iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Michael Barany

Nina Markl 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 @ninamarkl.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

the rest of us also respect students enough as adults capable of comprehending complex issues not to say stuff like this:

Prof Mathieson said the university was
"extremely disappointed" by the decision to strike.
He told the BBC's Radio Scotland Breakfast programme: "I have enormous sympathy with our students and it really irritates me that they are being weaponised in the way that they are by UCU.
"And UCU know that they are targeting students. Of course they can say that they think students are on their side because, I was a student once and we were all anti-establishment, and of course you're going to blame the establishment.

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Lucy Gaynor @lucyjgaynor.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Cuts like those proposed at Edinburgh are cultural vandalism, & the destruction of future opportunities for countless students. Pitting students and staff against each other is callous disregard for the immense work that teaching staff put into educating & encouraging young people.

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 29/09/2026

and then treating the ref block grant as found money for vanity projects rather than resources that need to pay for all the researchers we'd hired (a point I tried in vain to make in Senate)

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 29/09/2026

but what really gets me is the consistent inability to process that continuing to take in more money than it spends, by the simplest of arithmetic, is making the uni "richer and richer"

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 29/09/2026

just absolutely no recollection of signing off on the pre-ref hiring spree or post-2020 property binge

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 28/09/2026

Really galling that the Principal accuses staff of ‘weaponising’ students when the revealed preference of the University’s management has consistently been that they prioritise breaking the union over things avoiding students graduating with empty pieces of paper.

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Plashing Vole @plashingvole.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Best of luck to @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social members going on strike for over a month. Nobody does this willingly - it’s a last resort, unlike that enormously rich university’s slash and burn tactics.

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 28/09/2026

truly it is a race to give scientists reasons to avoid their products while also burning traditional modes of openness and collaboration

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 27/09/2026

there's been a bit of work on the arxiv's history, I think? at least at the level of a good magazine article. Not quite what you're after but the Biagioli/Galison edited volume on scientific authorship has a couple chapters that speak to pre-publication handling.

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Dr Vanessa @hpsvanessa.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Cannot tell you how much I hate this & how ashamed & angry I am that @ukri.org have taken this step. We KNOW this sort of gAI is socially biased, we KNOW it favours slopAI output over human-written. Our research landscape is falling apart due to underfunding, & they do this? it's *appalling*

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 24/09/2026

inject that evolving technological advancement straight into those veins, that's the good stuff

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John Stott @jpsastro.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I've seen the future and it's bleak. Coming to an inbox near you soon too I imagine. I don't use LLMs for anything I do and never will but it's depressing that I wrote something that no one ever read before it was rejected. 🧪 #academicsky

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 24/09/2026

Work Gets Hard When Context Is Everywhere

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Bart Penders @penders.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Back of the envelope calculations: 3600 years of research time went into the collective application process. The research will fund 3200 years of research. We are 400 research years poorer as a result of this. 1/2

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Dan Hirschman @asociologist.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Another win for the Cornell Chronicle’s email subject line policy of “jam the top two headlines together and hit send.”

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 22/09/2026

the site says "members do not accept payment for this work" but some have elsewhere disclosed receiving access, in-kind resources, funding for events, etc from openai. here's hoping for more disclosure to show they're serious about "Independence, Transparency, and Accountability"

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Drew Lewis @drew-lewis.com · 22/09/2026

I know mathematicians aren't big on methods from other disciplines, but I feel like comparatists would have a field day examining this and e.g. the Leiden declaration

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 22/09/2026

ok but some of the chickens have a prize they won a long time ago for stuff completely unrelated to fox management, so we have to trust them on this

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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Wow does the post title bury the lede! I particularly like the pictured comment.

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 22/09/2026

the chefskiss was running his comment email through the same tool as the essays

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 21/09/2026

not to mention funds for non-local seminar speakers, tea and milk, and other relatively small costs that directly contribute to interpersonal academic community and collaboration

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 21/09/2026

finding out that supposedly-crisis-budget-cutting uni has budgeted £500/yr in tokens for 3rd-party ai models for every academic and i-don't-know-how-much for students, and this is presented as cost-control after who-knows-how-much being burnt on this stuff previously

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 20/09/2026

We have a higher ed system that is premised on the idea that incoming undergraduates have basic reading, writing, study, and math skills which will allow them to learn how to understand research knowledge and ideally eventually generate themselves.

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Reposted by Michael Barany

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

We’ve lived through the nearly complete systematic unwinding of the postwar public university, which for all its faults, was premised on the idea that not only aristocrats could be intellectuals, & that having non-aristocratic intellectuals was better for knowledge & therefore better for everyone

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 20/09/2026

underscored by the fact that they set profit targets using earnings metrics that even the private finance industry seems to acknowledge are sketchy even for their designed purpose, a kind of speculative corporate finance with virtually nothing in common with educational public charities

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 20/09/2026

not only this, but such thinking is financially sustainable at universities at a scale that works, provided you're not setting out to engineer a budget narrative toward academic vandalism

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jbralston.bsky.social @jbralston.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

But what if I told you that thinking isn't always efficient and that learning demands grappling with complex ideas in smaller groups, so you can't just "scale up" something like a course on advanced Arabic or Hegel or Feminist hermeneutics of testimony without losing the learning itself.

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jbralston.bsky.social @jbralston.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Same thing happening at Edinburgh Uni to programmes in history, the arts, Celtic studies and more. Edinburgh is known for having one of the best humanities programmes in UK and world for research and teaching. We also more than pay for ourselves but with consultants, you can always be more efficient

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jbralston.bsky.social @jbralston.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

A few facts. 1) Humanities programmes, despite what you may assume, actually make money for the university and don't lose it. 2) we aren't in a deficit as university and have had a multimillion pound surplus every year.

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 20/09/2026

I joined because they're working on problems I think are important from a perspective I appreciate, not because anyone has any illusions that they have it all figured out. The attitude seems to be based on learning and problem solving.

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 20/09/2026

I think that's right: circumstantial, that's where the center of gravity seems to be for the big companies and the mathematicians feeling the brunt of them right now, but center of gravity is not totality and I suspect the org would be keen to take a globally inclusive approach

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Barbara Fantechi @barbarafantechi.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

At the bottom of the membership list of ahmath.org today: "Note: We currently have a backlog of submissions to upload." The Association of Human Mathematics is open to anyone who wants to put clear limits on AI usage in mathematical research. #MathSky

ahmath.org

AHM

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 20/09/2026

I really try to refrain from too much commentary on local academic politics - and boy is there a lot it 🙄 - but I just think based on my own experience is that there a lot of humanities academics who just don’t believe that their research matters or should be supported.

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 19/09/2026

would of course expect more slop in the desk rejected pool, genAI and otherwise. the suggestion seems to be that the vast bulk of the papers feeding the surge in desk rejections are slop, but perhaps more interesting to try to assess how much slop gets past that first hurdle

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 19/09/2026

all the same, I wonder how this would compare to a sample of papers that went out for review

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Kate Louise Mathis is on strike @drmaudbailey.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

'Budget constraints' = fall-out of deliberate prioritization of capital expenditure now laid at the feet of all sorts of staff (other than management, of course) and our specialist programmes www.ucuedinburgh.org.uk/blog/depreci...

ucuedinburgh.org.uk

Depreciating the University of Edinburgh into the Ground — UCU Edinburgh

There are four key takeaways from the University of Edinburgh’s 2024-25 annual report, which this post explores: The University continues to make a sizeable surplus. What financial pressures exi...

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Reposted by Michael Barany

adoyleaustin.bsky.social @aliceaustin.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

A university in the city that hosts the National Library of Scotland will no longer provide an opportunity to study Scottish Literature as a stand-alone subject...

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Reposted by Michael Barany

Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

My (very impressionistic) sense is that it's removing joint degrees in languages that is most likely most rapidly to lead to staff losses and loss of access to degree programmes/research capacity, with then follow-on impacts for students/staff in other SHAPE disciplines who rely on languages.

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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 19/09/2026

Third paper on ≈the same open question within days: this one is the third. The authors blatantly acknowledge their whole plan was to get and dump a ChatGPT proof on arXiv in ONE day to claim a result, and complain about being "scooped" by another group WHICH DID THE SAME THING Do you feel no shame?

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Euan Healey @euanhealey.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Edinburgh University created the first ever Chair in Celtic in Scotland in 1882 (Donald Mackinnon of Colonsay). This is a cultural retreat happening before our eyes where there was once leadership.

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Katherine McDonald @katherinemcdon.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

One of my top writing tips (which I'm sure one of you gave me) is to have a separate document called "cuts" for the bits that don't quite work, so that you can fool yourself that you're not DELETING them you're simply MOVING them.

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 18/09/2026

PA Consulting in this case, though there are recent six-fig Nous contracts that doubtless have had a role. The data/metrics have indeed been consistent with this industry's poor form, by all accounts.

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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

There are many ideas in mathematics that may be hard to get, but are easy once you get them. Because of this, mathematical understanding does not expand in a monotone direction. Our understanding frequently deteriorates as well. There are several obvious mechanisms of decay.

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Royal Historical Society @royalhistsoc.org · 18/09/2026

We warmly welcome applications to join the Fellowship of the Society. Next closing dates: 5 Oct and 14 December. Fellowship is open to those who've made a scholarly research contribution to #history in all sectors (within & beyond higher education) in the UK/worldwide bit.ly/4iOu51g #Skystorians

bit.ly

Apply for Fellowship - RHS

Closing dates for next applications: Mondays 5 October and 14 December 2026 Fellowships are awarded to those who have made an original contribution to historical scholarship, typically through the a...

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 18/09/2026

in the blessed name of the patron saint of infrastructure studies (SL Star), it shall be done

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 18/09/2026

the Cold War investment in languages and area studies had really outsized knock on effects across the university system, transformative for many fields including those critical of the Cold War state that funded the transformation

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