Angela Cassidy
@angecass.bsky.social
science, society + policy; humans - animals - environments; #STS #HistSTM #scipol #scicomm
@ange_cass on BirdApp; @ange_cass_pics on Instagram
Haven't lived there for decades, but this just made me homesick ❤️
Seeing as I very rarely take selfies, this wasn't hard.. => Picture on your phone that has your energy that isn’t a selfie
Picture on your phone that has your energy that isn’t a selfie
And *then* there's the process for paying external collaborators, which is approximately the shape of the Magic Roundabout in Swindon, and has literally brought me to tears before now. Unbelievably complicated 🙁
Events organisation: having absorbed the 40 page guide to raising a purchase order I move on to the 15 page guide to placing a catering order
Thoroughly pleasant bank holiday amble around Exeter's post-industrial riverscape, interpersed, with a sneaky pint and random encounter with performing drama cyclists..
I had a dim, probably kids TV related memory that it might be something like that. I wonder how old it is?
Random discovery while hacking back overgrown but lovely garden of our new house. Ceramic, hollow, has 'Tony Soper Bird Bell' on it. I know who Soper is (BBC Nat Hist Unit) + that he did lots of bird TV/books but can #birdersuk #naturalists #envhums #envhist tell me more? Feeding device?
Pretty sure Matthew Kelly writes about 'improving' Dartmoor in Quartz and Feldspar; perhaps also David Matless on East Anglia (can't remember which book though)..
A *painfully* British story. Trying to work out if Cod War resonances are being deliberately played up or just because I've spent too much time thinking about #envhist #histstm of 1970s UK?
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
UK's puffin protection laws at centre of post Brexit row
The endangered puffin - one of Britain’s most iconic seabirds - is at the centre of a battle over the UK’s post Brexit freedoms.
www.bbc.co.uk
Funded Masters scholarships, with accessible entry requirements! Brilliant to see creation of such vital, affordable, entry points to academia for all @uniofexeter.bsky.social.
Pls pass word on to promising students interested in #medhumanities #medsociology #histmed #STS #histstm #OneHealth etc
Wellcome Centre on X: "We are offering two scholarships worth £3,500 each for full-time students enrolling on our MA programme for a September 2024 start. Find out more here! https://t.co/fwvoAdi3Sc https://t.co/oe6fJrUAoL" / X
We are offering two scholarships worth £3,500 each for full-time students enrolling on our MA programme for a September 2024 start. Find out more here! https://t.co/fwvoAdi3Sc https://t.co/oe6fJrUAoL
twitter.comSheriff Fatman just came up on J's playlist as this piece crossed my time...
NEW POST: On 101 Damnations, the 1990 debut album of South London duo Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine. Link to newsletter in my profile; all reposts much appreciated. (1/5)
#skystorians 🗃️ #polisky
🧵
101 Damnations (1990)
Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine’s debut album depicted a South London wrecked by Thatcherism, via the prisms of American popular culture and of organised religion.
academicbubble.substack.comFantasticly clear summary and analysis #H5N1 in dairy cows in the US from @bnerlich.bsky.social, who's been writing about #scicomm #STS aspects of infectious disease for A Very Long Time. She *is* joining dots with wildlife and longer tail of the issue, including 2000s flus -> BSE.
n this week's post I try to get my head round bird flu in cows in the United States #H5N1 #science #epidemics blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingscienc...
Milk, reservoirs and spillovers: Bird flu in cows - Making Science Public
On 26 April my sister emailed me from the United States and said “I might have to go over to oat milk”. She was alarmed by reports that bits of bird flu virus had been found in pasteurised milk. She has not gone over to oat milk yet. It seems that there is almost no ...
blogs.nottingham.ac.uk"The chances of it (H5N1) going from migratory birds to cows were so low,” Poulsen says. “And then it happened.” -> BUT the jump to wild mammals happened over a year ago. Both deeply weird and utterly unsurprising - from #histstm #onehealth POV - to see absence of joining the dots here
Bird flu caught the dairy industry off guard.
@meghanbartels.bsky.social digs into why cow farmers were less prepared than poultry ones, and what needs to happen to prevent further spread. 🧪@sciam.bsky.social www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-...
How Bird Flu Caught the Dairy Industry Off Guard
Understanding how avian influenza jumped into cows can help shape the path to stopping the virus’s spread
www.scientificamerican.com"Without skilled critical readers, we risk producing minds that are primed to accept neatly summarized information at face value rather than question it, analyze it from multiple angles, and draw their own nuanced conclusions."
We need to shift the conversation from ChatGPT's impact on writing to how generative AI will impact other core skills, like reading. Students are using purpose-built apps to offload close reading and this has profound implications on learning. Link👇 open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...
No One is Talking About AI's Impact on Reading
What does it mean when we stop reading texts and instead offload that skill to AI? We desperately need another ChatGPT moment outside of text generation to wake people up and let them know how quickly...
open.substack.comFor the gardeny inclined - our lawn is full of e.g. this lovely speedwell, yarrow, moss, wood violets, primrose, crocus etc. Would like to further reduce grass so I can mow less without making hayfever victims in the house explode. What would be good plants to introduce to this mix, when & how?
Satisfying: ”The Tories are fucked, fucked, fucked. They really are utterly fucked.”
Good morning! Rise and shine campers! It turns out the Conservatives are completely fucked iandunt.substack.com/p/elections-...
Elections 2024: The Tory day of reckoning
What we've seen so far confirms what we've witnessed for the last couple of years: a wave of electoral annihilation is coming for the Conservative party under Rishi Sunak
iandunt.substack.com
Absolutely. Barring very specific cases (and even then I'm impatient with videos), just give me something to READ, dammit!
but I generally don’t like learning via video because it feels so excruciatingly slow to me vs reading
Fabulous news. Because the link preview isn't working, here's a picture of the extremely, justifiably, joyous NASA team ❤️
Hello old friends! (just got the rest of our stuff out of storage, post move)
Thankyou! The bigger question I'm circling around is *why* do these repeated arguments get forgotten?
Have a long gestating and deeply stuck paper in progress about this in relation to 'care'. Hope to pick it up again soon but it's really difficult to write about
I know you've talked about this on social media before, but have you written anything more lengthy on the topic? Am working on a paper about amnesiac rhetorics/reinventing the wheel of interdisciplinarity and am wondering if there's connections to be drawn here
FWIW I find all the above ideas (also entanglement, rewilding restoration) useful and think human relations with environments would be improved if they were more widely known. BUT if we just talk about the nice bits then it collapses back into idealisations of Nature and we're back to the beginning.
It really does. Reckon they would have had fun with rewilding..
...naturecultures, lively flourishing, nonhuman agency, *aieeeeeargh*! See also: next door's bamboo undermining our patio (4 months digging/sieving to remove); when mushrooms grew out of our shower (rented flat); and the time our virgin cable stopped working b/c the junction box was FULL OF SNAILS
Today in renting, a charming sign of spring: a pale green leaf. Peeking out from under the lip of the bathtub. Inside the flat.
Folks, I pulled out a five-foot, fully leafed out strand of bindweed. The root is still in there, somewhere under the bathtub.
(despite all appearances, my family aren't ALL goths, it's more like a working majority)
Excellent day up on Dartmoor to visit gorgeous Scorhill circle: sky, stone, mist, green, water, mud..
Realised as I wandered that the Exe riverscape here is reminding me of the Lea Valley near where I grew up in N London. Love this kind of combination of water, industry/post industrial leavings, Big Concrete and flourishing life.
Excellent walk today. Pylons, edgelands, water, green, bridges...
In some regions “they are basically all hybrids,” Boitani says. “In this case, there is nothing you can do. You cannot send the army and kill everything.”
Here's an interesting story for anyone interested in dogs, wolves and zooarchaeology.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
‘We’d like to shoot them all’: growing army of wolfdogs raises hackles across Europe
Experts say the hybrids risk ‘polluting’ the genetic stock, but scientists disagree on how to deal with them. In Piedmont, Italy, the sight of a blond wolfdog signals the risk of another new litter
www.theguardian.comSeconded. Autoplay video has chased me off several other social media platforms because I find it SO annoying and distracting. Don't mind gifs so much esp as part of a conversation..
Scorching hot take nobody wanted: it's good that bluesky doesn't host video and gifs.
1) pivoting to video makes all social apps worse, stifles discussion and encourages "OMG, THIS" responses
2) it also massively increases hosting costs thus increasing how much bluesky has to monetise.
We recently moved to the edgelands of our city, where a line of pylons marches through the landscape. Fond of them already
I have huge admiration for Oli's ingenuity, smart thinking and sheer tenacity through a PhD which started with relatively simple questions but went to some very complicated places. All in the face of multiple pandemic tripwires.. Bravo, and congratulations Dr Moore!
And its done. PhD viva passed with minor corrections. Thank you @angecass.bsky.social for your patience and guidance. One chapter closed, a new one to be opened! Viva was a great experience. Which surprised me!
... however, this paper on Lovelock's ongoing relationships with Shell, Dupont et al, and the multiple iterations, transformations of Gaia theory offer some serious food for thought. Not fully convinced by argument linking Gaia to 'natural balance' climate denial strategies, but def worth a read 2/2
So if you know a bit about Lovelock's backstory as an independent scientist and generalised tinkerer for hire, this makes more sense... 1/2
TIL James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis's research on the "Gaia hypothesis" was funded in part by Big Oil.
@n.b. @ccmmody.bsky.social
This pic is from sixteen years ago (their ears are a bit bigger now). Holy crap, we made an - awesome - grown-up human bean. Happy birthday S!
Best Outreach Thing Ever
So this is not remotely relevant but I thought you’d like the story. In 2015 I went to a Chelsea Garden Fringe Festival event on Dune & gardening in space with a sock puppet making element. It was epic!
Really nice series of #STS #histSTM #evhums essays on Dune + author Frank Herbert's multiple connections with 'gritty' (cf shiney) scences, which I somehow missed first time around. Wondering again if anyone has written about Dune (or science fiction in general) and sociobiology/evolution/gender?
In honor of Dune Part 2, here is a little series on the Sciences of Dune we wrote for the LARB when Part 1 was released. Includes essays on prophecy, eugenics, pharmacology, language, medicine, harvesting, ethnography, and I wrote about computers and Mentats lareviewofbooks.org/feature/scie...
Indeed. Over past few years have virtually met various dedicated NZ folk who've stayed up to small hours to join UK based confs/seminars/meetings, so perhaps we should consider reciprocating?
The @britishacademy.bsky.social ECR network helped support @sipnetworkuk.bsky.social's 1 day workshop last summer, so needed to help us get the Network up and running again after pandemic hiatus. We're now running our first conference in five years(!) this summer, so THANKYOU BA! sip2024.co.uk
The @britishacademy.bsky.social
has set up an Early Career Researcher Network to provide support to humanities & social science researchers. We currently have hubs in the Midlands, Scotland, South West and Scotland and it is free for ECRs to join
www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/early-career...
Early Career Researcher Network
An inclusive, researcher-led network for UK-based early career researchers working in the humanities and social sciences
www.thebritishacademy.ac.ukAh, I see hashtags are working now, that's better.. Also great to see that ICHST is planning for hybrid from get-go, looks like CFP welcomes remote presentation and participation! #histSTM #STS #envhist #envhums
Carbon-wise, I'm not encouraging all European #histSTM folk to head down under, but it looks like ICHST 2025 will be a great meeting for those who are a bit closer