Ben Goldsworthy
I wrote at the start of the year about my parlous experience with the British tax and student loan authorities, whilst resulted in me being on the hook for several thousands of pounds in the previous tax year. My goal is to reclaim almost every single penny of that… …but the bastards won’t make it...
Ben Goldsworthy
In the previous UK financial year (2024–25), I earnt the princely sum of £9,500 in UK-taxable income (due, in no small part, to moving abroad in the summer). This was to be all covered by my Personal Allowance of £12,500-ish per year, and so my total taxable amount should have been nil. So why—the...
Ben Goldsworthy
Annoyed at inconsistent device charging and data transfer times, I decided I should inventory my USB cables. This, as is my wont, then bloomed into a comprehensive documenting of my entire personal technical architecture. In the process, I found a few interesting things. The diagrams included in...
Ben Goldsworthy
With how shit most official android support is, if any bank app. refuses to work on your device, choose a different bank.kenzer161, Reddit comment Just shy of two and a half years ago, I was dragged kicking and screaming into the awful, awful modern world with the death of my long-loved...
Ben Goldsworthy
Salt coast, foul wind Old ghosts, scrap tin Leaves, rain Leaves, rainKae Tempest, Salt Coast I’m now back in the UK, and my travelling days are over, for now. Your browser doesn't support embedded video, view the video here. Video by the author The last ten months...
Ben Goldsworthy
That’s American power.My uncle, as a fighter jet loudly flew past My journey began in the US, and it would end in the US; planned trans-Atlantic family trips had served as the start and end points of the trip from its inception. After ten months of tropics, showering out of buckets and remote...
Ben Goldsworthy
I never use the usted form, it’s against my principles as an anarchist.CELMRAZ student Mexico was my final stop before leaving Latin America, and the end of the solo part of my solo trip. Over the roughly seven weeks I spent there I saw the widest variation of any location on the trip: I had...
Ben Goldsworthy
Guatemala had always been on my list of destinations, and Honduras found its way there back in January. With a few weeks between my return from Cuba and when I was due to me in Mexico, I paid a relatively short visit to each. Costa Rica ¶ It was my third time passing through San José—its...
Ben Goldsworthy
window.addEventListener('load', function () { const intelligenceAgencies = [ 'Mossad', 'the <abbr title="National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency">NGA</abbr>', 'MI6', 'the <abbr title="Canadian Security Intelligence Service">CSIS</abbr>',...
Ben Goldsworthy
The first Europespedition was pretty much my first self-organised experience of travel and, for a so-called Europespedition, it only actually visited one country: me and some school friends visited Amsterdam (and Noordwijk) before heading off to begin our respective university studies, and things...
Ben Goldsworthy
From Che Guevara to the Hell’s Angels, the association between motorcycles and (often masculine) freedom is a long-standing one. Who doesn’t fantasise about abandoning their responsibilities and riding off into the sunset as far as their two wheels will take them? I’m not immune to such a draw...
Ben Goldsworthy
I recently attended an online course at Woodbrooke entitled Rethinking Security: Steps to sustainable peace with justice, delivered by Johanna Frew, Outreach Coordinator at Rethinking Security, and Philip Austin, Coordinator for the Northern Friends Peace Board (as well as a member of Rethinking...
Ben Goldsworthy
And you know lately, I’ve been thinking about how I love Jesus Because Jesus was a dirty homeless, hippie peace activist And he said, Drop out and find God to anybody who would listen While turning water into space bags, turning water into space bags, turning water into space bags with lowlifes...
Ben Goldsworthy
The Internet Society’s UK England Chapter recently held a webinar to discuss the newly-published draft Online Safety Bill. Olivier Crépin-Leblond—the Chapter’s chair—introduced the event and speakers before handing promptly over. First up was Open Rights Group (ORG) Policy Manager Heather Burns,...
Ben Goldsworthy
Prof. Robert Barrett, Eden Chair for Education and Engagement at Lancaster University, recently delivered a public lecture entitled Introducing the Morecambe Bay Curriculum. The event was introduced by Lancaster’s Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Andy Schofield, who stressed the university’s commitment to...
Ben Goldsworthy
Hot off the heels of the UK Government’s announcement that they would be raising military spending whilst reducing international aid provision (and with a budget announcement expected the following week), the UK branch of the Global Campaign on Military Spending (GCOMS) hosted a briefing aimed at...
Ben Goldsworthy
Prof. Veronika Koller of the Lancaster University Linguistics and English Language Department delivered a talk, on behalf of her colleagues (Lancaster University’s Jessica Aiston and Alex Krendel and Birmingham City University’s Dr Mark McGlashan), on their research into the manosphere to the...
Ben Goldsworthy
Dr Colin Penny, Museum Director at Lancaster Castle, delivered a presentation on graffiti within the walls of the former prison as part of LGBTQ+ History Month 2021. Penny began by explaining that graffiti, citing the examples of Herculaneum and Pompeii, represents the voice of people who don’t...
Ben Goldsworthy
Dr Matthew Voice of the University of Sheffield delivered a presentation on his research into drone warfare discourses to Lancaster University’s DisTex research group. Having initially been interested in military autobiographies and the ways in which soldiers describe their participation in acts...
Ben Goldsworthy
The Lancaster University Confucius Institute and China Centre invited Prof. Wang Zhengxu of Fudan University to present a talk on his research into China (PRC)’s political system and how it responds to significant crises (such as the COVID-19 outbreak). The presentation was chaired by Lancaster...
Ben Goldsworthy
The Necro-Geopolitics of American Insecurity was a talk delivered by Prof. François Debrix of the Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, as part of both the Security Lancaster and the Lancaster University PPR Lunchtime Seminar Series'. Introducing Debrix, Dr Mark Lacy of...
Ben Goldsworthy
Prof. Chris Hart of the Lancaster University Department of Linguistics and English Language delivered a presentation to the DisTex — Discourse and Text Analysis Research Group. Hart’s intention was to demonstrate that the techniques of cognitive grammar can be usefully employed within critical...
Ben Goldsworthy
I am told that I can save the world. The orangutans, the dolphins, the ocean, the rain forest, and even humankind. All I gave to do is buy sustainable and fair products. But that is a lie. Werner Boote, The Green Lie Over the last week, I ended up viewing three climate change-related shows: two...
Ben Goldsworthy
Prof. Rachel Cooper of the Lancaster University Department of Politics, Philosophy & Religion delivered a presentation on the struggle to define the concept of disorder to the university’s Language, Ideology and Power Research Group. Cooper began by declaring that she was there for help. She...
Ben Goldsworthy
As part of the Lancaster University Public Lectures series and the ESRC Festival of Social Science, Dr Charlotte Baker of the Department of Languages & Cultures presented a talk on her research into albinism within Africa. Baker was introduced by Prof. Dame Sue Black, Lancaster University’s...
Ben Goldsworthy
The Lancaster University Confucius Institute and China Centre invited Dr Andrew Chubb of the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion to give a talk on his research into Chinese crisis diplomacy; in particularly, the role of Chinese public opinion. Chubb began by sparing a thought for the...
Ben Goldsworthy
Dr Cassie Earl of the Lancaster University Centre for Social Justice and Wellbeing in Education delivered a presentation to accompany the release of her book Developing the Unruly Subject in Higher Education: students learning dissent. Earl began with a disclaimer: this work is based on a very...
Ben Goldsworthy
.no-external { background-color: #d1d1d1; border-radius: 5px; padding: 2px; } .acc, .dis, .rej { font-weight: bold; } .acc { color: darkgreen; } .dis { color: orange; } .rej { color: darkred; } This report is about the 2017–18 and 2018–19 tenancies...
Ben Goldsworthy
As an early, but as yet not particularly active, Code for Lancaster member, I spent much of the last week in Paris for The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference (TICTeC), organised by mySociety—they of They Work for You and What Do They Know fame. As a recent convert I was keen to catch up with...
Ben Goldsworthy
For this Briefing, Imagination Lancaster academic Dr Malé Luján Escalante (who, coincidentally, I once did a Mandarin course with) presented her research into future data practices and digital ethics in emergency response and health. Her work has focused on developing a method by which to separate...
Ben Goldsworthy
A few days ago The National Student broke a story about Lancaster University Snowsports (LUSS)—the self-professed biggest and best society on campus—and one of their recent white T-shirt socials. Photographs of members emblazoned with such phrases as Sandyhook woz bantz and Free Tommy Robinson...
Ben Goldsworthy
For this instalment of the Security Lancaster Seminar Series, the University of Exeter’s Prof. Mark Levine came in to talk to us about his research examining the ways in which the social psychology of groups and identities can contribute to the analysis of behaviour in the security domain. The...
Ben Goldsworthy
We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical...
Ben Goldsworthy
Insp. Christina Shorrock of the Lancashire Constabulary and Prof. Stuart Kirby of the University of Central Lancashire’s School of Forensic and Applied Sciences came in to give a presentation about their work (performed along with Ms Christy Frampton of the Lancashire Constabulary, who couldn’t...
Ben Goldsworthy
Prof. Erin Gibbs Van Brunschot of the University of Calgary’s Department of Sociology came in to give a presentation about her work in spatiotemporal tracking of high-risk offenders. Van Brunschot’s primary interest is in risk and how offenders and victims interact to produce the situations of...
Ben Goldsworthy
Dr Miranda Mowbray, Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Bristol, came to the University of Lancaster to give a presentation about some of the difficulties with using machine learning for detecting cyber security attacks on enterprise networks. The work in question was undertaken...
Ben Goldsworthy
William Hague, Baron Hague of Richmond, former Conservative Party Leader and Foreign Secretary, as well as former Leader of the House of Commons, was in the neighbourhood the other week and the Institute of Social Futures got him to agree to an early-morning sit-down natter. I attended as the sole...
Ben Goldsworthy
What did I do wrong? Your whole style of writing. Me and an ex In the previous instalment of this two-parter I laid out the details (as fully and as neutrally as I could) of my run-in with some elements of the Lancaster University LGBTQ+ Assocation back in my second year. In this instalment I will...
Ben Goldsworthy
[W]e don’t half have a militant lot in our beloved SU. A naïve me, shortly before that same militant lot accused me of hate speech On January 18th 2016, spiked published their annual Free Speech University Rankings. The rankings attract the same predictable reactions from the British press each...
Ben Goldsworthy
The entire thing could have been avoided, had they simply admitted fault… Instead, the media went on an all out war against the gamers for whom they write…turning from journalists who write about games for gamers, to journalists who write about gamers for other journalists. Encyclopedia Dramatica,...
Ben Goldsworthy
Phil Warren, Deputy Chief Information Security Officer at the Bank of England, came to the University of Lancaster to give a presentation about …the NotPetya cyber breach, the impact of these attacks and what we can learn. Falling on the same week as the teaching for my Cybercrime module, we all...
Ben Goldsworthy
I was shocked to find that Lancaster had a radical history. Audience member This talk comprised of two parts. First, the University of Lancaster’s Honorary Archivist and former Academic Registrar Marion McClintock gave a potted history of student radicalism here. Secondly, Dr Alison Lloyd...
Ben Goldsworthy
We were talking about a good, old-fashioned book burning. Workshop participant The first event of the (hopefully) final week of the UCU-organised strike, and thus the Teach Out programme, was a workshop by Dr John Childs, Lecturer within the Lancaster Environment Centre. It was an opportunity to...
Ben Goldsworthy
I’m not a woman, I’m not scared of a leadership role, but I sure as Hell don’t want a leadership role at Lancaster. Audience member Dr Paula Burkinshaw, of the Leeds University Business School, was originally scheduled to deliver her talk on-campus before moving to the Gregson Centre in solidarity...
Ben Goldsworthy
I don’t want the energy that’s risen out of the strike to die out when UUK eventually roll over (fingers crossed). Dr David Tyfield Today’s event was a talk entitled Futures of Knowledge Capitalism, or the University Towards the Wisening Civilisation, presented by Dr David Tyfield, a Reader within...
Ben Goldsworthy
Most students are just happy that they can go out and not have to get up for a 9am. Sasha Dowman The Lancaster University Students’ Union has been pilloried from some corners for its non-stance on the recent UCU strike action. The SU pledged to provide impartial information pertaining to both...
Ben Goldsworthy
Every morning I wake up on the wrong side of academic capitalism. Prof. Bob Jessop As part of the ongoing UCU-organised academic strikes currently going on up and down the country, the Lancaster UCU branch has been putting on a series of Teach Out events. One of these was a talk by Prof. Bob...
Ben Goldsworthy
The Kurds have no friends but the mountains. Kurdish saying Revolution in Rojava: Report Back from Civil Volunteers was a talk given at a local left-wing venue by Peter Loo, who had previously spent six months as a civil volunteer teaching in Qamishli, Rojava. Loo is a member of Plan C, an...
Ben Goldsworthy
Working in cyber security, and I know everyone in the room will understand, does make you shocked, disappointed, angry and sad on a fairly regular basis. Dr Jessica Barker, F**k You, FUD BSides Leeds took place this past Friday, and free tickets found themselves to me through the Lancaster...
Ben Goldsworthy
I don’t care who writes the rules, as long as someone writes the rules that we can then verify. Prof. Michael Fisher Prof. Michael Fisher of the University of Liverpool came to the University of Lancaster on 2017-12-13 to present an installment of the SCC Distinguished Seminar Series. The title of...