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Jun 20, 2025: The Ghosts in the Machine - Harpers Spotify’s lo-fi slop to mushify your brain
Jun 20, 2025: Slop wars
Jun 18, 2025: Ice on the car this morning. According to the IPCC I’m supposed to be living in one of the later Mad Max films, not Fargo.
Jun 16, 2025: Fascism as a management philosophy This paper analyses the advent of fascism as a management philosophy, and its growing influence in the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary …
Jun 14, 2025: In that moment, I was not just defending the work. I was conceding to a logic I was not fully comfortable with. The demand for a metric had begun to …
Jun 12, 2025: The first mass-casualty AI language model disaster is yet to happen The first big AI disaster will probably involve an AI agent. Any other use of AI has to involve a human-in-the-loop - the AI can provide information …
Jun 12, 2025: Buiding A.I. into everything isn’t just annoying, it’s a major new vulnerability “We found this chain of vulnerabilities that allowed us to do the equivalent of the ‘zero click’ for mobile phones, but for AI agents,” he said. …
Jun 12, 2025: “ One of the ways it’s going to destroy humans, long before there’s a nuclear disaster, is going to be the emotional hollowing-out of people.” “They’re trying to convince people they can’t do the things they’ve been doing easily for years – to write emails, to write a presentation. Your …
Jun 6, 2025: “Tesla share plunge amid Trump feud wipes $152bn off Elon Musk’s company” Reminds me of the market reaction when Richard Dawkins blocked me on …
Jun 5, 2025: Switzerland’s new surveillance plan could force encrypted service providers to build backdoors into their offerings, threatening privacy for everyone …
Jun 4, 2025: “What ultimately transpired is the closest thing to a personal episode of Black Mirror I hope to experience in this lifetime.”
Jun 2, 2025: From the “this will age well” file: “Trump Administration Will ‘Collapse’ in 30 Days, Says James Carville” Published 24 Feb 2025
Jun 2, 2025: The numbers in this story seem squidgy but the broader points remain: “use AI” is the new “learn to code”, but all the tech sector ever wants is the …
Jun 1, 2025: Kyorugi
May 28, 2025: "Part of a teacher’s job is to help students break out of their prisons, at least for an hour, so they can see and enhance the beauty of their own minds." “…the only task remains the paradoxical one identified as far back as in Plato’s Meno: Give students work they don’t know they need to do. And yes, …
May 26, 2025: "While the responses to perceived failure are different across models (Sonnet has a meltdown, o3-mini fails to call tools, Gemini falls into despair), the way they fail is usually the same." A fascinating paper the tries to get different LLM agents to run a vending machine business. In the shortest run (18 simulated days), the model fails …
May 25, 2025: A new room for a doomed loom – and the battle to save Australia’s slowly dying crafts | Australian education – The Guardian the episode felt like “a …
May 24, 2025: …the very language of development was transformed. Buzzwords like “empowerment,” “capacity-building,” and “participation” were stripped of political …
May 23, 2025: Anthropic’s new AI model turns to blackmail when engineers try to take it offline
May 21, 2025: Restaurant automation gives a glimpse into our working future: precarity, less respect for quality and experience, and more demands on humans Since the automation, the kitchen is usually calm. Park no longer cooks. She monitors the machines, fixes glitches, restocks ingredients, and scrubs …
May 21, 2025: Paper showing LLMs have a “tendency to extrapolate scientific results beyond the claims found in the material” study is the first to systematically evaluate whether prominent LLMs, including ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Claude, faithfully summarize scientific claims …
May 20, 2025: Despite the fawning coverage of Bluesky, it sounds an awful lot like old social media Q: How do you plan to make money? A: Subscriptions are coming soon. The next steps are to look into what marketplaces can span these different …
May 18, 2025: …how automation unfolds, who decides and benefits, and how implementation can truly advance innovation, productivity, and human flourishing UBI proposals serve a deceptive function in labor automation discourse—the proposal is positioned by tech elites as a progressive solution while its …
May 16, 2025: AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state Chatbots, likewise, escalate the risks of typical online secret-sharing. Their conversational design can draw out private information in a format …
May 15, 2025: Started work in 1977 and still refuses to retire. I’m so sick of this.
May 13, 2025: Beyond Redistribution: Rethinking UBI and the politics of automation However, within the automation discourse, UBI proposals also function to smooth over, and thereby naturalize, human displacement. UBI exists within a …
May 9, 2025: Parking at hospitals has been a disaster for my entire career but it’s getting worse and actively harms patients and their families/supporters. As the …
May 6, 2025: What’s the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT? Unless you’re an extreme power user, asking AI questions every day is still a rounding error on your …
May 1, 2025: “Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20% to 30% of code inside the company’s repositories was “written by software” — meaning A.I." Sadly this only …
Apr 28, 2025: University of Zürich researchers undertake an ethically shady experiment on a subreddit involving the use of A.I.-generated comments. Astonishingly …
Apr 28, 2025: Welcome to the semantic apocalypse Way back in 2019, when AI was still a relatively niche topic, and only the primitive GPT-2 had been released, I predicted the technology would usher …
Apr 26, 2025: What’s the bet they’re going to try to rent it as-is?
Apr 26, 2025: Has anyone written an oral history of the Whirlpoool forums yet?
Apr 26, 2025: More than 2,200 jobs being cut across Australian universities. It was only a few years ago more that 17,000 were lost during COVID.
Apr 25, 2025: “Maashorst council says [Andy Warhol’s] print of Queen Beatrix from 1985 series Reigning Queens probably taken with the rubbish” - The Guardian
Apr 24, 2025: U.S. National Institutes of Health guts its first and largest study centered on women - Science.org
Apr 24, 2025: Beautiful work by Julian Fell and Simon Elvery with this visual storytelling: Over five decades, here’s how voters have shifted away from the major …
Apr 20, 2025: Fascinating Bandcanp Daily post on the pioneers of computer music via Bruce Sterling
Apr 20, 2025: Happy Easter to those who partake
Apr 19, 2025: Which Australian members of parliament consistently voted for compulsory income management for welfare recipients? Interesting list.
Apr 15, 2025: Turmoil has engulfed the Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying nations is in dispute. We argue instead that populism must be understood as a specific political discourse, a way to articulate all kinds of policies – liberal or …
Apr 13, 2025: “The problem is, these code suggestions often include hallucinated package names that sound real but don’t exist. I’ve seen this firsthand. You paste …
Apr 13, 2025: The stunning autumn days will continue until morale improves.
Apr 13, 2025: How people (on reddit) are using A.I. in 2025 I’m always surprised, given its influence, that HBR remains an evidence-free zone. For example this article makes expansive pronouncements about how …
Apr 11, 2025: An interesting discussion about the pitfalls Big Tech geopolitics and alternate futures that might be possible Looking ahead, the AI Iron Curtain appears likely to extend into space. For instance, China’s Chang’e 6 Lunar Exploration Mission returned first-ever …
Apr 9, 2025: “Their ambulances were crushed and partly buried. Nearby were their bodies – also buried, en masse, in the sand. Our dead colleagues were still …
Apr 5, 2025: “It’s one part of a very cruel puzzle.” Inhumane prison hulks return from Australia’s past to its present.
Apr 5, 2025: Visiting other studio photographers in Lagos, he kept getting the same response: they had all destroyed their negatives. Digital photography had …
Apr 4, 2025: On murmuration
Apr 3, 2025: I’m a trade policy advisor, ask me anything.
Apr 2, 2025: I rewatched V for Vendetta for the first time since it was in cinemas. I wondered “what did old mate Roger Ebert’s make of it”. Not quite what I was …
Apr 1, 2025: 18 years old. I know he won’t be around much longer but I’m grateful he is.
Apr 1, 2025: Technical and lengthy but super-interesting: Cryptocurrency and Extremism: How Social Network Analysis is Used to Track Extremist Cryptocurrency …
Apr 1, 2025: The point here is that the artificial intelligentsia is dragging us into an archaic future where intelligence is quantified, fixed, and ranked, and …
Mar 30, 2025: Police broke into a Quaker Meeting House last night (27 March) and arrested six young people holding a meeting over concerns for the climate and Gaza
Mar 23, 2025: This was mooted but the detail seems even worse than feared. It’s not really about DEI per se - it’s really about any research that recognises any …
Mar 21, 2025: “The IndieWeb doesn’t need to go mainstream to be meaningful. It’s a celebration of a more personal, decentralised, and creative world wide web. For …
Mar 20, 2025: "What’s the Matter with Abundance?" Malcolm Harris' worthwhile critique of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's "Abundance" Cutaway view of a toroidal colony, by Rick Guidice. Source: NASA Ames Research Center Abundance is the prefab, catch-all alternative to these forms …
Mar 19, 2025: The two-lane road to hell is paved with good intentions: why an all-or-none approach to generative AI, integrity, and assessment is insupportable Unlimited genAI use (Lane 2/All), if applied to students in their early stages of higher education, is akin to handing a teenager the keys to a …
Mar 19, 2025: The $1m cactus heist that led to a smuggler's downfall Reaching out of nooks in the cracked crust along the desert’s coast, there lie thousands of Copiapoa cacti. A cactus group made up of more than 30 …
Mar 16, 2025: Best sentence I’ve read in a while, courtesy of A S Hamrah: British movies these days—from good ones like The Old Oak to OK ones like Bird to …
Mar 16, 2025: Lists colonise the mind and impoverish the imagination. Elena Gorfinkel’s clarion “Against Lists” remains critically relevant.
Mar 15, 2025: Trump administration demands Columbia University: put an outside Chair in charge of Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies adopt a new definition …
Mar 14, 2025: U.S. researchers consider “Last week, Aix Marseille University, France’s largest university, invited American scientists who believe their work is at risk of being censored by …
Mar 12, 2025: Hairdressing sign that instils confidence
Mar 12, 2025: General practice use of A.I. scribes is already much more widespread than people realise Legal expert warns patients' medical data at risk as GPs adopt AI scribes - ABC Excellent points in this article. I’ve directly observed some cavalier …
Feb 27, 2025: Bit of an experiment tonight. I tired to imagine what Moroccan influenced pasta might look like. I think it worked pretty well - there’s the core of a …
Feb 26, 2025: Is a calculator a learning tool? I’m not being rhetorical. The AI-and-calculator metaphor is everywhere in educational assessment discussions at the …
Feb 25, 2025: “Should Australia’s GPs and patients be excited about the Medicare pledge? Yes and no” - by Mariam Tokhi, via onekind
Feb 21, 2025: I keep hearing nobody comes to campus any more
Feb 13, 2025: I don’t know if I like intermissions. A break is often welcome, but I’d rather it was on my terms (and timing).
Feb 12, 2025: “The result of Rehberger’s attack is the permanent planting of long-term memories that will be present in all future sessions, opening the potential …
Feb 8, 2025: Brainrot, 1860s edition
Feb 8, 2025: The Bridge
Feb 6, 2025: A wonderful, detailed article about Fugazi’s music and legacy. They were the first band I every saw live (someone dug up the poster but sadly not the …
Feb 5, 2025: Another busy night under the flight path
Feb 3, 2025: 😳😳😳 Bonkers The Labs also lead a comprehensive program in nuclear security, focused on reducing the risk of nuclear war and securing nuclear …
Jan 30, 2025: Living under the flight path
Jan 30, 2025: Runner
Jan 28, 2025: Take care of yourself, stay cool, and don’t be a numbnut. Check out HeatWatch for evidence-based ways to cool down.
Jan 25, 2025: Menthol cigarette ban overturned by new U.S. Administration For those who are wondering where menthol bans are coming from, they’ve been recommended …
Jan 25, 2025: Transitory
Jan 20, 2025: Engaging AI in education requires far more resources and time than anyone wants to admit. It also calls for a level of nuance we’re not going to find …
Jan 20, 2025: Who’s Afraid of the Little Red Book A really interesting and timely dive into Xiaohongshu/RedNote. “Who’s Afraid of the Little Red Book” - The China Story by Wing Kuang In the United …
Jan 19, 2025: …we compared how ants or people tackle an identical geometrical puzzle. We find that when ants work in groups, their performances rise significantly. …
Jan 17, 2025: David Lynch was a visionary in an era bereft of them I’ve read a few things about Lynch over recent years that expanded my appreciation his impact. I thought others might be interested in them following …
Jan 17, 2025: The new are hotdogs sandwiches is are lozenges soup?
Jan 13, 2025: Whenever I beat the RSS drum, someone always asks about discoverability, so I want to put this bluntly: it is through algorithmic discoverability …
Jan 12, 2025: Microsoft has partnered with a utility company to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island, the site of the worst nuclear disaster in US history - …
Jan 12, 2025: To paraphrase Frederic Jameson it seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of human knowledge than the breakdown of …
Jan 8, 2025: An important example of how public knowledge is being controlled through intimidation, doxing and brigading. Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify …
Jan 7, 2025: I really enjoyed this post/newsletter on skibidi toilet and dialectic analysis
Jan 6, 2025: Cam Wilson has taken over venerable Australian tech(ish) newsletter The Sizzle - Cam’s first issue is out today. All the best to Anthony Agius for his …
Dec 31, 2024: The two genders: Githyanki and Githzerai. (The New York Times seems unable to stop beclowning itself)
Dec 19, 2024: Michael Leunig, Australian cartoonist, dies aged 79 I hope those memorialising him remember his recent comments and attitudes as well as his earlier …
Dec 18, 2024: I read more for pleasure this year than usual. Reading more widely led to some genuine surprises - and a few punishing tomes. Rachel Kushner’s …
Dec 18, 2024: To give up one’s very self, to think only of others, that is the true meaning of Christmas.
Dec 16, 2024: I’m dealing with generative A.I. use in assessment a lot at the moment. This is a good summary of the issues, but also describes the pressures and …
Dec 15, 2024: Climate change may have driven Homo sapiens to extinction in Europe before we were helped by Neanderthals. The Nature article provides more details. I …
Dec 12, 2024: Storing information for 2124 A wonderful article on how you might go about digitally storing something for 100 years: What is consistent about these examples is that they all …
Dec 11, 2024: “Malaysia-based New Zealander hailed as the Tiger Woods of Scrabble” wins Spanish world title – despite not speaking Spanish
Dec 10, 2024: “it could be the first assassination in the United States using a 3D printed weapon“
Dec 8, 2024: Interesting short video about the Catalan tradition of building human towers, or castells
Dec 6, 2024: Getting free from the slop machine I read some misguided comments Tim Minchin made about social media. He conflated algorithms with all social media, and claimed they’re intrinsically …
Dec 5, 2024: Fascinating chart about Spotify’s increasingly granular (and bizarre) music genres, via Simon Elvery
Dec 4, 2024: The Lennox Street bridge underpass is an example of the old local government planning proverb: revenge is a dish best served via permanent signage.
Dec 3, 2024: The First Rule of Acquisition: Once you have their money, never give it back.
Dec 2, 2024: The Oxford Word of the Year 2024 is brain rot.
Nov 30, 2024: Interesting article on the rise of “nudging” in public policy, and how we can’t decouple behavioural economics' pernicious, intrinsically conservative …
Nov 30, 2024: This is wonderful. Unearthing video snapshots of life between 2009 and 2012. Dancing, toddlers walking, soccer games, holidays, video messages. …
Nov 27, 2024: An old photo I took in Mildura, found during a clean out
Nov 26, 2024: Today I learned the Royal Society elected Elon Musk as a Fellow in 2018
Nov 25, 2024: Data collated by the tertiary education union has revealed there are 306 university executives who earn more than their state’s premier. Interesting …
Nov 20, 2024: Poems Human or bot? Readers guess wrongly now AI writes with grace and rhythm Perfect
Nov 20, 2024: I love Law & Order and I heard Noam Chomsky is a fan too. I tried to find a source - according to this 2003 profile, he is: When Chomsky and Carol …
Nov 19, 2024: I dunno about this. Clapback read-a-book energy. “Australian authors group give every federal politician five books to encourage nuance in Middle East …
Nov 17, 2024: Interesting open access article from Abby Smith, Seema Mihrshahi, and Becky Freeman on Exploring small retailers’ perspectives on selling tobacco …
Nov 17, 2024: It retrospect I should have recognised this as a warning about the quality of the takeaway pizza I’d just ordered.
Nov 14, 2024: Interesting and unusual to see the South China Morning Post discussing legalised vaping’s cost to the Malaysian health system. If no control measures …
Nov 12, 2024: 🐞
Nov 10, 2024: Good morning fronds 🌱
Nov 9, 2024: We showed that intrusive memories were virtually abolished by playing the computer game Tetris following a memory-reactivation task 24 hr after …
Nov 8, 2024: 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 institutions, systems, and tendencies that exist …
Nov 8, 2024: 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 cognitive warfare. This form of non-lethal warfare …
Nov 8, 2024: Musk must be one of the biggest winners of the election. He took a relatively popular social media app and turned it into a tool for the Trump …
Nov 6, 2024: Some reasonable points here, and a challenge for us is to be open to the message! Mastodon’s structure and culture of openness present opportunities …
Nov 5, 2024: Antiwar counter protesters
Nov 4, 2024: I really enjoyed this list of The Most Iconic Speculative Fiction Books of the 21st Century
Oct 26, 2024: Afternoon sun
Oct 24, 2024: Israel dynamites historic Lebanese village of Mhaibib, site of the 2,100-year-old shrine of Prophet Benjamin - New Arab
Oct 23, 2024: Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics - 404 Media
Oct 22, 2024: “Malaria is as old as Egyptian civilization itself, but the disease that plagued pharaohs now belongs to its history and not its future” - Dr Tedros …
Oct 20, 2024: The Verge 2004 - a fun selection of articles reflecting on why this year was a turning point for our online existence.
Oct 18, 2024: superdoopermoon
Oct 14, 2024: Wet
Oct 13, 2024: With the European Peace Facility, the EU is seeking greater flexibility that will allow it to bypass the African Union and directly fund national and …
Oct 7, 2024: The blockbuster film of the last few years has achieved a synthesis of these two trends: color-rich saturated imagery, hammer on the head …
Oct 2, 2024: tl;dr the big variation in non-GP specialist fees in Australia is largely due to differences between individual doctors, rather than factors such as …
Sep 30, 2024: Guizhou has been the target of successive visions of state-led sinofuturity, which have developed the province as unevenly as its karst landscape. …
Sep 28, 2024: 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 presidency, offering the first hard evidence of the …
Sep 26, 2024: Live Free or DEI - Gaby Del Valle at The Baffler
Sep 24, 2024: Israeli strikes kill 492 in heaviest daily toll in Lebanon since 1975-90 civil war It’s awful that Israel’s “escape forward” strategy, at the cost of …
Sep 23, 2024: Sticking an AirTag on my Kindle just saved me again. If it wasn’t for this I’d have lost it many times by now.
Sep 21, 2024: Catholicism, another flank in America's pernicious global influence? Another interesting piece, though it cements my view that American Catholicism has far more in common with with the evangelical churches of their …
Sep 21, 2024: Interesting piece on Vance and his antecedents. Who Owns America? was the Agrarian-Distributists’ last hurrah. The American public — including, …
Sep 21, 2024: As above
Sep 20, 2024: ‘The most horrific, sobering thing I’ve ever seen’: BBC nuclear apocalypse film Threads 40 years on - The Guardian Worth a watch if you’ve never seen …
Sep 18, 2024: In one of the University College Cork buildings they have a Mac (the same model that my Dad bought for our family and that I used as a kid) on display …
Sep 17, 2024: Welcome, Vault Dweller
Sep 17, 2024: Tide players surf the currents Twenty years of the development of health impact assessment in Australia A presentation at University College Cork, 17 September 2024 References …
Sep 16, 2024: A genuinely shocking number of students on campus. I wish things were more like this at home.
Sep 16, 2024: James Joyce Bridge
Sep 15, 2024: Love a cavernous train terminal
Sep 10, 2024: >The primary risk here, however, is the replacement of actual policymaking by a distorted form of technical action. Despite its claim to assist or …
Sep 8, 2024: We crave assurance that intimacy can survive independent of convenience. We dream of friendship that is interminable, impervious to the passage of …
Sep 8, 2024: 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 publications. First, the abundance of fabricated …
Sep 8, 2024: A wistful piece of writing. We’re each wealthier than kings of the past but we remain a kind of peasantry in the thrall of distant plutocrats. …
Sep 7, 2024: 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 writing community when it published a controversial …
Sep 7, 2024: On early 2023… Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero—the enlisted shipboard leader—led a scheme to buy a Starlink for $2,800 and to install it …
Sep 5, 2024: Google Scholar is more busted than I thought. Pay for citations schemes exist and may be more widespread than we realise. Google Scholar is …
Sep 5, 2024: A fascinating long read about the origins of Gaia theory, the early influence of systems theory, and NASA and JPL’s sexist culture in the ’60s. A cool …
Sep 5, 2024: Shisha available
Sep 5, 2024: “the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled against the long-running digital archive, upholding an earlier ruling in Hachette v. Internet …
Sep 5, 2024: Rosella outside the window
Sep 4, 2024: I tried to explain this t-shirt to my ten year old niece and she looked at me so pityingly, as if she thought i was suffering a major mental …
Sep 2, 2024: Zuckerberg is clearly preparing for a Trump Presidency: “New Trump Book Threatens To Jail Zuckerberg, Putting Zuck’s Groveling Letter In New Light” - …
Sep 1, 2024: A glorious start to spring
Aug 27, 2024: An explainer about whether walking backwards is better for you, by Bianca Nogrady
Aug 26, 2024: When the Nazis Opened a Propaganda Bookstore in Los Angeles - Lithub
Aug 23, 2024: Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke - The Verge “The lost Library of Alexandria could have fit onto the …
Aug 23, 2024: Over the last five years the average open access article processing charge has gone up by 26% to AUD $4,945. …
Aug 18, 2024: “We don’t think about the collateral damage of sanctions the same way we think about the collateral damage of war…But we should.”
Aug 17, 2024: 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 million a year for environmental infrastructure along …
Aug 15, 2024: Shisha No Thanks! Five Years of Progress Slides from a presentation to the Unpacking Vaping Cessation Special Interest Group. Slides (PDF 1.4 Mb) More about the project at Shisha No Thanks …
Aug 12, 2024: zesty
Aug 11, 2024: Deterritorialising a sport out of existence after one time in the Olympics is God-tier critical studies 🎓🫡
Aug 10, 2024: Don’t ever let anyone tell you that Australia lacks a distinct culture.
Aug 9, 2024: 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 fundraising ingenuity. Researchers took on a …
Aug 9, 2024: Return to office directives should be predicated on everyone having an office of their own. Forcing staff to hotdesk out of a backpack using lockers …
Aug 9, 2024: Ariana Ramsey won an Olympic bronze medal with the U.S. women’s rugby team here last week. A few days later, something almost as exciting happened: …
Aug 8, 2024: Gigwork is a lie Shawnta’s story exemplifies one of the reasons people turn to gig work: she lost her good union job at UPS as a data entry clerk because she had too …
Aug 8, 2024: 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 details about this) and so slightly harder to write in …
Aug 6, 2024: Mr. Murdoch has called his effort to change the trust Project Harmony because he hoped that it might head off a looming family struggle when he dies… …
Aug 5, 2024: Already 67 higher education institutions are undertaking redundancy and restructuring programmes. This number is expected to rise as softening demand …
Aug 5, 2024: “A family of Russian sleeper agents flown to Moscow in the biggest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War were so deep under cover that their …
Aug 1, 2024: I wasn’t aware this was needed.
Jul 30, 2024: Surabaya
Jul 27, 2024: Jakarta
Jul 27, 2024: "…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 from modern smartphones. Inspired by the design of …
Jul 24, 2024: Exciting new frontiers in ̶s̶c̶a̶m̶s̶ ̶ academic publishing A new step has been added to the mind-boggling scam that is academic publishing: Conduct research (publicly funded) Write up research (publicly …
Jul 20, 2024: “We are talking about thousands and thousands of kilometers of infrastructure between Europe and the United States and Asia. This is a network that …
Jul 15, 2024: “SimCity Isn’t a Model of Reality. It’s a Libertarian Toy Land - Beneath its playful exterior, the beloved game that inspired a generation of …
Jul 15, 2024: Another one for the WTF Europe file
Jul 13, 2024: Bombo
Jul 13, 2024: Fucking TikTok. “In a similar vein, some posts featured a sycophantic, yet comedic, admiration for fascist leaders, presenting them as cute and …
Jul 12, 2024: Inside Mexico’s anti-avocado militias
Jul 10, 2024: I’ve had two printers that outlived operating system support for them. I didn’t expect it would happen to sneakers.
Jul 10, 2024: The Heads
Jul 3, 2024: A third of land set aside for restoration in worse state than before, Australian offset audit finds - The Guardian It’s almost like biodiversity …
Jun 29, 2024: It's the competence, stupid Sharp observations from Ian Dunt: “The trouble was that the government had no basic competence. It did not have the organisational proficiency to …
Jun 25, 2024: “Barcelona plans to enact a citywide ban on all short-term rentals to address complaints that tourism is to blame for a local housing crisis and …
Jun 23, 2024: Sounds like an episode of The Gilded Age
Jun 22, 2024: Lost in the Woo-to-Q Pipeline - The Cut
Jun 21, 2024: Same No-Face, same
Jun 20, 2024: Awful More than 550 hajj pilgrims die in Mecca as temperatures exceed 50C
Jun 19, 2024: Hello fronds
Jun 19, 2024: Tarps and prayers
Jun 19, 2024: “So many of Chomsky’s arguments, indeed the very phrases that he used, are becoming commonplace. Even while he is not directly quoted, his shadow …
Jun 15, 2024: Despicable. “The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s …
Jun 14, 2024: Lionel Hutz A world without lawyers, 2024 Acrylic on concrete
Jun 14, 2024: Queens Square
Jun 14, 2024: It’s important to understand that the Congo Free State was solely owned by Leopold II rather than the Belgian government. This was a decisive factor …
Jun 12, 2024: Painting the town red
Jun 12, 2024: Border Force “officers routinely ask travellers to provide their passcode or password to devices so they can be examined, but they do not have the …
Jun 9, 2024: Anachronism of a Salesman Anthony Lapaglia and Josh Helman in Death of a Salesman I saw the Sydney production of Death of a Salesman with Anthony Lapaglia in it. It was an …
Jun 7, 2024: Liquid3, an “urban photo-bioreactor” that a Serbian startup has developed to replace trees. I, for one, welcome our new green slime overlords.
Jun 7, 2024: 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 member of a tribe, this measure was historically …
Jun 6, 2024: A company that had built its name on celebrating knowledge and expertise was now at the mercy of machines that could not discern the difference …
Jun 6, 2024: The friendly, sad bloke at the cafe
Jun 4, 2024: “Playing with conventions, literary or social, taking them apart and exposing them as scaffolding that hides rather than reveals truths can be …
Jun 4, 2024: “a device that dispenses physical “attention receipts” that list exactly how much time you’ve spent watching YouTube videos”
Jun 4, 2024: Instagram is testing “ad breaks” that force you to stop and look at an ad for a period of time before you can continue scrolling. The internet’s …
May 30, 2024: “A study of 26 years' worth of wolf behavioral data, and an analysis of the blood of 229 wolves, has shown that infection with the parasite Toxoplasma …
May 30, 2024: Attention cyberloafers
May 29, 2024: Bit harsh on Whitlam
May 29, 2024: A good explainer about Māori wards in New Zealand local government, and why their new regressive government is disestablishing them
May 28, 2024: Stunning photo essay about Mexico City’s ancient floating gardens
May 28, 2024: At the turn of the 21st century, corrugated cardboard accounted for just fifteen percent of the U.S. recycling stream. Today, it’s nearly half. …
May 26, 2024: ‘It’s also no coincidence that the biggest business case for these systems is to help communication in the corporate world: a semantic zone drained of …
May 24, 2024: Utopian Realism, a speech by Bruce Sterling This is a great read, especially for anyone who’s spent time in Turin A basic Turinese problem here is that Torino is progressive, but a heritage …
May 21, 2024: Why doesn’t Hollywood make more mass extinction films?
May 21, 2024: “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 national identity: One would have to go back 20 …
May 16, 2024: A study of 84 countries found 60 multinationals account for more than half of the world’s plastic pollution. Six companies alone are responsible for …
May 16, 2024: "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 what I’m feeling. I’m interested in discovery. If …
May 14, 2024: The greening of the office continues
May 14, 2024: In what year was the first emoji-like character set developed? Your guess is almost certainly wrong. Emoji History: The Missing Years - Get Info
May 14, 2024: “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 industry. Despite its crucial role in the development and …
May 14, 2024: As Australian subsidies to fossil fuel producers increase to $14.5b we have to ask, has the election of the ALP made any difference in addressing the …
May 13, 2024: I wondered if there’s a Vox explainer about Macklemore, and of course as there is.
May 13, 2024: 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 compelling evidence that it impairs learning and particularly …
May 7, 2024: Pokémon Go Players Invent Fake Beaches on Real Maps to Catch Rare Wigletts. I’m embarrassed to understand that sentence.
May 6, 2024: 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 primary prevention strategy on gendered violence takes …
May 5, 2024: Flight of the Concorde? North Korea’s brief flirtation with supersonic airliners by Daniel Salisbury
May 4, 2024: Family Farms in NSW and Queensland promoted by Covid vaccine-sceptic group Parents With Questions were intended to operate outside a ‘corrupt’ food …
May 3, 2024: Facebook is the zombie internet, where a mix of bots, humans, and accounts that were once humans but aren’t anymore interact to form a disastrous …
May 2, 2024: 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 antitrust case that blocked the merger of Penguin Random …
Apr 30, 2024: Ready for take-off
Apr 30, 2024: Waiting
Apr 30, 2024: The Brazilian JSOC for the environment This is pretty wild. Brazil has created a (massively underfunded) JSOC for the environment. In 2013, Cabral secured approval to build a unit of …
Apr 29, 2024: “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 societies during the polycrisis. One of her slides …
Apr 29, 2024: 545 people are on governing body positions for Australian universities. 137 represent staff and students, 143 are corporate executives and …
Apr 28, 2024: “We did not invest enough in university politics and sociality to form a long-term stable relationship with our faculty… When epistemic and …
Apr 21, 2024: 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 economy went mainstream - The Culture Journalist …
Apr 21, 2024: “The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning …
Apr 18, 2024: Capitalists Hate Capitalism Capitalists hate capitalism. All capitalists would rather extract rents than profits, because rents are insulated from competition. The merchants who …
Apr 16, 2024: This is the state of the modern internet — ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer, offering not a …
Apr 16, 2024: Security researchers agree, at least, that it’s unlikely that Jia Tan is a real person, or even one person working alone. Instead, it seems clear …
Apr 14, 2024: Field epidemiology needs to go home A interesting challenge to the notion of field epideimiology, drawing heavily on the lessons from a case in Ghana in 2011. The “field” is often seen …
Apr 11, 2024: "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, cooking, farming, delivering – behind little icons on …
Apr 6, 2024: Yossi Sariel unmasked as head of Unit 8200 and architect of AI strategy after book written under pen name reveals his Google account - The Guardian
Mar 30, 2024: 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 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at nearly 800 miles per …
Mar 21, 2024: “See the thing about the term ‘doctor’ is that for a long long (long long long long long) time it meant pretty exclusively people with PhDs." Doctor …
Mar 20, 2024: Nobel Laureate economist Angus Deaton has delivered a ferocious rebuke to his own profession, saying economists have failed to understand that …
Mar 13, 2024: 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 by an algorithm – but they’re not even told it …
Mar 12, 2024: The investment came with the expectation that Kickstarter would attempt a pivot to blockchain as its new benefactor—the crypto fund of venture …
Mar 8, 2024: A.I. is a certain, serious threat but not because of far-off robot uprising fantasies. It’s already speeding up climate change and fuelling …
Mar 5, 2024: 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 to tobacco policy in New Zealand, more directly …
Mar 2, 2024: 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 degree and around 1,800 while I was at TAFE. It was …
Mar 1, 2024: This paper explores do-it-yourself (DIY) and maker practices within sound and electronics through a close reading of Electronics and music maker …
Mar 1, 2024: 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. That’s the shocking result from the 2022-2023 …
Mar 1, 2024: Spatial Apartheid Mapping by DAIR To help researchers understand the current impact of spatial apartheid, we developed a dataset consisting of …
Mar 1, 2024: Secretive firm behind voice no campaign billed taxpayers almost $135,000 via Coalition MPs, documents show via @RHW@mastodon.au The secretive firm …
Feb 27, 2024: “Judicious attention allocation is a moral skill and that our growing reliance on algorithmic recommendation threatens our development and exercise of …
Feb 26, 2024: My office cactus is looking vaguely obscene at the moment
Feb 24, 2024: 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 it wrong, the computer guys have arrived to tell …
Feb 23, 2024: 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 federated social networks like Mastodon to carry out …
Feb 19, 2024: “But there’s a catch: while Woolworths supermarkets are subject to a flat pricing system — which means all products except fresh produce are sold at …
Feb 17, 2024: 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 cleaned out the whole field to replace it with a …
Feb 17, 2024: I watched American Fiction last night. I haven’t enjoyed a film that much in a long time. Jeffrey Wright and Cord Jefferson, so good. 4½ stars
Feb 16, 2024: Why people don't recycle
Feb 12, 2024: 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 most we have witnessed a few of those weightless …
Feb 11, 2024: “Replacing missing observations with substitute values… is a common but controversial technique in economics that allows certain types of analyses to …
Feb 10, 2024: "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 a part of some lucid, compelling explanation, …
Feb 7, 2024: 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 machine learning for more things like this, and …
Feb 6, 2024: 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 underlying system of production. It accepts the …
Feb 4, 2024: 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 low pay that is available to us,” Serrano said. …
Feb 4, 2024: 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 for patterns, which it then uses to make its …
Feb 3, 2024: "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 organiser Rueben Taipari put out the call for the hikoi to …
Feb 2, 2024: 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 five questions - which I didn’t really feel …
Jan 31, 2024: 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 ChatGPT. It’s sometimes profound, and sometimes weird, and …
Jan 29, 2024: I love my phone case designed by Ailantd Sikowsky - you can get them from Redbubble
Jan 29, 2024: “There is a danger that voters could end up living in generated online realities that are based on a toxic mixture of AI hallucinations and political …
Jan 29, 2024: 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 awards, aims to give as much agency and freedom, …
Jan 27, 2024: 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 repulsive, because the site was the antithesis of a …
Jan 27, 2024: When we’re young, we go around giving a fuck about all kinds of things, blissfully unaware of our ever-dwindling supply. Until one day, we give the …
Jan 25, 2024: For the first time in the Palestinian territories, remote-controlled quadcopters have been deployed on a large scale against suspected Palestinian …
Jan 25, 2024: Computers were a Mistake: Pandora's Box Edition Interesting piece by Siva Vaidhyanathan in the Guardian: Billions of people use such a device now, but hardly anyone peeks inside or thinks about the …
Jan 24, 2024: William Morris expressed similar thoughts in “How I Became a Socialist”
Jan 24, 2024: Hackers steal your data but aren’t able to spray you with sewage… yet (I hope)
Jan 24, 2024: "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 weapons, climate change, advances in the life …
Jan 23, 2024: 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 on the appropriation of vast troves of data obtained …
Jan 22, 2024: LARPing competence and seriousness Doctorow’s recent linkdump is a litany of corporate failure, arrogance and malice towards their customers, ranging from pharma to film projectors. …
Jan 20, 2024: Bill Clinton vs Organised Labour An interesting account of Bill Clinton’s betrayal of U.S. labour, and how that’s shaped many of the issues the U.S. is still contending with. In his …
Jan 19, 2024: The Perfect Webpage: How the internet reshaped itself around Google’s search algorithms, and into a world where websites look the same - The Verge
Jan 19, 2024: Under certain circumstances, the Pilbara has the potential to produce some of the highest temperatures in the world and unfortunately for locals, one …
Jan 19, 2024: How platforms killed Pitchfork 🔗💿🪦 Ultimately, though, it wasn’t any decline in editorial quality that led me to read Pitchfork less frequently. It’s that the site had been caught up …
Jan 18, 2024: It’s amazing how bad I am at this: The monthly AI or real quiz: January 2024 - BBC, via Kristina
Jan 17, 2024: 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 do to reduce health inequalities, the UK provides …
Jan 16, 2024: 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 Mbembe to refer to the use of social and political …
Jan 16, 2024: "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 and political relevance: I will never forget one of …
Jan 16, 2024: 🏙️
Jan 16, 2024: "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 criticised McKinsey for its role in the country’s …
Jan 13, 2024: shimmer
Jan 13, 2024: Calming place
Jan 13, 2024: Climate migration will leave the elderly behind Climate-driven migration promises a generational realignment of U.S. states, as coastal parts of Florida and Georgia grow older and receiving states …
Jan 12, 2024: 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 Indigenous society in western Ecuador’s Upano …
Jan 10, 2024: 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 sounding vaguely female is enough to get you …
Jan 9, 2024: Do you experience tinnitus? I read this study about a soundscape and CBT app that sounds promising Link to the iOS app Your mileage may vary but it …
Jan 8, 2024: We can't afford our car fixation Interesting article to see from an Australian business reporter: Not only does it cost Australians more to feed fuel-thirsty cars such as SUVs and …
Jan 7, 2024: 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 challenges calling into question its …
Jan 7, 2024: "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 is a great framing device, and interesting that it’s so …
Jan 6, 2024: “If you look over the past couple of years, we’ve seen this continuing evolution of escalating extortion tactics,” Rubin said. “If you go back in …
Jan 2, 2024: 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 are the master of that game. They are trying to …
Dec 31, 2023: 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 counterfeit cigarettes. Starting in the late 1980s, he …
Dec 31, 2023: Gaza is an unprecedented conflict, breaking the most tragic records, and while experts might debate whether it’s a genocide or not, the truth is we’re …
Dec 25, 2023: 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 you with LSD just a hair below the threshold. At …
Dec 21, 2023: 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 reason that so many have struggled to take it …
Dec 21, 2023: 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 “amplifying the voices of vapers worldwide and …
Dec 19, 2023: How’s this for a sentence: “the industry of Henry Kissinger’s interminable twilight was only matched by its tawdriness”
Dec 19, 2023: 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 sphere transgressions framework as a conceptual lens …
Dec 19, 2023: 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 ultimately motivated by charitable giving, accelerationists …
Dec 19, 2023: 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 its own government. The United States has tried the …
Dec 18, 2023: 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 December but I read it in January): Nuclear waste has no …
Dec 18, 2023: Have your mind read by television
Dec 16, 2023: 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 listening, when the reality is more nuanced, negotiated and …
Dec 16, 2023: 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 activities, including by praising their economic …
Dec 13, 2023: Drive by
Dec 13, 2023: 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 gains, intergenerational hoarding and tax write-offs than …
Dec 12, 2023: Council achieving its urban canopy targets
Dec 10, 2023: 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 that from Sydney, and that it needs to be …
Dec 6, 2023: "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 need them. It’s good to see that they’re …
Dec 5, 2023: Pikachu grindset
Dec 5, 2023: 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 entered into force in 2008. Source: UN Department of …
Dec 5, 2023: Protecting Indigenous Designs From the Fashion Machine “We were not legally allowed to practise our culture,” says Paul, who is an urban Denesuliné woman and a member of English River First Nation. “So, …
Dec 5, 2023: 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 planning expert with the University of NSW, said …
Dec 4, 2023: "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 on Land’s new memoir “Class”: Stephanie Land …
Dec 3, 2023: "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 taste like are not as high for a Thai consumer as …
Dec 2, 2023: 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: “State-sponsored attackers may be targeting your …
Nov 28, 2023: One of Douglas Annand’s iconic Dalton undercroft mosaics at UNSW (1960, West Wall depicted).
Nov 28, 2023: The chattering e-biking classes
Nov 28, 2023: 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 exists around faculty who experience stalking and …
Nov 27, 2023: COP28 president secretly used climate summit role to push oil trade with foreign government officials via Royce Kurmelovs
Nov 25, 2023: The contemporary hunt for hidden messages in film We retreat into private enclaves, indulging our personal preferences without worrying about what the things we enjoy signify for society writ large. …
Nov 21, 2023: “Thirty years later, ostensibly Marxist parties continue to dominate Nepalese politics, but socialism appears nowhere in sight. Is Marxism still alive …
Nov 17, 2023: “average daily walking trips dropped a whopping 36% in the contiguous U.S. between 2019 and 2022”
Nov 14, 2023: “The normal thing would be to quit his old job and accept the new position, which was also fully remote. But what if he kept his old job, and secretly …
Nov 14, 2023: As the threat of food shortages knocks at our door, the only hope for feeding ourselves is to decentralize food production. We can learn from what …
Nov 13, 2023: Anti-vaxxers are winning local elections across Western Australia “The appeal of local governments, Harris argued, is that they allow insurgent groups like Stand Up Now Australia to subvert the party-entrenched …
Nov 11, 2023: Hidden at the top of 44 Martin Place is something a little unexpected
Nov 11, 2023: CSIRO accused of not disclosing BP input into scientific reports According to internal documents, the CSIRO reports were eventually published in scientific journals and were used in BP’s legal defence, but first …
Nov 10, 2023: “In other words, the economist who has been embraced as a guiding light by the global institution tasked with shepherding humanity through the climate …
Nov 8, 2023: Antidepressants or Tolkien character?
Nov 7, 2023: Welcome to the Kazakh town where there’s bad insulation and an unreliable water supply - and ubiquitous surveillance under the guise of being a “smart …
Nov 7, 2023: 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 and merge the two into a model for tomorrow; while …
Nov 7, 2023: Kagi’s Small Web is an interesting effort to fight back against the enshittification of search by bringing back the blogroll.
Nov 7, 2023: ☕️🤎
Nov 7, 2023: “Thus, under the present geopolitical approach to GHG emissions, global warming will exceed 1.5°C in the 2020s and 2°C before 2050." And the …
Nov 7, 2023: 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: Lessons for the Future and participating on a …
Nov 6, 2023: 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 dollars in pay and benefits while they worked long hours …
Nov 6, 2023: "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 Palestinians is likely to result in a lot of …
Nov 3, 2023: In 🤡 news: A group of academics has offered an unreserved apology to the big four consultancy firms after admitting they used artificial intelligence …
Nov 2, 2023: Medicare’s forty-year update Interesting Inside Story piece from Mike Steketee about the Australian Government’s efforts to update Medicare - and the pressures involved: Creating …
Nov 2, 2023: When climate adaptation exacerbates the problems Maladaptation is usually understood as referring to the unintended consequences of well-meant measures to reduce climate vulnerability. But it also …
Nov 1, 2023: Blue, purple and red
Oct 31, 2023: 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 to the Covid-19 pandemic. What is more: This …
Oct 31, 2023: Hundreds of millions of identity checks under the federal government’s ID verification service may have been illegally conducted, with the Albanese …
Oct 30, 2023: "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 distance from the problem. And I find, personally, that, like …
Oct 29, 2023: Glorious
Oct 28, 2023: 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 collaboration between Arabs and Jews, but you’re not …
Oct 27, 2023: 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 of the tech industry can continue to deny their …
Oct 27, 2023: 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, in very many public spaces. The mainstream press, …
Oct 27, 2023: "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 of ‘ends’. This need not mean acquiescence to the …
Oct 25, 2023: Seven years ago today, while I was on my way to Phuentsholing in Bhutan for work
Oct 24, 2023: 🌳🟣📷
Oct 24, 2023: 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 used in emergency warning systems and often blaring …
Oct 23, 2023: I’ve seen some sick stuff online but… “Lately I’ve met adolescents — some who don’t yet meet the platform’s minimum-age requirement of 16 — who say …
Oct 23, 2023: The truth is that the majority of Australians have committed a shameful act whether knowingly or not, and there is nothing positive to be interpreted …
Oct 22, 2023: Fragile Microsoftulinity
Oct 22, 2023: Perfect day in Sydney today 📷
Oct 22, 2023: 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 of Saturday, we are nearly 40 per cent, walking …
Oct 21, 2023: Robot Teachers, Racist Algorithms, and Disaster Pedagogy I tweeted in response to the homework algorithm “hack” that if it’s not worth a teacher reading the assignment/assessment, then it’s not worth the …
Oct 21, 2023: 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 loneliness, one of the staff members scoffs. …
Oct 20, 2023: 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 of their similarity to us, and those who think it …
Oct 20, 2023: 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 Liu’s Dark Forest trilogy. The politics espoused in them is …
Oct 20, 2023: "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 BIOT — had secured the land for the base in 1965, …
Oct 20, 2023: Our Frasier Remake Jacob Reed asked 130 artists and animators to create scenes from the season 1 finale of Frasier My Coffee with Niles in different styles. The results …
Oct 19, 2023: Please remember to update your genetic information Yesterday, a threat actor named ‘Golem,’ who is allegedly behind the 23andMe attacks, leaked an additional 4.1 million data profiles of people in …
Oct 18, 2023: Pooled
Oct 18, 2023: Sunny 📷
Oct 18, 2023: “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 create virgin plastics and polymers, like Exxon, Dow, …
Oct 17, 2023: Jamie's 5 Second Austerity Treats While the author has clearly been having a bad day, or maybe year, this is an interesting acknowledgement of our material reality: Jamie’s 5 …
Oct 16, 2023: 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 history, driving habits, in-car browser histories, and …
Oct 12, 2023: "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 trouble accessing it. Screen Violence from Settler …
Oct 12, 2023: 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 hands of government agencies. One such example, is …
Oct 11, 2023: 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 Snorlax and Togetic in Pokémon Go also rolled …
Oct 10, 2023: 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 stress limits is vastly expanded. The additional …
Oct 9, 2023: 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 within the institution and among their librarian …
Oct 9, 2023: Unsettling ‘The Settler’ Decolonisation, they famously argue, is not a metaphor but a material set of actions, hard-won through struggles for sovereignty, land, power. This …
Oct 9, 2023: "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?” It’s the process by which oppressive technologies are normalized and …
Oct 7, 2023: 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 a crossbow and declaring he wanted to kill the …
Oct 7, 2023: The surprisingly long life of paper straws The presence of PFAS in plant-based straws shows that they are not necessarily biodegradable and that the use of such straws potentially contributes …
Oct 7, 2023: An August DeSmog investigation described a Shell-sponsored video from one popular feel-good account as “part of a concerted push from oil and gas …
Oct 6, 2023: In defence of “what if?” We live in a world not of ambitions achieved completely and plans that reliably follow a straight line but of zigs and zags; of vast schemes that …
Oct 6, 2023: Hokusai and Contemporary Art: Pop Art, Superflat, and Beyond Talk delivered by Kendall deBoer, curatorial assistant, Department of Contemporary Art, …
Oct 6, 2023: 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 most ardent supporters in the west… But the move …
Oct 6, 2023: 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 day and scrolled countless times more. My eyeballs …
Oct 5, 2023: "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 crisis. Not just because I refuse to assent to my own …
Oct 5, 2023: 👌🏼
Oct 5, 2023: "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 these programmes helped build is the one we live in” I …
Oct 3, 2023: 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 research.” 2013: “I was kicked out from UPenn, was …
Oct 3, 2023: 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 and their own prior work, almost exactly mirrors …
Oct 2, 2023: 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 regularly surprises me. Time for genuinely …
Oct 1, 2023: Confronting a terrorist A fascinating account of anti-Chinese racism and neo-Nazis in Perth by Crispian Chan. Harrowing but very human and reflective, I really appreciate …
Oct 1, 2023: "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 MacQuillan. It’s an important book that sets out …
Sep 30, 2023: 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 pandemic—there will probably be future pandemics. These …
Sep 29, 2023: 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 international civil society experts and the government of …
Sep 29, 2023: You’re born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you’re up in …
Sep 29, 2023: “It’s comparable to a lot of the revelations made about so-called autonomous vehicles. They’re just surveillance wagons. Not only have they taken …
Sep 28, 2023: "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 the land and they should have their voices heard… You can …
Sep 27, 2023: 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 the following prompt: Write a short justification that …
Sep 26, 2023: No parts, no repair “the easiest way to prevent harvested components from entering the parts stream is to destroy as many old devices as possible. That’s why Apple’s …
Sep 26, 2023: “The TikTok account, conversations with victims, and TikTok’s own lack of action on the account show that access to facial recognition technology, …
Sep 25, 2023: 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 distressing to see it, and general practice specifically, …
Sep 25, 2023: “The recent study settles this debate: humans in western Asia domesticated table grapes around 11,000 years ago. Other people, in the Caucasus, …
Sep 25, 2023: Genuinely surprised that CERN staff are allowed to have an OnlyFans onlyfans.web.cern.ch (via rixx)
Sep 24, 2023: 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 court in July, claiming the app was illegally obtaining …
Sep 24, 2023: From 2020: African elites initiated tobacco-related co-operation to meet their interests, but Chinese interests dominated implementation. …
Sep 24, 2023: An important article examining why almost half of all cigarettes in the world are consumed in China - more than 2.4 trillion every year. “China’s …
Sep 22, 2023: Humanity's mutilation of the tree of life During past mass extinctions there was no species with the power or interest to stop extinctions, and no conscious stake in maintaining biodiversity. …
Sep 22, 2023: Apple TV+ has taken down the paywall on their anthology series Extrapolations until Monday 25 September. Important but harrowing viewing about how the …
Sep 22, 2023: Forwards and backwards
Sep 21, 2023: Beyond grades I was already disillusioned with grading and its perpetual power to distract from students’ learning and my teaching. But more than that, I wanted my …
Sep 21, 2023: A language is a dialogue with the environment… it captures the essence of that place where it developed better than imported languages. Being able to …
Sep 20, 2023: Banana Ecosocialism …for most of Uganda’s history, bananas escaped serious commodification and facilitated the conscription of Ugandans into the production of cash crops …
Sep 19, 2023: Chile's experiment with cybernetic management In a February 1973 lecture, he explained how his cybernetic approach to management would empower the Chilean people and put the power of science at …
Sep 18, 2023: London facing 45C days ‘in foreseeable future’, mayor Sadiq Khan warns Those kind of temperatures are a struggle for most in Australia, but England is …
Sep 18, 2023: US military asks for help to find missing F-35 fighter jet after ‘mishap’ sees pilot eject
Sep 18, 2023: "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 that can be tinkered with and fixed. I try to …
Sep 17, 2023: Before our scientific magicians poisoned the water, polluted the soil, decimated plant and animal life… How can anything survive in a climate like …
Sep 16, 2023: What happened to the family doctor? U.S.-focused but clearly relevant to Australia as well: “Today, primary care is being squeezed from all sides. Long-standing patient-doctor …
Sep 16, 2023: 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 private enterprise. The frontrunner for the contract to …
Sep 16, 2023: Wildfires and xenophobia Twitter/X really is the new Gab: “Armed militia groups, some linked to extreme far right political parties, seized on the tension to conduct illegal …
Sep 15, 2023: Interview with a McKinsey whistleblower An interesting interview with a former McKinsey consultant about what it’s like to use spreadsheets to further human misery overcast.fm/+Fd_yzr4a… …
Sep 15, 2023: The last of the fungus “Before sunset, we found more than 30 caterpillar carcasses. We arrived back at his village after nightfall, and Tenzin sold them all to a middleman …
Sep 14, 2023: “Gambling addiction has contributed to 184 suicides in Victoria over eight years, although the true figure could be much higher” …
Sep 13, 2023: The pursuit of Aboriginal literary sovereignty “Perhaps critique and analysis informed by the traditions and priorities of the settler colony can never register the full living and survivance of …
Sep 13, 2023: One of Douglas Annand’s beautiful mosaics at UNSW
Sep 13, 2023: Trilemma facing carbon extractive multinational corporations “In this report, we have argued that Shell will face a trilemma with respect to these questions. It can achieve only a maximum of two out of three …
Sep 13, 2023: “offers insights into how NGOs play a critical role in stifling the development and independence of radical African movements” Breaking the silence on …
Sep 11, 2023: “In Western philosophy the proper way is considered ethics, whereas in Aboriginal society, as far as it is known, there is no equivalent term for …
Sep 11, 2023: Monday
Sep 8, 2023: Enough with the emails already.
Sep 7, 2023: Smoke-filled skies. Summer is here.
Sep 5, 2023: “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 Primary & Community Health Research & Innovation …
Sep 5, 2023: 60 years old, the Yirrkala Bark Petitions are one of our founding documents – so why don’t we know more about them? - Prof Clare Wright …
Sep 5, 2023: ⏰ 🐦⬛
Sep 4, 2023: Why engage in a deeper exploration of the creation of meaning when ChatGPT can do it for you? I dread the garbage I’m going to be sent to review.
Sep 3, 2023: "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 acquired through the course of our life experience and are …
Sep 2, 2023: Colonial science European colonies became the frontiers of exploration, extraction and production of tropical plants. They also became captive markets for exports, …
Aug 31, 2023: Empire of dust In 2019, a Financial Times investigation declared the London underground “the dirtiest place in the city”, with parts of the Central Line between …
Aug 31, 2023: 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 want, some do it much better than others. Why? That’s …
Aug 31, 2023: “subsea cables are the workhorses of global commerce and communications, carrying more than 99% of traffic between continents” The Secret Life of the …
Aug 30, 2023: How Monotype became a font behemoth On the enshittefication of fonts. That optimism, however, will likely be tested as Monotype begins dabbling with AI. The company already owns …
Aug 30, 2023: 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 border, 133 were able to claim asylum; 470 …
Aug 30, 2023: The Marxist in the Machine “With remarkable humility and a relatable sadness Wang confronted the fact that it is much harder than he had thought to get a handle on reality and …
Aug 29, 2023: Plenty of horrifying detail on here Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule newyorker.com The New Yorker …
Aug 29, 2023: A detailed account of what it’s like to be a GP in the English NHS. A lot of this would be the same in Australia, with a range of additional, distinct …
Aug 29, 2023: A worthwhile post by Patricia Rogers, a major figure in évaluation in Australia Risky behaviour — three predictable problems with the Australian …
Aug 27, 2023: Tell me your favourite blogs and why, briefly. My collection of RSS feeds needs pruning and replanting to encourage new (mental) growth 🌱 🧠
Aug 21, 2023: Reflected light
Aug 18, 2023: It is not possible for a reminder to be gentle.
Aug 18, 2023: "It’s a name that speaks to contemporary forms of neocolonialism and climate profiteering, like the real estate agents who have been cold-calling …
Aug 17, 2023: 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, Opinion, and more since 1929 …
Aug 17, 2023: A rogues gallery of investors, ranging from Binance to Andreessen Horowitz to Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al Saud to… Jack Dorsey (why?) Here’s who …
Aug 15, 2023: Worthwhile piece in Rolling Stone about the many women and people of colour who have been warning us about the dangers of AI for a long time. …
Aug 13, 2023: Swampy 📷
Aug 12, 2023: History is calling
Aug 12, 2023: Dog’s life 📷 🐕
Aug 11, 2023: “We’d invited the Prime Minister and the opposition leader to accept the Uluru Statement as a bark painting, like politicians always have. But our old …
Aug 10, 2023: Remote work as a break from workplace racism There’s a fair bit of human resources nonsense in this article (quiet quitting, leadership jargon, etc.) but the racism described is real. “Jobs are …
Aug 8, 2023: 🖖 While I like it, Strange New Worlds has jarring tone shifts between episodes. Alternating hijinks and PTSD is a very 2020s version of mythos and …
Aug 8, 2023: Brave New Word? A fun little web game when you guess when neologisms were coined, via waxy.org Not from the game, but I’m always amazed the phrase …
Aug 8, 2023: Buildings, buildings everywhere
Aug 7, 2023: Baseball in Bhutan “Bhutan hopes to be next great baseball country” This is interesting, and highlights the dizzying pace of change in Bhutan. These sort of scenes would …
Aug 7, 2023: Coral I borrowed a GoPro to take some photos while snorkelling. It was pretty fun!
Jul 31, 2023: Is Mastodon a hostile place? I read a useful post by Erin Kissane, where they asked people on Bluesky about what their negative experiences of Mastodon had been. I recommend you …
Jul 24, 2023: 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 certainly part of it. It was, instead, the …
Jul 15, 2023: Review of The Deluge by Stephen Markley Stephen Markley has crafted a well-written, thousand-page sprawling multi-person narrative about the havoc we'll face over next two decades due to …
Jul 14, 2023: The Deluge Stephen Markley has crafted a well-written, thousand-page sprawling multi-person narrative about the havoc we’ll face over next two decades due to …
May 29, 2023: Fire in the Hole Across the globe, thousands of coal fires are burning. Nearly impossible to reach and extinguish once they get started, the underground blazes …
May 23, 2023: Climate reparations: An idea whose time has come The largest twenty-one companies analyzed would disburse $5,444 billion over the period 2025–2050. — Read on …
May 17, 2023: Misunderstanding Misinformation In this sense, individual posts are not atoms, but something like drops of water. One drop of water is unlikely to persuade or do harm, but over time, …
May 15, 2023: “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, he says it takes about 2,000 joules. But to warm a …
May 2, 2023: The New History of Old Inequality* I don’t read much history but I thought this article by Trevor Jackson was exceptional, and offered a genuinely different view to almost all the …
Apr 21, 2023: 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 reflects on more than 50 years of the Inverse …
Nov 30, 2022: One other human habitation remains on Earth Please forgive the extended quote from Wikipedia about The City and the Stars but the metaphor seems obvious, and timely: As far as the people of …
Nov 3, 2022: My friend comes uninvited It comes instead when I am fighting not an open but a guerrilla war with my own life, during weeks of small household confusions, lost laundry, …
Mar 25, 2022: 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 on Equity in Primary Health Care Provision – More …
Feb 24, 2022: 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 is one of the first published evaluations of a …
Feb 2, 2022: 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 Abdi, Abela Mahimbo, Ashfaq Chauhan and Lisa Woodland …
Jan 31, 2022: Moon Towers The surviving moon towers are all in Austin, Texas, though they were found throughout the USA and Europe I read an article on lost objects. In …
Jan 26, 2022: Informal care in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic An important paper from Lukas Hofstaetter, Sarah Judd-Lam and Grace Cherrington from Carers NSW, which describes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic …
Jan 26, 2022: “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 on “Equity in Primary Health Care Provision: More …
Dec 20, 2021: 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 on rapid dissemination of research findings during …
Oct 1, 2021: 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 quite severe on the ground and there is a lot of …