It seems a good day to remind people that in the UK 3 times as many people work in Indian restaurants or for McDonalds as in the whole coal and steel industry. 5 times as many are academic staff at universities. If Labour does not understand its electorate, there is no way to appeal to it.
1. How common is LLM use in scientific publishing, and how does it vary across field, publisher, journal prestige, author demographics etc.? @kylesiler.bsky.social has new paper in PNAS that addresses this question on a massive scale: 7.3 million papers from Elsevier, PLOS, MDPI, and Frontiers.
Today Microsoft moved all its GitHub copilot subscribers to token-based billing.
If you want to see what happens when people have to pay the actual costs of AI, the day is finally here. It's obvious that every customer sees the deep, meaningful value and isn't angry at all.
John Schofield of York University on the value of archaeology - it’s not just about the past.
theconversation.com/six-reasons-...
This week: an evening at Society of Antiquaries, London, for a celebration of the Low Ham publication as part of their summer soiree. Here's us authors (@davidrobertsarch.bsky.social, Roger Leech and me) posing with the hard copy from Pen & Sword books but it's also open access - link in comments 👇
Work for a UK university? Want to see how below-inflation settlements have eroded your pay? @bparsia.bsky.social has produced a handy tool. Put in your spine point, starting date... then get angry all over again about how even this massive, sustained pay cut hasn't been enough to keep sector afloat
Good summary. One interesting nugget is that there are currently around 2.8 million students, which seems to me a staggering number and yet more proof of the importance of the ‘industry’. If the solution to the crisis is more collaboration I’m not sure how it happens with that scale in mind.
How do we enhance the engagement of history students in their degree programmes?
A new article - 'Rethinking Engagement: Insights from UK History Departments' - bit.ly/4viEKru, by Sarah Jones and Simon Peplow offers discipline-specific proposals.
Latest Open Access article in 'Transactions' 1/2
A long account in @lrb.co.uk by Stefan Collini of the causes of what feels like a death spiral for UK Universities. Recent estimates are that UK HE contributes >£130Bn annually to the UK economy, resulting in >750 000 jobs across all regions of the UK
lordslibrary.parliament.uk/higher-educa...
If you work in development-led archaeology in England, whether it's curatorial advice, consultancy or running projects, Historic England and Reading University would welcome your feedback on HE's guidance on the Palaeolithic 🦣🏺
Please follow this link to access a short online survey: bit.ly/3PcKMul
Tarik Abou-Chadi
The government plans to cut university subsidy for teaching archaeology by 50%, yet it’s never been more relevant to society.
Hey #UCU,
I just released v1 of another @ucucommons.org project: JNCHES vs Inflation.
Site: jnchesvinflation.streamlit.app
Blog post: ucucommons.org/project-jnches-vs-inflation/
It's depressing but may be helpful!
Very good, if extremely depressing, piece by Stefan Collini to explain what has been and is being done to this country’s universities. If interested to find out, I recommend reading it.
‘The truth is that both ministers and vice-chancellors are locked into a financial model whose premise is misconceived and whose side effects are profoundly damaging for higher education.’
Stefan Collini on the UK’s university problems, online now from the next issue.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Bijan Parsia
We're happy to announce a new UCU Commons Project: JNCHES vs. Inflation. We've extracted pay spine point data going back to 2005 and plotted it in a number of ways against several inflation measures.
