iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Prof Ian Hall @ianhall.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Swiss glaciers suffer 'disastrous' year of ice loss, threatening water supplies "…in its simplest form, what we see right now is that we took an ice cube out of the fridge and it's just melting in front of our eyes." www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

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Dr Katie Twomey @k2mey.eurosky.social · 28/09/2026

This is quite cool. My university is the first organisation in the world to force Microsoft to allow us to turn off copilot summaries in Word 365, after a backlash against it from staff (including, very vocally, me). That cannot have been easy for our heroic IT people so hats very much off to them!

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David_j_roth @davidjroth.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

It's too depressing and obnoxious to write about, but virtually all of the doomy/horny AI hyperventilating is transparently displaced anxiety about our fucked climate and political situation. Even rich idiots know it's bad and being permitted to get worse. They're trying to write their own ending.

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Keren Weitzberg @kerenweitzberg.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Are you a tech worker? Or know a tech worker? Or just want to know what tech workers actually think about “AI”? Check out @cwunews.bsky.social and @utaw.tech’s tech workers inquiry. www.instagram.com/p/DdrTMsqIvX_/

instagram.com

Instagram

Create an account or log in to Instagram - Share what you're into with the people who get you.

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Aaron Martin @sixfouronea.net · 23/09/2026

"There’s a special place in hell for people who steal from the poor" Criminals exploit a well-known flaw in the cards most low-income Americans use to get aid: magnetic-stripe tech. Few states have switched to the [more secure] chip cards that distribute welfare funds. www.wsj.com/us-news/how-...

wsj.com

How Romanian Crime Rings Are Draining U.S. Welfare Accounts

Thieves have exploited antiquated magnetic stripes on benefits cards to steal hundreds of millions of public dollars.

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Caroline Dodds Pennock @carolinepennock.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Ditto 30,000 roles in universities in the past three years.

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Huw C. Davies @huwcdavies.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

About 2.7 million hours of work for no return.

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Sarah Emily Duff @sarahemilyduff.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

‘OpenAI’s policy director…wrote that the company was “creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the ‘culture’ of society”… OpenAI called itself an “existential threat” to news publishers, …“no matter how prominently we show the links, users won’t click.”’

404media.co

‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft

"Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions."

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 18/09/2026

This is why I hate "just a tool" so so so much. You can make a calculator without access to every calculation. You can make photoshop without access to all photos. Someone show me a genai tool that didn't require all of our labour in its production. It's plagiarism software.

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headfallsoff @headfallsoff.com · 19/09/2026

people are always saying anti-AI arguments don’t understand the full nuances of the technology. which is correct. but only because it stole everyone’s work, exists solely to get you fired, has made the entire internet unusable and has been forced on everyone without consent

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Citizen.Coping @propcazhpm.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Exactly. "To these detectives of digital inauthenticity, I say: Friend, welcome to a typical Tuesday in a Kenyan classroom, boardroom, or intra-office Teams chat. The very things you identify as the fingerprints of the machine are, in fact, the fossil records of our education."

marcusolang.substack.com

I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.

I'm calm. I'm calm. I promise.

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Daniel C. Blight @danielcblight.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

***URGENT PLEASE SHARE*** University of Brighton management have announced today that they ‘give notice of termination of all collective agreements’. This is a fundamental erasure of workers' rights. Management have announced the termination of all contractual documents, which includes:

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Owen Davies @odavies9.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Good luck to all those university students starting shortly who will find their departments looking dramatically different, due to job cuts, to how they looked when they applied ....

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Adanedhel🌹 @danielwaweru.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Zemene Mesafint II (the age is so disordered it hasn’t got round to a name for itself, let alone the obvious candidate).

But what if we are already in the early stages of what will be a protracted period of disorder? A world in which we cannot assume that what was true yesterday will be true tomorrow or that seemingly solid institutions will endure.
We might cease to be surprised at what the news brings each day. Natural disasters like the floods in Nepal and Tibet happen, and it's not clear who is sending the cavalry.
Do we shrug and carry on with our own lives? Conflicts - some with the potential to embroil great powers - occur with no obvious arbiter. Dependable alliances such as NATO are being tested and retested and could fall apart.
Russia's hybrid war with Europe is expanding; China and the United States could clash over Taiwan; competition for resources in a warming, drier world is already stimulating violence.
This is a world of increasing unpredictability in which we are left, to a much greater extent than we expected, at the whims of our leaders, who are less bound by external frameworks and feel freer to make it up as they go along.
We should be choosing those decision makers more caretully than ever - just when electorates seem less inclined to do so.

https://archive.ph/CxsET

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ertruitt.bsky.social @ertruitt.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

🚨🚨🚨JOB ALERT: The HSS Department at Penn is hiring a tenure-track or tenured professor in the history of data/info science, computing, or AI. Please share widely! apply.interfolio.com/192132

apply.interfolio.com

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

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Keren Weitzberg @kerenweitzberg.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

A good piece on Aadhaar, its design problems, and the opacity behind some of its purported figures (deduplication failure rates, exclusion errors, cost savings estimates)

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Howard French @hofrench.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Jason Arday is dead, and the culpabilities are numerous.

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Adanedhel🌹 @danielwaweru.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

There’s a Ralph Bunche Rd in Nairobi: Kenyatta and Bunche were friends from LSE days, and he visited Kenya at Kenyatta’s invitation

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Julia Carrie Wong @joolia.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

our entire global financial system is currently leveraged to the hilt on the premise that it was good and right for a small cadre of US companies to steal all of the intellectual work ever produced by humanity and sell its back to us without credit or remuneration to the authors (plagiarism)

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Keren Weitzberg @kerenweitzberg.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

"Questions have been raised about colleagues’ research performance being evaluated, without the use of provisional REF grades or journal metrics or actually reading any of it, by managers with no expertise...What we do have expertise in, however, is bullshit..."

thesphinxblog.com

Better Than You

From the office of Prof. Neville Morley, Supreme Plenipotentiary, Überboss and Vice-Chancellor of Ex University, Earth 2: Your ever-caring and responsive senior management team has heard your pathe…

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Duncan Money @mininghistory.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

I ran a workshop on jobs in history outside universities for PhD students at the University of Vienna earlier this year and got very good feedback from participants, so I'm looking to run it again later this year. Please get in touch if this would interest your students or department.

Blue-coloured slide with the title "History Works" in white text.
Underneath is the sub-title "Jobs and Careers Outside Universities for Historians and Other Experts of the Past" in light blue text.

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Nanjala @nanjala.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

As someone who has written a whole book about the importance of Twitter to public discourse I cannot emphasise enough important it is for people to log off the current incarnation of the site.

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Dr. Aaron Thierry @thierryaaron.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

“What we have is a shifting baseline,” said Dr Rob Robinson @btobirds.bsky.social... “People engaging in nature today are going to think the numbers they are seeing are normal, particularly children. But if you go back 50yrs, they would have been able to experience a much richer environment"

theguardian.com

Listen to Britain’s dawn chorus of 1976: the dramatic loss of birdsong in 50 years

Guardian recreates audio landscape of past filled by loud morning symphony before 73m wild birds were lost

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Dr. Aaron Thierry @thierryaaron.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

It's still a case of "More & More & More" of everything. The clean energy transition requires complete substitution, not simply addition!

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Plashing Vole @plashingvole.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

I wish UCU would actually push some cases of fake redundancy to court. Our own plan is to leave 3 people to do all the teaching. Next year that would be 37.5 hours in class alone each - the full week, without doing any preparation, research, marking etc. That’s not a real redundancy situation.

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Dan Hirschman @asociologist.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

"in-hospital mortality increases for Black, but not White, patients as hospitals reach capacity... We identify rationing by wait times as a mechanism, documenting that sicker Black patients wait longer for care than healthier White patients at almost all capacity levels"

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Francesca Stavrakopoulou @proffrancesca.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

I’d love it if you’d sign this. It might not prevent me and my colleagues losing our jobs, but it will draw attention to the ideological vandalism being perpetrated by the wealthy execs running our university. Stop Redundancies at the University of Exeter - sign the petition below! c.org/NpvY4sR9gH

c.org

Sign the Petition

Stop Redundancies at the University of Exeter

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Aaron Martin @sixfouronea.net · 24/06/2026

"[Rwanda's] immigration service, with the support of the Ministry in charge of refugees and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, is currently conducting a [biomretric] registration campaign in all refugee camps as well as in urban centers." www.sosmediasburundi.org/en/2026/06/1...

sosmediasburundi.org

Rwanda : the biometric card that could change refugees' lives - SOS Médias Burundi

SOS Médias Burundi Mahama, Rwanda, June 16, 2026 – Rwanda is continuing its digital transformation with the gradual rollout of a new biometric identity card for all its citizens and residents. This la...

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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Huh. I wonder why the “users give scans of their eyeballs to Sam Altman for no discernible benefit” startup is failing

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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Should researchers still be posting their data openly online? It’s a question being debated by some researchers now that bots are routinely mining open-access databases and scientific publications to train artificial-intelligence tools'.

nature.com

Bots are scraping open data — how should researchers respond?

The snowballing ability of artificial intelligence to trawl open data sets has some scientists worried about losing control of their information.

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Keren Weitzberg @kerenweitzberg.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Very honored to be quoted in 'Project Profile,' journalist Naipanoi Lepapa's compassionate, in-depth, six-part investigative report on the use of biometrics in the humanitarian sector: www.theelephant.info/investigatio... www.theelephant.info/author/nlepa...

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United Tech & Allied Workers @utaw.tech · 05/05/2026

BREAKING: Google DeepMind workers in UK have voted 98% in favour of unionising — demanding an end to AI use by Israel and the US military for perpetrating genocide in Gaza. If successful, they’ll be the first frontier AI lab in the world to unionise.

GOOGLE DEEPMIND WORKERS IN UNION
RECOGNITION BID - 98% of Google DeepMind members vote YES

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Bronwen Manby @bronwenmanby.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

Rwanda: 'By the 2027 deadline, banks, hospitals, telecom companies, and government institutions are expected to use the [Single Digital ID] authentication system.' www.newtimes.co.rw/article/3439...

newtimes.co.rw

Govt sets 2027 deadline for full shift to digital ID

The government will phase out current national identity cards by June 2027, requiring all citizens to transition to the new Single Digital ID (SDID) by that time. The...

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Keren Weitzberg @kerenweitzberg.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

Congrats to my colleague Ib: His innovative new book, China and African Parliaments, is shortlisted for the prestigious L.H.M. Ling award! global.oup.com/academic/pro...

global.oup.com

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School of Society & Environment, Queen Mary University @qmulsse.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

Congratulations to Dr Innocent (Ib) Batsani-Ncube, whose book has been shortlisted for L.H.M. Ling Outstanding First Book Prize. Ib examines China's expanding influence, using parliament buildings as a lens for understanding China–Africa relations. Read more👇 www.qmul.ac.uk/society-and-...

qmul.ac.uk

China and African Parliaments shortlisted for L.H.M. Ling Outstanding First Book Prize

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 14/03/2026

i need the “llms are might be conscious” folx to read this

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Keren Weitzberg @kerenweitzberg.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

"If humanitarian data is no longer the sole responsibility of traditional actors like UN humanitarian agencies...and humanitarian NGOs – assuming it ever was – we must ask ourselves if existing concepts and tools for governing humanitarian data are still tenable in a new era." tinyurl.com/34w6remb

datastudiesbibliography.org

All Data Is Humanitarian Data — Data Studies Bibliography

If in this new era all data has the potential to become humanitarian data, then it will be important for critical data scholars to further explore and theorize the humanitarian implications of seeming...

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Dr Margie Cheesman @margchee.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Opportunity to contribute to a public consultation on the UK's digital ID scheme roadmap-for-modern-digital-government.campaign.gov.uk/digital-id-c...