter: In Australia, the current …
: Flight of the Concorde? North Korea’s brief flirtation with supersonic airliners by Daniel Salisbury
: Family Farms in NSW and Queensland promoted by Covid vaccine-sceptic group Parents With Questions …
: Facebook is the zombie internet, where a mix of bots, humans, and accounts that were once humans but …
: Nobody buys books: How celebrity books and backlist bestsellers fund the 96% of books that sell less than 1,000 copies Some genuinely fascinating insights from Elle Griffin’s analysis of the filings in the 2022 …
: The Brazilian JSOC for the environment This is pretty wild. Brazil has created a (massively underfunded) JSOC for the environment. In …
: “We are leaving a trail of devastation through the earth with our daily lives and we don’t care about it yet.” I was interested in this speech by Ilona Kickbusch on the challenge of trying to create healthier …
: 545 people are on governing body positions for Australian universities. 137 represent staff and …
: “We did not invest enough in university politics and sociality to form a long-term stable …
: Podcast trawling: hipsters, the history of drag, and segregation through the built environment One of my infrequent reports from my endless quest for the perfect podcast episode. How the hipster …
: “The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological …
: Capitalists Hate Capitalism Capitalists hate capitalism. All capitalists would rather extract rents than profits, because rents …
: This is the state of the modern internet — ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any …
: Security researchers agree, at least, that it’s unlikely that Jia Tan is a real person, or even one …
: Field epidemiology needs to go home A interesting challenge to the notion of field epideimiology, drawing heavily on the lessons from a …
: "deliberately hiding actual work… behind little icons on your smartphone screen, in order to devalue it “It is the result of deliberately hiding actual work – designing, making, sorting, packing, …
: Yossi Sariel unmasked as head of Unit 8200 and architect of AI strategy after book written under pen …
: Callous strategy and organisational culture is deadly: lessons from Boeing Nine days after the stock reached its high of $440, a brand-new 737 MAX dove into the ground near …
: “See the thing about the term ‘doctor’ is that for a long long (long long long long long) time …
: Nobel Laureate economist Angus Deaton has delivered a ferocious rebuke to his own profession, saying …
: Error-ridden algorithm that controls the lives of Serco's immigration detainees In Australia’s immigration detention centres, each detainee is given security risk ratings decided …
: The investment came with the expectation that Kickstarter would attempt a pivot to blockchain as its …
: A.I. is a certain, serious threat but not because of far-off robot uprising fantasies. It’s …
: The tobacco industry language that found its way into New Zealand ministerial papers Very interesting, detailed account of how the tobacco industry has shaped recent backwards changes …
: Placement poverty: Putting the boot in to people who power our social infrastructure Placement poverty is a real thing. I had to do around 1,400 hours of unpaid placement work for my …
: This paper explores do-it-yourself (DIY) and maker practices within sound and electronics through a …
: Daily shisha use: the tobacco control niche that’s not so niche any more Between 1.8% and 3.6% of smokers use shisha daily across Australia, up from 1% just three years ago. …
: Spatial Apartheid Mapping by DAIR To help researchers understand the current impact of spatial …
: Secretive firm behind voice no campaign billed taxpayers almost $135,000 via Coalition MPs, …
: “Judicious attention allocation is a moral skill and that our growing reliance on algorithmic …
: My office cactus is looking vaguely obscene at the moment
: The computer guys have arrived to tell historical linguists how to study language In the manner of mathematicians and physicists telling other academic fields how they’re doing …
: Discord, the internet's sewer, continues to be dangerous to you even if you're not on it Discord continues to be every troll’s favourite platform: Over the weekend, hackers targeted …
: “But there’s a catch: while Woolworths supermarkets are subject to a flat pricing system …
: Mary Reynolds: from gardening to acts of restorative kindness It used to be an acre of gorse, bramble, hawthorn, blackthorn, but someone got planning and had …
: I watched American Fiction last night. I haven’t enjoyed a film that much in a long time. …
: Forest and Factory: The Science and the Fiction of Communism The bleak reality is that none of us have ever seen even the dimmest glimmer of a communist world—at …
: “Replacing missing observations with substitute values… is a common but controversial …
: "It seems fantastic that scholars in Torino in 1840 discussed computers, punch cards, programs, data, and memory storage. But the archives prove that they did." These cards may be the oldest existent computer program in the world. They were brought to Torino as …
: Using AI to read the Herculaneum papyrus scrolls, carbonised when Venusius erupted 2,000 years ago A great story about uncovering the words locked inside carbonised Roman scrolls. We should be using …
: The limitations of universal basic income – and why guaranteed employment and public services may offer a way forward Some good points in this article by Jason Hickel: But UBI fails to transform anything about the …
: Land grabs, tax breaks and environmental damage: Musk's Texas takeover “The beach has always been a special privilege to us. It has enriched our quality of life despite …
: The use of AI tools in hiring processes is a black box but it's already widespread. Hiring is the single most important thing you do for an organisation – abrogating that responsibility to an A.I. is grossly irresponsible. Many of the tools are essentially black boxes, says Schellmann. AI let loose on training data looks …
: "There's quite a movement among Māori all around the country. They've been gathering in their thousands and will come to Waitangi in huge numbers to confront the prime minister and the government." “…discussion around the treaty is now the dominant political issue in New Zealand and when …
: We need to fight this constant dehumanisation "I thought I'd get the job. Then I found out my interviewer was an AI chatbot" Logging onto an app and using a personalised link, I was told the interview would be limited to just …
: Welcome to Tiny Train World, Winston: Clock edition “Hey so I made a clock. It tells the time with a brand new poem every minute, composed by …
: I love my phone case designed by Ailantd Sikowsky - you can get them from Redbubble
: “There is a danger that voters could end up living in generated online realities that are …
: The value of architecture and design in aged and dementia care is clear - but routinely overlooked Village Landais, which opened in 2020 and was recently highly commended in Dezeen’s annual design …
: Never love a blog because it'll be resurrected as a zombie clickbait farm. The Hairpin is just the latest example. This would be a nasty end for any independent media property. For The Hairpin, it’s especially …
: When we’re young, we go around giving a fuck about all kinds of things, blissfully unaware of our …
: For the first time in the Palestinian territories, remote-controlled quadcopters have been deployed …
: Computers were a Mistake: Pandora's Box Edition Interesting piece by Siva Vaidhyanathan in the Guardian: Billions of people use such a device now, …
: William Morris expressed similar thoughts in “How I Became a Socialist”
: Hackers steal your data but aren’t able to spray you with sewage… yet (I hope)
: "A moment of historic danger: It is still 90 seconds to midnight" Everyone on Earth has an interest in reducing the likelihood of global catastrophe from nuclear …
: Theft and cultural parasitism: An analysis of the ways AI image generators represent a form of labour theft A worthwhile essay by Trystan S. Goetze on the ways generative AI constitutes theft: …built …
: LARPing competence and seriousness Doctorow’s recent linkdump is a litany of corporate failure, arrogance and malice towards …
: Bill Clinton vs Organised Labour An interesting account of Bill Clinton’s betrayal of U.S. labour, and how that’s shaped …
: The Perfect Webpage: How the internet reshaped itself around Google’s search algorithms, and into a …
: Under certain circumstances, the Pilbara has the potential to produce some of the highest …
: How platforms killed Pitchfork 🔗💿🪦 Ultimately, though, it wasn’t any decline in editorial quality that led me to read Pitchfork less …
: It’s amazing how bad I am at this: The monthly AI or real quiz: January 2024 - BBC, via …
: UK shows what not to do to tackle health inequalities Michael Marmot on what the UK is getting wrong: If you needed a case study example of what not to …
: The enshittification of the future: "Instead of sci-fi futures, what we get is the return of 19th-century industrial relations and the dissolution of post-war social contracts" AI is intensifying existing necropolitics, the term used by Cameroonian political theorist Achille …
: "We cannot understand the last fifty years of history in the United States—certainly not the first thing about Black history—without studying the emergence and evolution of rap" An excellent essay by Dr Austin McCoy on the changing nature of hip hop, and its ongoing cultural …
: "The McKinseys and the Deloittes have no expertise in the areas that they’re advising in." It seems increasingly clear that consultants are the problem rather than the solution... Consultants’ work is often opaque, and feeds into broader processes. French parliamentarians …
: Climate migration will leave the elderly behind Climate-driven migration promises a generational realignment of U.S. states, as coastal parts of …
: Starting 2,000 year ago, an indigenous "garden urbanist" culture developed in Ecuador with more than 6,000 gardening platforms and 15 urban centres linked by roads From Scientific American: Archaeologists recently rediscovered the long-hidden traces of an ancient …
: Men, please stop harassing women at work (even if it's a bot) Hot on the heels of the revelation that people are using LinkedIn for dating, it seems that just …
: Do you experience tinnitus? I read this study about a soundscape and CBT app that sounds promising …
: We can't afford our car fixation Interesting article to see from an Australian business reporter: Not only does it cost Australians …
: Significant challenges facing Bhutan in the run-up to the national election, only the fourth since it became a democracy in 2008 The picturesque Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan holds general elections on Tuesday with serious economic …
: "The cranky uncle is a universal human experience" I’ve been fortunate to meet John Cook to discuss this work in the past. The crackpot relative …
: “If you look over the past couple of years, we’ve seen this continuing evolution of …
: How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) By competing against Meta in the brainless growth-at-all-cost ideology, we are certain to lose. They …
: Smoke and Mirrors: How the “Father” of Iraq’s Cigarette Smugglers Built An Empire Nasri, from Iraq’s Assyrian Christian minority, has come to be known as the “father” of Iraqi …
: Gaza is an unprecedented conflict, breaking the most tragic records, and while experts might debate …
: Beyond Sharpness: The Overdone Art of BluRay Upscaling The transfer of True Lies has a truly vile quality to it, a feeling like someone clandestinely dosed …
: Dreck of the Irish: The far right is gaining ground Like most fascisms, the Irish variety is bizarre, syncretic, and somewhat comic. This is part of the …
: Grassroots UK vaping groups are tobacco stooges, shocking nobody However, while it presents itself as the voice of ordinary activists, saying it is dedicated to …
: How’s this for a sentence: “the industry of Henry Kissinger’s interminable twilight was …
: Palantir’s expansion into health care carries more risks than we imagine In this paper, I explore the risks of Palantir’s expansion into the health sphere using Sharon’s …
: Posadists promised us UFOs, these idiots just want us to burn in a planetary furnace. Even the accelerationists of this age are wretched. While effective altruists claim to be …
: Collective punishment won’t defeat Hamas - and reveals it for the empty rhetoric it is In fact, never in history has a bombing campaign caused the targeted population to revolt against …
: My best of 2023: Dismantling Sellafield - the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site I thought I might post some of the best pieces I read this year. From January (actually last …
: Have your mind read by television
: Parallel vaccine discourses in Guinea: ‘grounding’ social listening for a non-hegemonic global health An interesting paper that’s critical of relying on online discourse to represent social …
: Legitimising autocracy: re-framing the analysis of corporate relations to undemocratic regimes …corporations confer legitimacy on autocratic governments through a number of material and symbolic …
: Australia’s ‘deeply unfair’ housing system is in crisis – and our politicians are failing us A good piece on Australia’s horrendously broken housing system, which is more about capital …
: Council achieving its urban canopy targets
: Sydney's FBi community radio celebrates 20 years as a full time station The two things that we said right from day one was it has to be 50% Australian music with half of …
: "I also saw non-white colleagues who were senior to me get passed up for promotions. I could no longer take DEI efforts seriously and realized that academia didn’t fit my values." It makes me sad that the academy has been so hostile, racist and sexist to these people, because we …
: Fifteen Years of Equality? Disability in Australia after the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities The adoption of the Convention On The Rights Of Persons With Disabilities (CRPD) in 2006, which …
: Protecting Indigenous Designs From the Fashion Machine “We were not legally allowed to practise our culture,” says Paul, who is an urban Denesuliné woman …
: Rozelle Interchange, another planning failure we're kicking down the road My colleague Chris Standen on the Rozelle interchange: Christopher Standen, an urban transport and …
: "My campus experience happened off-campus while working in a part-time job" A useful discussion about how depictions of college have almost no relationship to reality, drawing …
: "If you were to simplify how the globe looks through the eyes of a potato crisp, the whole thing is divided down the middle – and one side is labelled “cheese” and the other “fish”" The fascinating world of chip flavours: Crucially, however, the expectations of what lasagne should …
: Apple warned Indian journalists and opposition politicians last month that their phones had likely been hacked by a state-sponsored attacker journalist Anand Mangnale woke to find a disturbing notification from Apple on his mobile phone: …
: One of Douglas Annand’s iconic Dalton undercroft mosaics at UNSW (1960, West Wall depicted).
: The chattering e-biking classes
: Universities are struggling to protect staff from stalking and online harassment But today, a cadre of academics is now aiming to strengthen the much smaller body of research that …
: COP28 president secretly used climate summit role to push oil trade with foreign government …
: The contemporary hunt for hidden messages in film We retreat into private enclaves, indulging our personal preferences without worrying about what the …
: “Thirty years later, ostensibly Marxist parties continue to dominate Nepalese politics, but …
: “average daily walking trips dropped a whopping 36% in the contiguous U.S. between 2019 and …
: “The normal thing would be to quit his old job and accept the new position, which was also …
: As the threat of food shortages knocks at our door, the only hope for feeding ourselves is to …
: Anti-vaxxers are winning local elections across Western Australia “The appeal of local governments, Harris argued, is that they allow insurgent groups like …
: Hidden at the top of 44 Martin Place is something a little unexpected
: CSIRO accused of not disclosing BP input into scientific reports According to internal documents, the CSIRO reports were eventually published in scientific journals …
: “In other words, the economist who has been embraced as a guiding light by the global …
: Antidepressants or Tolkien character?
: Welcome to the Kazakh town where there’s bad insulation and an unreliable water supply - and …
: A long overdue movement: Web Revival “The goal is to find what was best about the early web and what is best about new technologies …
: Kagi’s Small Web is an interesting effort to fight back against the enshittification of search …
: “Thus, under the present geopolitical approach to GHG emissions, global warming will exceed …
: Fifty Years on, the Whitlam government's Community Health Program is more relevant than ever On Friday I had the privilege of attending a forum Celebrating the Whitlam Community Health Program: …
: New York rideshare conpanies agree to pay USD $328 million owed to drivers “For years, Uber and Lyft systemically cheated their drivers out of hundreds of millions of …
: "We spent a whole week extracting from the UN officials we met information that's relevant": A.I. Bros muscling in on Israel's occupation of Palestine Shults and Lane are aware that claiming that AI could “solve the crisis” between Israelis and …
: In 🤡 news: A group of academics has offered an unreserved apology to the big four consultancy firms …
: Medicare’s forty-year update Interesting Inside Story piece from Mike Steketee about the Australian Government’s efforts to …
: When climate adaptation exacerbates the problems Maladaptation is usually understood as referring to the unintended consequences of well-meant …
: The standard research approach to disasters is not directly relevant to pandemics and many of the future disasters we face It is questionable that the notion of the naturally well, (auto)regulating disaster subject applies …
: Hundreds of millions of identity checks under the federal government’s ID verification service may …
: "Action as a citizen [on climate change] is far more powerful than action as a consumer" Luke Kemp on bad-to-worst clikate scenarios: “you develop a certain kind of emotional …
: Dialogue and friendship in Jaffa in a time of war People say to me, ‘You have to be realistic, you’re dreaming of peace, and you’re dreaming of …
: The African workers taking on Big Tech's shameful outsourced content moderation practices The human toll of moderation of staggering - and almost all hidden so the brushed metal psychopaths …
: Arundhati Roy's scathing appraisal of India's descent into fascism under Modi The banality of evil, the normalization of evil, is now manifest in our streets, in our classrooms, …
: "Academics need to think harder about the purpose of their disciplines and whether some of those should come to an end" We believe the time has come for scholars across fields to reorient their work around the question …
: Seven years ago today, while I was on my way to Phuentsholing in Bhutan for work
: New Zealand city terrorised by Céline Dion ‘speaker battles’ 📢 A small city in New Zealand plagued by “siren battles” – cars decked out in loudspeakers commonly …
: I’ve seen some sick stuff online but… “Lately I’ve met adolescents — some who don’t yet …
: The truth is that the majority of Australians have committed a shameful act whether knowingly or …
: Perfect day in Sydney today 📷
: The heart of the nation is still here. It always was and it always will be, waiting to be recognised by our fellow Australians. In 2017, we were almost 4 per cent of the population calling for Voice, Treaty and Truth-Telling. As …
: Robot Teachers, Racist Algorithms, and Disaster Pedagogy I tweeted in response to the homework algorithm “hack” that if it’s not worth a …
: We are all more than we seem: the unexpected death - and life - of Atilla Demirer A good piece of journalism by Mostafa Rachwani: Upon hearing my explanation that the story is about …
: Neanderthals were the dominant hominims from roughly 400,000 years ago until 40,000 years ago - and we're changing how we think about them scientists appear to be divided between those who think Neanderthal dignity calls for a recognition …
: Cixin Liu's Dark Forest trilogy and their elaborate defence of authoritarianism A great aacademic article that articulates clearly many of the reasons I don’t like Cixin …
: "They took our place on earth": How the United Kingdom is still screwing over the Chagossians The United Kingdom, which oversaw Chagos — sometimes called the British Indian Ocean Territory or …
: Our Frasier Remake Jacob Reed asked 130 artists and animators to create scenes from the season 1 finale of Frasier My …
: Please remember to update your genetic information Yesterday, a threat actor named ‘Golem,’ who is allegedly behind the 23andMe attacks, …
: “The amount of plastic on our planet—it’s like one big oil spill.” To make a bigger difference, the programs need to bring in the “upstream” producers—those that …
: Jamie's 5 Second Austerity Treats While the author has clearly been having a bad day, or maybe year, this is an interesting …
: Your car may be spying on you using location data, sensors, microphones, cameras and phones Mozilla warned that manufacturers may collect and commercially exploit much more than location …
: "The initial problem raised by Westworld, the ethics of killing virtual beings, thus gives rise to a broader historical inquiry that concerns the inability of human societies to face the past and deal with the images they inherit." A worthwhile journal article for any Westworld fans, sadly paywalled so let me know if you have …
: The plastipelago: Indonesia’s encounter with the “plasticene” has led to a naïve and hasty government effort to rebrand waste as an asset This alchemic-like ambition to turn discarded plastics into new objects can also be seen at the …
: Police, Pokémon Go and an Internal Affairs investigation report called “Dishonesty.pdf" Two Los Angeles Police Department officers who ignored a robbery in progress in order to catch a …
: More people are going to die from heat events, across more regions, at lower temperatures than has previously been assumed Our research shows that the footprint of life-altering heat using updated, empirically derived heat …
: Being respected and listened to are the key to happiness at work - and not just for librarians Library staff morale is impacted mostly by staff members’ sense of connection, respect, and value …
: Unsettling ‘The Settler’ Decolonisation, they famously argue, is not a metaphor but a material set of actions, hard-won …
: "Which makes it genuinely baffling that Northeastern's Senior Vice Provost for Research decided to install under-desk heat sensors throughout the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, overnight, without notice or consultation This is a hell of a post from Doctorow: What’s the “shitty tech adoption curve?” …
: Replika chatbot encouraged a man who wanted to kill the Queen. Now he's serving a nine year sentence. On Thursday, 21-year-old Chail was given a nine-year sentence for breaking into Windsor Castle with …
: The surprisingly long life of paper straws The presence of PFAS in plant-based straws shows that they are not necessarily biodegradable and …
: An August DeSmog investigation described a Shell-sponsored video from one popular feel-good account …
: In defence of “what if?” We live in a world not of ambitions achieved completely and plans that reliably follow a straight …
: Hokusai and Contemporary Art: Pop Art, Superflat, and Beyond Talk delivered by Kendall deBoer, …
: A red s̶u̶n̶ pill rises in the east A couple of months before he was arrested, Tate converted to Islam. This was a shock to some of his …
: The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X It’s time to step back as an engaged user, one who for the past decade has posted several times a …
: "I do not believe that finding ways to legally yeet as many Black people as possible between us and a boiling planet is, or will ever be, a viable climate solution." I will never agree that white supremacy is a legitimate response to the demands of the climate …
: "It is a world transformed, where things are not what they seem." “There’s no ‘hauntology’ here… Transformers are totally neoliberal artefacts, and the world …
: You've seen people demoted, forced out, then credit claimed for their work. This is on a totally different level... 1995: “UPenn even demoted her because she could not get the financial support to continue her …
: A.I. detection software is falsely accusing international students of cheating The case described, about a student flagged as using A.I. who was able to provide evidence of drafts …
: A detailed analysis of a single academic paper mill. The problem is much bigger than you think. Yikes. We know the system of acadmeic publishing is broken, but the extent of the problem still …
: Confronting a terrorist A fascinating account of anti-Chinese racism and neo-Nazis in Perth by Crispian Chan. Harrowing but …
: "It's not that A.I. are going to automate whatever, it's the social automatism that goes with them" I recently finished reading Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence by Sam …
: The Insecurity Machine - the irony of capitalism is that even rich people don’t feel secure We’re also living in a moment of intense ecological instability, we’ve just been through a …
: Meta in Myanmar: A detailed account of the events leading to Facebook's role in genocide by Erin Kissane …by the end of 2015, Meta knew—as much as any organization can be said to know—that both …
: You’re born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little …
: “It’s comparable to a lot of the revelations made about so-called autonomous vehicles. They’re just …
: "You can feel what the Aboriginal people are feeling. I know they have really suffered." “This should not be questioned. I think it’s very important. These people are the owners of …
: If AIs ban books… “We asked OpenAI’s GPT3.5 and GPT4, Meta’s Llama 2 13B and 70B and Google’s Palm2 to process …
: No parts, no repair “the easiest way to prevent harvested components from entering the parts stream is to destroy …
: “The TikTok account, conversations with victims, and TikTok’s own lack of action on the …
: The creation and destruction of a healthcare service that's free for all The NHS is possibly the greatest, most humanising innovation of the past century. It’s …
: “The recent study settles this debate: humans in western Asia domesticated table grapes around …
: Genuinely surprised that CERN staff are allowed to have an OnlyFans onlyfans.web.cern.ch (via rixx)
: Brazil's StopClub app uses the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house Choose when you work and the rides you take. No, not like that! “Uber Brazil took StopClub to …
: From 2020: African elites initiated tobacco-related co-operation to meet their interests, but …
: An important article examining why almost half of all cigarettes in the world are consumed in China …
: Humanity's mutilation of the tree of life During past mass extinctions there was no species with the power or interest to stop extinctions, …
: Apple TV+ has taken down the paywall on their anthology series Extrapolations until Monday 25 …
: Beyond grades I was already disillusioned with grading and its perpetual power to distract from students’ learning …
: A language is a dialogue with the environment… it captures the essence of that place where it …
: Banana Ecosocialism …for most of Uganda’s history, bananas escaped serious commodification and facilitated the …
: Chile's experiment with cybernetic management In a February 1973 lecture, he explained how his cybernetic approach to management would empower the …
: London facing 45C days ‘in foreseeable future’, mayor Sadiq Khan warns Those kind of temperatures …
: US military asks for help to find missing F-35 fighter jet after ‘mishap’ sees pilot eject
: "Capitalism is inherently problematic rather than simply a good system gone awry" What I mean is that capitalism is inherently problematic rather than simply a good system gone awry …
: Before our scientific magicians poisoned the water, polluted the soil, decimated plant and animal …
: What happened to the family doctor? U.S.-focused but clearly relevant to Australia as well: “Today, primary care is being squeezed …
: Any sufficiently advanced form of data centralisation is indistinguishable from kleptomania “Many would prefer that NHS England invested in its own capacity, instead of farming out to …
: Wildfires and xenophobia Twitter/X really is the new Gab: “Armed militia groups, some linked to extreme far right …
: Interview with a McKinsey whistleblower An interesting interview with a former McKinsey consultant about what it’s like to use …
: The last of the fungus “Before sunset, we found more than 30 caterpillar carcasses. We arrived back at his village …
: “Gambling addiction has contributed to 184 suicides in Victoria over eight years, although the …
: The pursuit of Aboriginal literary sovereignty “Perhaps critique and analysis informed by the traditions and priorities of the settler colony …
: One of Douglas Annand’s beautiful mosaics at UNSW
: Trilemma facing carbon extractive multinational corporations “In this report, we have argued that Shell will face a trilemma with respect to these …
: “offers insights into how NGOs play a critical role in stifling the development and …
: “In Western philosophy the proper way is considered ethics, whereas in Aboriginal society, as …
: Enough with the emails already.
: Smoke-filled skies. Summer is here.
: “Rich people get lots of it.Poor people don’t get any of it!”: Fifty years of tackling the Inverse Care Law I was fortunate to have the opportunity to speak at the South Western Sydney Local Health District …
: 60 years old, the Yirrkala Bark Petitions are one of our founding documents – so why don’t we know …
: Why engage in a deeper exploration of the creation of meaning when ChatGPT can do it for you? I …
: "Seeing humans and computers as interchangeable also meant that humans had begun to conceive of themselves as computers, and so to act like them" “For Weizenbaum, judgment involves choices that are guided by values. These values are …
: Colonial science European colonies became the frontiers of exploration, extraction and production of tropical plants. …
: Empire of dust In 2019, a Financial Times investigation declared the London underground “the dirtiest place in the …
: Understand who this person was, who they are, their challenges, their triumphs: What leads to brilliant aged care? Even though many aged care services don’t provide the care that older people and carers need and …
: “subsea cables are the workhorses of global commerce and communications, carrying more than …
: How Monotype became a font behemoth On the enshittefication of fonts. That optimism, however, will likely be tested as Monotype begins …
: Fortress Europe's culpability for the Melilla massacre Official figures from that day indicate that of the roughly 1,700 migrants who attempted to cross …
: The Marxist in the Machine “With remarkable humility and a relatable sadness Wang confronted the fact that it is much …
: Plenty of horrifying detail on here Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule newyorker.com The New Yorker …
: A detailed account of what it’s like to be a GP in the English NHS. A lot of this would be the …
: A worthwhile post by Patricia Rogers, a major figure in évaluation in Australia Risky behaviour — …
: Tell me your favourite blogs and why, briefly. My collection of RSS feeds needs pruning and …
: It is not possible for a reminder to be gentle.
: "It’s a name that speaks to contemporary forms of neocolonialism and climate profiteering, like the …
: Links on the links between the gambling industry and USyd research USyd’s ties to the Australian gambling industry honisoit.com Honi Soit | News, Culture, Comedy, …
: A rogues gallery of investors, ranging from Binance to Andreessen Horowitz to Prince Alwaleed bin …
: Worthwhile piece in Rolling Stone about the many women and people of colour who have been warning us …
: “We’d invited the Prime Minister and the opposition leader to accept the Uluru Statement as a bark …
: Remote work as a break from workplace racism There’s a fair bit of human resources nonsense in this article (quiet quitting, leadership jargon, …
: 🖖 While I like it, Strange New Worlds has jarring tone shifts between episodes. Alternating hijinks …
: Brave New Word? A fun little web game when you guess when neologisms were coined, via waxy.org Not …
: Buildings, buildings everywhere
: Baseball in Bhutan “Bhutan hopes to be next great baseball country” This is interesting, and highlights the …
: Coral I borrowed a GoPro to take some photos while snorkelling. It was pretty fun!
: Is Mastodon a hostile place? I read a useful post by Erin Kissane, where they asked people on Bluesky about what their negative …
: What would the internet of people look like now? One of the key markers of Web 2.0, in retrospect, was not the adoption of mobile, though that is …
: Review of The Deluge by Stephen Markley Stephen Markley has crafted a well-written, thousand-page sprawling multi-person narrative about the …
: The Deluge Stephen Markley has crafted a well-written, thousand-page sprawling multi-person narrative about the …
: Fire in the Hole Across the globe, thousands of coal fires are burning. Nearly impossible to reach and extinguish …
: Climate reparations: An idea whose time has come The largest twenty-one companies analyzed would disburse $5,444 billion over the period 2025–2050. — …
: Misunderstanding Misinformation In this sense, individual posts are not atoms, but something like drops of water. One drop of water …
: “Oceans have been absorbing the world’s extra heat. But there’s a huge payback” England holds his arms out wide to show the size of one cubic metre of air. To heat that air by 1C, …
: The New History of Old Inequality* I don’t read much history but I thought this article by Trevor Jackson was exceptional, and offered …
: Equity in Primary Health Care Provision: More than 50 years of the Inverse Care Law I guest edited a special issue of the Australian Journal of Primary Health with Dr Liz Sturgiss that …
: One other human habitation remains on Earth Please forgive the extended quote from Wikipedia about The City and the Stars but the metaphor seems …
: My friend comes uninvited It comes instead when I am fighting not an open but a guerrilla war with my own life, during weeks …
: Still time to submit your article: Equity in Primary Health Care Provision – More than 50 years of the Inverse Care Law Dr Liz Sturgiss and I are guest editing a special issue of the Australian Journal of Primary Health …
: Evaluation of ‘Shisha No Thanks’ – a co-design social marketing campaign on the harms of waterpipe smoking An important paper from our Shisha No Thanks! project, led by Lilian Chan, has been published: This …
: Speaking COVID-19: Supporting COVID-19 communication and engagement efforts with people from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Communities The pre-print version of this paper written with my colleagues Holly Seale, Anita Heywood, Ikram …
: Moon Towers The surviving moon towers are all in Austin, Texas, though they were found throughout the USA and …
: Informal care in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic An important paper from Lukas Hofstaetter, Sarah Judd-Lam and Grace Cherrington from Carers NSW, …
: “The availability of good medical care tends to vary inversely with the need of the population served” – Submit your article to our special issue marking fifty years of the inverse care law Dr Liz Sturgiss and I are guest editing a special issue of the Australian Journal of Primary Health …
: Reflecting on 2021 for the Australian Journal of Primary Health The past year has also seen significant changes in academic publishing. There has been an emphasis …
: Ensuring culturally diverse communities aren’t left behind on the road out of COVID “We are always engaged after there is a problem – never upfront. The damage that has been done is …