Archive for July 2025

Delivering the NT government’s response to the report on Tuesday, Domestic Violence Prevention Minister Robyn Cahill (above) said the recommendations were “uninspiring” and failed to hit the mark.

Last week’s stories, from Columbia’s settlement with the federal government to another state’s foray into direct admissions.

The average, midsized data center uses 300,000 gallons of water a day, roughly the use of a thousand homes. Larger data centers might use 4.5 million gallons a day, depending on their type of water cooling system. Austin has 47 such data centers, while the Dallas-Fort Worth area hosts the majority in Texas at 189. Let’s waste more environmental resources on underdeveloped, non-transparent, corporate profiteering!

Carmen Prefontaine, vice-president of CUPE Manitoba, is running in the Oct. 25 byelection…. She said she supports Mayor Scott Gillingham’s vision of shifting some of the city’s safety investments toward social services and health-based interventions. “I’m not sure armed officers are always the answer — social workers, public health, and other resources need to be available,” she said. “We need to respond to emergencies with the help that’s needed.”

It may very well be that “prompt engineering” will eventually be legitimized enough to be proposed as an automated, enshittified alternative to academic writing (a ubiquitous general education requirement which neoliberal university administrators have long fantasized about sunsetting). These certificate programs are no doubt imagined by some as a step in that direction. But I see the more imminent catastrophe as the rebirth of for-profit colleges, tapeworm-like, inside public universities. To cite another Cottom truism: “EdTech is a Trojan horse for elite capture of public resources. Every time.”

On 10 July 2025, overseas social workers across the UK gathered both in-person and online for the second annual BASW Diaspora Social Workers Conference. This year’s theme explored Resilient Diaspora Social Workers: Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Environments.

The fact I’m writing this in the form of a blog post is however the best indicator that academic blogging is far from dead. There’s a thriving ecosystem of multi-author blogs, online magazines and publication projects that have vastly expanded the range of forums in which academics can publish short form content, faster than would ever be possible through the journal system and to more diverse audiences.