Indymedia Ireland is a volunteer-run non-commercial open publishing website for local and international news, opinion & analysis, press releases and events. Its main objective is to enable the public to participate in reporting and analysis of the news and other important events and aspects of our daily lives and thereby give a voice to people.
Fraud and mismanagement at University College Cork Thu Aug 28, 2025 18:30 | Calli Morganite UCC has paid huge sums to a criminal professor
This story is not for republication. I bear responsibility for the things I write. I have read the guidelines and understand that I must not write anything untrue, and I won't.
This is a public interest story about a complete failure of governance and management at UCC.
Deliberate Design Flaw In ChatGPT-5 Sun Aug 17, 2025 08:04 | Mind Agent Socratic Dialog Between ChatGPT-5 and Mind Agent Reveals Fatal and Deliberate 'Design by Construction' Flaw
This design flaw in ChatGPT-5's default epistemic mode subverts what the much touted ChatGPT-5 can do... so long as the flaw is not tickled, any usage should be fine---The epistemological question is: how would anyone in the public, includes you reading this (since no one is all knowing), in an unfamiliar domain know whether or not the flaw has been tickled when seeking information or understanding of a domain without prior knowledge of that domain???!
This analysis is a pretty unique and significant contribution to the space of empirical evaluation of LLMs that exist in AI public world... at least thus far, as far as I am aware! For what it's worth--as if anyone in the ChatGPT universe cares as they pile up on using the "PhD level scholar in your pocket".
According to GPT-5, and according to my tests, this flaw exists in all LLMs... What is revealing is the deduction GPT-5 made: Why ?design choice? starts looking like ?deliberate flaw?.
People are paying $200 a month to not just ChatGPT, but all major LLMs have similar Pro pricing! I bet they, like the normal user of free ChatGPT, stay in LLM's default mode where the flaw manifests itself. As it did in this evaluation.
AI Reach: Gemini Reasoning Question of God Sat Aug 02, 2025 20:00 | Mind Agent Evaluating Semantic Reasoning Capability of AI Chatbot on Ontologically Deep Abstract (bias neutral) Thought
I have been evaluating AI Chatbot agents for their epistemic limits over the past two months, and have tested all major AI Agents, ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, Perplexity, and DeepSeek, for their epistemic limits and their negative impact as information gate-keepers.... Today I decided to test for how AI could be the boon for humanity in other positive areas, such as in completely abstract realms, such as metaphysical thought. Meaning, I wanted to test the LLMs for Positives beyond what most researchers benchmark these for, or have expressed in the approx. 2500 Turing tests in Humanity?s Last Exam.. And I chose as my first candidate, Google DeepMind's Gemini as I had not evaluated it before on anything.
Israeli Human Rights Group B'Tselem finally Admits It is Genocide releasing Our Genocide report Fri Aug 01, 2025 23:54 | 1 of indy We have all known it for over 2 years that it is a genocide in Gaza
Israeli human rights group B'Tselem has finally admitted what everyone else outside Israel has known for two years is that the Israeli state is carrying out a genocide in Gaza
Western governments like the USA are complicit in it as they have been supplying the huge bombs and missiles used by Israel and dropped on innocent civilians in Gaza. One phone call from the USA regime could have ended it at any point. However many other countries are complicity with their tacit approval and neighboring Arab countries have been pretty spinless too in their support
With the release of this report titled: Our Genocide -there is a good chance this will make it okay for more people within Israel itself to speak out and do something about it despite the fact that many there are actually in support of the Gaza
China?s CITY WIDE CASH SEIZURES Begin ? ATMs Frozen, Digital Yuan FORCED Overnight Wed Jul 30, 2025 21:40 | 1 of indy This story is unverified but it is very instructive of what will happen when cash is removed
THIS STORY IS UNVERIFIED BUT PLEASE WATCH THE VIDEO OR READ THE TRANSCRIPT AS IT GIVES AN VERY GOOD IDEA OF WHAT A CASHLESS SOCIETY WILL LOOK LIKE. And it ain't pretty
A single video report has come out of China claiming China's biggest cities are now cashless, not by choice, but by force. The report goes on to claim ATMs have gone dark, vaults are being emptied. And overnight (July 20 into 21), the digital yuan is the only currency allowed. The Saker >>
Interested in maladministration. Estd. 2005
RTEs Sarah McInerney ? Fianna Fail?supporter? Anthony
Joe Duffy is dishonest and untrustworthy Anthony
Robert Watt complaint: Time for decision by SIPO Anthony
RTE in breach of its own editorial principles Anthony
Waiting for SIPO Anthony Public Inquiry >>
Parse failure for http://humanrights.ie/feed/. Last Retry Friday October 03, 2025 13:22
Sarah Mullally Appointed as First Female Archbishop of Canterbury Fri Oct 03, 2025 11:24 | Will Jones Dame Sarah Mullally has been announced as the first female Archbishop of Canterbury, with conservative Anglicans condemning the liberal bishop's appointment as "committing live action, slow-mo (but not that slow) suicide".
The post Sarah Mullally Appointed as First Female Archbishop of Canterbury appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Kemi?s Pledge to Repeal the Climate Change Act Must Be Just the Start Fri Oct 03, 2025 09:00 | Ben Pile Kemi Badenoch's pledge to repeal the Climate Change Act ? which commits the UK to Net Zero ? must be just the start of the dismantling of the Westminster Uniparty consensus on climate catastrophism, says Ben Pile.
The post Kemi’s Pledge to Repeal the Climate Change Act Must Be Just the Start appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
The Sceptic | Episode 53: Starmer?s Bizarre Bid to Brand Reform Racist, the Real Danger Posed by Lab... Fri Oct 03, 2025 07:00 | Richard Eldred In Episode 53 of the Sceptic: Tom Jones on Keir Starmer's bizarre bid to brand Reform racist, Andrew Orlowski on the real danger posed by Labour's digital ID and Kathryn Porter on the colossal cost of Net Zero.
The post The Sceptic | Episode 53: Starmer?s Bizarre Bid to Brand Reform Racist, the Real Danger Posed by Labour?s Digital ID and the True Cost of Net Zero appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
News Round-Up Fri Oct 03, 2025 01:58 | Richard Eldred A summary of the most interesting stories in the past 24 hours that challenge the prevailing orthodoxy about the ?climate emergency?, public health ?crises? and the supposed moral defects of Western civilisation.
The post News Round-Up appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
The WHO Pandemic Accords Consolidate the Power of the Covid Clerisy on a Global Scale Thu Oct 02, 2025 19:07 | Ramesh Thakur The WHO Pandemic Accords, the first part of which came into effect last month, consolidate the power of the Covid clerisy on a global scale, warns Professor Ramesh Thakur. Expect more of the same.
The post The WHO Pandemic Accords Consolidate the Power of the Covid Clerisy on a Global Scale appeared first on The Daily Sceptic. Lockdown Skeptics >>
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Maynooth activism MA is back
international |
education |
press release
Monday February 29, 2016 22:30 by Laurence Cox - MA in Community Education, Equality and Social Activism

The MA CEESA (Community Education, Equality and Social Activism) took this year out to think about what we do and how we can do it better. We've been doing a lot of thinking and talking to people in that time and the result is that we're making some changes in the course while keeping the basic principles intact. Course review and reflecting on what we do
In 2015 the CEESA team reluctantly decided not to run the Masters for 2015-16. We realised that the likely numbers for that year would not enable us to create a genuinely participatory group environment in which everyone could “learn from each other’s struggles”. After five years of the course, we also felt that it was time to practice what we preach and reflect in a more in-depth way on our own practise (we had already reworked the course after its first two years). And we needed to take stock after a key member of the team was let go by the university. So we turned to other work and took a year out from the course to rethink and reorganise it.
What we’ve been up to this year
Since that time we have done several things. We commissioned in-depth research from past students on their experience of the course, the things that worked for them and the things that needed greater work. We consulted with colleagues working on some of our sister courses about what works for them, the differences and similarities between our situations. We also published an interview (in German!) with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin, and an article in Studies in Social Justice setting the course in its movement context.
We organised a series of public events thinking outside of the regular routines of the university: with oral historian Terry Fagan, independent researcher Tomás MacSheoin and journalist William Hederman we hosted a discussion on “Intellectual work outside the academy: researching, thinking, teaching … and social movements”. With Ian Manborde (Ruskin College Oxford’s MA in Global Labour and Social Change) and Brendan Ogle (Unite’s Education and Development organiser) we organised a discussion on “What education do union organisers and other activists need?” Connolly Books hosted a discussion around CEESA staff member Laurence Cox’s book We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism, structured as a discussion about the state of our movements chaired by community activist John Bissett and with contributions from Andrew Flood (Workers Solidarity Movement), Margaret Gillan (Community Media Network) and Fergal Finnegan (MA CEESA). With the organic farm and yoga / meditation centre at Macalla Farm on Clare Island we are co-organising an activist sustainability / engaged Buddhism event on “Changing the world and changing ourselves”.
Alongside all of this (and of course our own work as educators and involvement in movements) we have held a series of structured discussions about what is working and what isn’t, and how we can reshape the course to speak more closely to the needs of movement activists and radical educators.
What’s changing with the course
On foot of this, we are relaunching CEESA in an Ireland that has changed substantially since the course started – most recently with widespread participation in movements and community struggles around water charges, marriage equality and fracking, but also around many other issues. In this period many people have become newly politicised, or returned to community and movement activism after a long downtime. As the limitations of the easier victories – and the difficulties with the obvious answers – become clearer, there is more of a place than ever for a course dedicated to supporting activists and radical educators who want to take the time to think seriously about the big questions, of what we are trying to do and how we are going about it, and to learn from each other’s struggles. Our aim is thus to return to our original intentions in starting the course, and review the course structure as well as individual components and our own practice, in the light of what is working and what could do with development.
Perhaps the most obvious change is that we want to strengthen the participatory and emancipatory structure of the course much more. Rather than a curriculum fixed before students arrive, we plan on spending the first part of the course (approx 1/6 of the total time) in introducing students to the various dimensions of the course, exploring what participants really want to focus on and enabling the group to develop and take ownership of the direction of the course as a whole. In this context we want to support participants much more in articulating their existing knowledge and practice for each other to learn from and as a basis for our collective learning (“teachers” as well as “students”) during the rest of the year. Beyond this, we aim to integrate theory and practice much more closely in the different aspects of the course; to focus more directly on everyone’s experience of the course as a way into reflecting on how we work together in movements and community groups; to reflect on issues of diversity, class and gender in the classroom and group environment and how we can work with them in our own activist and educational practice; and to engage with the challenges of the different learning needs of different students much more openly.
What isn’t changing
As always, the core principles of CEESA remain at the centre of our work. The course remains a practitioner-level Masters focussed on advanced work geared to practice within social movements and community education and with a crucial research component. We treat participants as skilled actors in their own field, and underline that we “learn from each other’s struggles” - seeing how other movements tackle familiar challenges in order to rethink our own practise, but also learning how to make longer-term alliances with movements beyond our normal comfort zone. We work across a wide range of social movements and issues, rather than focussing on any single one in isolation.We do not treat teachers as experts and students as passive, but work with a wide range of theoretical, practical and pedagogical approaches to develop a real dialogue around what we are doing as activists and educators. The big picture – in terms of community and movement struggles, history and international perspectives; in terms of critical theory and practice; in terms of the meanings of equality; in terms of feminist theory and practice; and above all in terms of how we can develop our own practice individually and collectively, contribute to our own movements and to building stronger alliances for equality – remains at the centre of our work. We hope you will join us in 2016-17!
Full details on the course at the link below.
Contact: Dept. of Sociology, NUI Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland at sociology.department@nuim.ie or (+353-1) 708 3659.
Deadline for applications: 30 June 2016.
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