Angela Cassidy

This remake of Ladyhawke is rubbish and no one asked for it to be made. In particular, the casting is awful.

Magic Rays of Light On the evening of 26 January 1926, inventor John Logie Baird held a public demonstration in his workspace on London's Frith Street of a 'seeing by wireless' app…

Many thanks to @andrewmale.bsky.social for his immensely generous @sightsoundmag.bsky.social review of Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of British Television; forgive me if I quote some phrases, but first here's the link to the Bloomsbury page for the book:

www.bloomsbury.com/uk/magic-ray...

This is a life and death story for the UK – so why is it being brushed under the carpet? | Aditya Chakrabortty The news that healthy life expectancy is in decline in Britain exposes a serious truth about the state we’re in, says Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty

"In their book Social Murder? Austerity and Life Expectancy in the UK, the public health experts David Walsh and Gerry McCartney point out how Tory and Lib Dem policies effectively killed ordinary Britons."

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Crises can be forgetten quickly – especially health ones, where the stories about the invisible enemy soon get blurred.

After Covid by @jasongale.bsky.social is an important account of how things actually played out, full of details that were crucial then, and will be crucial for next time.

Congratulations to all of our members who got elected, as well as those endorsed by us. More from us in the coming days. #ucu

Sounding a major #envhums #envpol #STS #histSTM #animals job klaxon. FOUR postdocs working with the Multispecies dream team!

The Black Death’s counterintuitive effect: as human numbers fell, so did plant diversity New study finds that plant biodiversity collapsed in landscapes where arable production was abandoned during and after the Black Death era.

“Modern, intensive farming practices have caused substantial biodiversity losses across the globe. Yet, our Black Death findings, in combination with numerous other examples, show us that humans and nature do not always have to be kept separate to conserve and promote biodiversity.”

Sounding a major #envhums #envpol #STS #histSTM #animals job klaxon. FOUR postdocs working with the Multispecies dream team!

Reactionary Worldbuilding: From Speculative Imagination to Political Practice The first in-depth study of the dark side of worldbuilding, exploring the connection between speculative imagination and political practice.Speculative imagination brings to life an array of possible ...

It's available for pre-order!

CFA: These are wonderful 3-years postdoc projects, check them out and apply: 🐦🐮

#envhum
#envhist
@esehnextgate.bsky.social

Honoured to be elected to #UCU NEC. Thanks for all your votes!

Disappointing turnout of 8.5%. I was elected by around 1% of total members.

I won in the first round (of STV system), which is a pretty emphatic endorsement of my ‘manifesto’, but sorry to report that our Union is in a parlous state.

Oh great news, congratulations!

Thread. (TLDR: the House of Lords DCC report on AI came down hard on the correct side of the debate, rather than siding with industry lobbyists.)

A brown penguin chick of some kind. It looks very much like a man in a suit. It is bedraggled and miserable

Made it to Friday but at what cost

Your regular reminder that the UK is in fact a high trust society and anyone who implies it isn’t is either selling you a pup or has bought one.

Some very interesting work here on the biodiversity impact of land abandonment during the Black Death. I'd love to see something similar on the Highland Clearances ... it would usefully inform re-wilding chat.

Fantasy fans will know who Charles de Lint is and want to read this. As for those who don't - well, as hint on how the story plays out, it doesn't go well for ICE in Newford.

They get disappeared to the "other world".

There's magic in Newford and the magic is angry these days.

V good private eye this week

Delighted to be starting my new Wellcome Trust funded project today, which has now been moved to University of Liverpool. A reminder that I will soon be advertising two postdocs on conservation and animal health and conservation and earth systems' health. The posts will likely start late this year.

👀

Most UK universities now inactive on X - Research Professional News Tipping point reached as shift away from Elon Musk’s social media platform continues

'Among universities, there are now 76 inactive accounts, compared with 65 institutions still active this year. Tattersall found that in the past three months, 13 universities have ceased posting and five have stated publicly on the platform that they have quit.' 1/2

Quietly, calmly and forensically, BBC just dismantled the Trump communications shitshow on Iran.

No hyperbole, just laying out an unprecedented military, diplomatic and reputational shambles.

Worth a watch.

(🎥 BBC News/BBC Verify)

AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) studentship – ‘Urgent rescue curation of space heritage in a time of world crisis’ with The Science Museum Group and University College London at Universi... PhD Project - AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) studentship – ‘Urgent rescue curation of space heritage in a time of world crisis’ with The Science Museum Group and University College Lond...

We have a 4-year AHRC-funded PhD studentship on 'Rescue curation of space heritage' advertised!

Supervision by me, space scientist Lucie Green (@luciegreen.bsky.social), and curators of space and engineering at the Science Museum, Doug Millard and Ben Russell

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

I was Team Contraptions at AAA and it was a DELIGHT

“Technology” has a long and problematized relationship with progress, efficiency, and efficacy. Sleek trains rushing through the countryside, the blinding reach of the electrical grid, or the instantaneous messages of networked communication are its shiny avatars. Contraptions, by contrast, are technical devices that barely work. They seem too complex, too circuitous, too labor intensive. They are frequently ad hoc—as unrepeatable and unreliable as Rube Goldberg’s fantastical machines. They push the received wisdom about technology’s defining features to the limit. Like the aesthetic “gimmick” theorized by Sianne Ngai, the contraption is a category charged with normative judgment. Contraptions may work, but they don’t work right. While the contraption is commonly associated with vernacular or retrograde alternatives to high technology, many “high tech” devices reveal a contraption-like character on close inspection: AI chatbots, internet protocols, and helicopters come to seem both over- and under-engineered the more attention is paid to them. This session invites STS scholars to think with the figure of the contraption: What alternatives to popular ideas about technology do these complicated and unruly objects offer? What is it about the present moment that pushes the contraption back into public thought? How does the normativity of contraption judgments manifest in everyday life? How do people come to perceive and evaluate technical complexity in social life? Work in this area may draw on theories of gimmicks, hacks, kludges, workarounds, tricks, bricolage, and other complex or informal technical activities.

STS folks, I'm organizing an open panel on CONTRAPTIONS for 4S this year, following up on a lovely panel at last year's AAA meetings. You should submit something if you got it! www.4sonline.org/accepted_ope...

'Her eight-year-old daughter Heather had just died in hospital, two weeks after playing in the sea on the beach at Dawlish Warren in Devon, where she contracted E coli O157, a bug which comes from raw sewage.'

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Studying for an MA and PhD at
@kingschostm.bsky.social was an incredibly rewarding experience. I was privileged to have a Hans Rausing Scholarship. I recommend this route to anyone interested in studying the history of science, technology, and medicine.

eurosky

Moved my account to eurosky. Very easy, the moving tool moved everything in a few minutes. Experience identical. Can recommend.

www.eurosky.tech

If there's one thing this article reveals, it's not that the journalists should be using AI, but that we'd all be better off without the editors and managers.

The collapse of a global news service