Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 1h

Beats being able to actually see what's happening right now tbh

Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 1h

While normally I'd complain about having to wear an eyepatch on my normally-good eye, meaning that I have to rely on one that doesn't get enough circulation and doesn't focus properly, I can actually wholly recommend engaging with the world through a cosy fuzzy fog.

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Reposted by Lauren Pikó

Professor Euan Ritchie @euanritchie.bsky.social · 8h

"One consultant totalled $85,000...almost $3,000 a day".

"Last year, a NTEU report estimated universities across Australia spent $734 million a year on consultants, a practice across the sector which the union has strongly criticised."

Here's an idea, hire more staff instead of consultants on $$$!

Professor Euan Ritchie @euanritchie.bsky.social · 9h

This nonsense must end, one would have hoped we'd learnt from the damage done to the Australian public service and government decision-making, but clearly not www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10...

Uni staff outraged as high-paid consultants work on redundancies

As Western Sydney University prepares to shed hundreds of staff due to its dire finances, leaked documents reveal it is paying consultants as much as $2,850 a day.

www.abc.net.au

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Reposted by Lauren Pikó

El Gibbs @bluntshovels.bsky.social · 2d

'Why is there so little nature writing by disabled Australian writers?' Jessica White

www.artshub.com.au/news/opinion...

Why is there so little nature writing by disabled Australian writers?

Author Jessica White considers ecobiography, and how deafness shapes her relationship with natural and built environments.

www.artshub.com.au

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Reposted by Lauren Pikó

Radio Reversal @radioreversal.bsky.social · 4d

This chat draws on Anastasia's chapter in this book, Histories of Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Australia, edited by @evansmithhist.bsky.social, @drjpersian.bsky.social & Vashti Jane Fox - great and useful read if you can find a copy!

www.routledge.com/Histories-of...

Histories of Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Australia

Histories of Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Australia provides a history of fascist movements and anti-fascist resistance in Australia over the past century.In recent years, the far right has become a re...

www.routledge.com

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 5d

Oh god, I just remembered I unironically said "all that is solid melts into air" during a workplace wellbeing meeting 🫠

My laptop should have set itself on fire in protest

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 5d

Have been referring folks at work to these and they are immensely enjoying them! 💜

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 5d

Not to be an enabler, but I haven't forgotten you mentioning a potential future avenue of bolshy disability history, and if/when that magical day arrives it would be my dream to talk shop with you on that 💜

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 6d

The planning and heritage industries do a terrible job in general of engaging with the horrors of what went on in these sites, often with grotesquely whitewashed results (e.g. "Springthorpe", the generic suburban estate built on the grounds of Mont Park Hospital in northeast Melbourne).

El Gibbs @bluntshovels.bsky.social · 6d

any further changes must include justice for the thousands of disabled people who lived and died in these places, and who also fought for liberation

www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10...

Psychiatric hospital to 'urban parkland': Sydney's public space dilemma

The challenge of transforming a major piece of Sydney's public space from a former mental health hospital to an "iconic urban parkland" is a delicate dance for the state government.

www.abc.net.au

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Reposted by Lauren Pikó

Asher Wolf @asherwolf.bsky.social · 6d

When we talk about the things that should haunt us, memory does not last long beyond the survivors unless testimony is recorded. And most of the communities that housed these sites have no desire to have those stories on the record, because it is a source of eternal shame

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Reposted by Lauren Pikó

Asher Wolf @asherwolf.bsky.social · 6d

I regularly come across older people with disabilities who were held at ‘Mayday Hills’ previously known as the ‘Beechworth Lunacy Asylum’. The site is now used for ghost tours, even while some of the old Mayday Hills workers are still employed elsewhere as disability support workers

El Gibbs @bluntshovels.bsky.social · 6d

any further changes must include justice for the thousands of disabled people who lived and died in these places, and who also fought for liberation

www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10...

Psychiatric hospital to 'urban parkland': Sydney's public space dilemma

The challenge of transforming a major piece of Sydney's public space from a former mental health hospital to an "iconic urban parkland" is a delicate dance for the state government.

www.abc.net.au

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 6d

Disabled person with a long family history of workers in those institutions; the stories I have heard are genuinely awful, and truly make me fear for the ones I haven't heard.

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 6d

*resets "days since shoehorning Walt Whitman quotes into meetings" counter to zero*

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 6d

I feel like there should be a Wile E Coyote - esque hole plummeting into an unending void somewhere behind that fence as well

Though maybe for me someone ticked a box that said "refer to yawning void" instead of "neurologist"

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Reposted by Lauren Pikó

Evan @evansmithhist.bsky.social · 6d

One month to go! Our new edited volume, ‘In Solidarity, Under Suspicion: The British Far Left from 1956’, will be published by @manchesterup.bsky.social in November.

Tell you institutional library to pre-order a hardback edition now.

manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526179593/

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Reposted by Lauren Pikó

Dr Zara Bain @zaranosaur.bsky.social · 6d

Skeptical of AI transcription services (transloption?)?

Want to support a small but fantastic disabled-majority, unapologetically intersectional AND research specialist transcription social enterprise instead?

Contact us quoting code SPOOKY10 for a spooky 10% off our definitely all-human services

Academic Audio Transcription Ltd @aat-transcribes.bsky.social · 6d

Conducting #QualitativeResearch or #ParticipatoryResearch this autumn?

Prefer the peace of mind and ease of proper human transcription services over the inaccuracies and confabulations of automated transcripts that cost you editing time before analysis?

Contact us for a free no-obligation quote 📧

Home - Academic Audio Transcription Ltd

Get high-quality, human-made transcripts and closed captions from our specialist disabled-led and disabled-majority team of expert transcribers.

academicaudiotranscription.com

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Reposted by Lauren Pikó

Tom Studans @maximumwelfare.bsky.social · 7d

#BREAKING 🚨 Deloitte to refund government, admits using AI in $440k report into mutual obligations issues.

Fake quotes from Federal Court case that ended Robodebt deleted from new report in Friday DEWR dump.

📰 AFR

✍️ @paulkarp.bsky.social

✍️ @edmundtadros.bsky.social

🗣️ @chrisrudge.bsky.social

HEADLINE: Deloitte to refund government, admits AI errors in $440k report

Deloitte Australia will issue a partial refund to the federal government after admitting that artificial intelligence had been used in the creation of a $440,000 report littered with errors including three nonexistent academic references and a made-up quote from a Federal Court judgement.

A new version of the report for the Department of Workplace Relations (DEWR) was quietly uploaded to the department’s website on Friday, ahead of a long weekend across much of Australia. It features more than a dozen deletions of nonexistent references and footnotes, a rewritten reference list, and corrections to multiple typographic errors.

(photo of Deloitte Australia HQ) Deloitte Australia has made almost $25 million worth of deals with the Department of Workplace Relations since 2021. Photographer Dion Georgopoulos

The first version of the report, about the IT system used to automate penalties in the welfare system such as pauses on the dole, was published in July. Less than a month later, Deloitte was forced to investigate the report after University of Sydney academic Dr Christopher Rudge highlighted multiple errors in the document.

At the time, Rudge speculated that the errors may have been caused by what is known as “hallucinations” by generative AI. This is where the technology responds to user queries by inventing references and quotes. Deloitte declined to comment.

The incident is embarrassing for Deloitte as it earns a growing part of its $US70.5 billion ($107 billion) in annual global revenue by providing advice and training clients and executives about AI. The firm also boasts about its widespread use of the technology within its global operations, while emphasising the need to always have humans review any output of AI.

SUBHEADING: Deleted references, footnotes

The revised report has deleted a dozen references to two nonexistent reports by Professor Lisa Burton Crawford, a law professor at the University of Sydney, that were included in the first version. Two references to a nonexistent report by Professor Björn Regnell, of Lund University in Sweden, were also deleted in the new report.

Also deleted was a made up reference to a court decision in a leading robo-debt case, Deanna Amato v Commonwealth.

The new report has also deleted a reference to “Justice Davis” (a misspelling of Justice Jennifer Davies) and the made-up quote from the nonexistent paragraphs 25 and 26 in the judgement: “The burden rests on the decision-maker to be satisfied on the evidence that the debt is owed. A person’s statutory entitlements cannot lawfully be reduced based on an assumption unsupported by evidence.”

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Reposted by Lauren Pikó

John Pring, DNS @johnpring.bsky.social · 7d

The campaigning organisation that represents disabled people within Labour had to cancel plans to attend this week’s conference in Liverpool after the party asked it to pay thousands of pounds in fees.
#Labour #LabConf25
www.disabilitynewsservice.com/disability-l...

Disability Labour priced out of conference after cash-strapped party withdraws financial support

The campaigning organisation that represents disabled people within Labour had to cancel plans to attend this week’s conference in Liverpool after the party asked it to pay thousands of pounds in f…

www.disabilitynewsservice.com

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 9d

I would be genuinely interested in lemon tree thoughts mainly because I think they would absolutely roast us. the dishwasher is more complicit

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Evan @evansmithhist.bsky.social · 16d

Taking inspiration from @hpsvanessa.bsky.social and asking on this #DigitalFriday for any suggestions of new (or overlooked) online collections of radical historical documents to add my ever growing list!

hatfulofhistory.com/radical-onli...

radical online collections and archives

I am very interested in the growing amount of radical literature from around the world that is being scanned and digitised. As there are so many and from many different places, I thought it would b…

hatfulofhistory.com

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Reposted by Lauren Pikó

Fergus Murray @fergus.oolong.co.uk · 9d

Fun fact: he's talking about the bizarre and horrifying history of ME/CFS here, but this is almost exactly what's happened with the anti-trans movement as well, and this time the British media are even more culpable.

George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · Oct 18

I see my own profession, the media, as being as culpable as any. How did we allow a bizarre sect, with a phenomenally cruel and brutal agenda, to set the prevailing view of this and other issues?
And it was right across the board: just about every major outlet in the UK.

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 9d

There's definitely never a good time for complex neurological symptoms to take over, but there are definitely some times that are worse than others.

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 9d

Solidarity Martin, I'm always grateful for your sharing of your experiences!

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El Gibbs @bluntshovels.bsky.social · 11d

NDIS can now deliver debts to disabled people if they get things wrong, even though new permanent rules aren't in place

ndis.gov.au/news/10949-n...

The NDIS supports transition period is ending | NDIS

The 12-month transition period for adjusting to the NDIS support lists ends on 2 October 2025.

ndis.gov.au

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 13d

I would give out notebooks when I'd introduce this piece, so you'll have to imagine me giving you one as well as the link :)

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