To be clear, this lawsuit is a good thing. The station has been mismanaged in the interests of the executive director and the Presidents of the Board.
https://loveofkdhx.org/
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For the #KDHX listeners in #StLouis
[#]StL
https://www.stlpr.org/arts/2025-01-30/16-critics-sue-kdhx-seeking-oust-board-directors-st-louis
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A handy guide if you were planning to visit #London in the late sixteenth century. There's no tea, but there is a porcupine in the Queen's menagerie!
https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/historical-city-travel-guide-london-late-16th-century
[#]histodons
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From the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) of North America:
"Protesting to Columbia University over the Forced Retirement of Professor Katherine Franke for Palestinian Advocacy."
The letter explains the flawed charges against Prof. Franke and the mishandling of the entire case by Columbia, which has refused to protect #AcademicFreedom or Prof. Franke from ongoing threats and harassment, including from colleagues in the Law School.
h/t @jricole
https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/protesting-retirement-professor.html
[#]Gaza #Columbia #HigherEd
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Interesting coverage of the recent appearance of "tarpits" like Nepenthe to trap AI crawlers. Several different perspectives provide critical analysis, not just boosterism.
But then there's this claim by the article author:
"But efforts to poison AI or waste AI resources don't just mess with the tech industry. Governments globally are seeking to leverage AI to solve societal problems, and attacks on AI's resilience seemingly threaten to disrupt that progress"
Um, disrupt what progress?
Is there an example of a "societal problem" being solved by AI (by which I assume they mean GenAI based on LLMs, which is what the tarpits are trying to thwart)?
It seems more likely at this point that #GenAI will cause societal problems, not solve them.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/
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St. Louis folks!
A performance of seven short plays marking the 10th Anniversary of the tragic loss of Michael Brown Jr.
From A Call to Conscience Interactive Theater for Social Change and The Michael Brown Sr Chosen for Change Organization.
This Friday and Saturday at Pilgrim United Church of Christ (826 Union Blvd.)
A Call to Conscience Theater did a community-based production about the Jefferson Bank protests last year - it was a privilege to see it.
perhaps of interest to @InTheShellofSTL ?
[#]Ferguson #MichaelBrown #StL #StLouis #StLEvents #HappeningInTheLou
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My #FANuary recommendation of an account to follow to make your timeline smile and look thoughtful:
@overholt
Curator of Rare Books at Harvard's Houghton Library, he shares news and images from some amazing collections, along with commentary on the mundane and insane experiences of life.
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From the intrepid Teen Vogue during the first Trump administration, but even more necessary as Trump & Co. have ratcheted up the #transphobia. #TransRightsAreHumanRights
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/gender-variance-around-the-world
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[#]LeonardPeltier is going home. Biden has commuted his sentence to home confinement.
"“It’s finally over – I’m going home. I want to show the world I’m a good person with a good heart. I want to help the people, just like my grandmother taught me.” - #Peltier on news of his release from prison.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/20/biden-commutation-leonard-peltier
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In my Intro to Modern Europe class this semester, I'm stressing that crises become opportunities to implement already developed solutions (this is not a new thought, but it is particularly well illustrated in European history).
So the time to figure out what comes next is now. Politics and business as usual haven't worked, so how can we imagine a different world? There are lots of ideas out there, and new questions are being asked every day.
As an academic, I'm most familiar with such opportunities in university settings (one of the reasons those profiting most from the current system want to discredit and defund higher education), and I'll pass along information about events and discussions that might be of interest to broader audiences.
For example; https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_yon5fCqNSj-PfOobx0xpmw#/registration
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Adding some thoughts and resources for the present moment in the U.S.:
https://righttobe.org/upcoming-free-trainings
1/2
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Katherine Francke of #Columbia Law School on how her defense of #student #protests against Israel's killing in #Gaza has led to the end of her teaching and faculty roles.
Harassment by colleagues, students trying to trick her into social-media-ready misstatements, the university president's abandoning her to the Congressional wolves to save her own skin...
"Rather than defend the role of a university in a democracy, in
fostering critical debate, research, and learning around matters of vital public concern, and in educating the next generation with the tools to become engaged citizens, Columbia University’s leadership has demonstrated a willingness to collaborate with the very enemies of our academic mission."
And the slaughter in Gaza continues.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i4cOWRtsVB_NDCm0kNQTq6y3dM2o51fa/view
[#]HigherEd
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Just canceled my #WashingtonPost subscription.
https://anntelnaes.substack.com/p/why-im-quitting-the-washington-post
[#]WaPo #Bezos #Journalism
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Sending my traditional #NewYear's greeting to all:
In the coming year, may you achieve your heart's desire.
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Even in this nuanced and critical discussion of #GenAI, some further clarification is essential, e.g. (p. 7):
"The foundation models at the center of generative AI can be used to accomplish a variety
of tasks, such as content creation, research and summarization, and task automation."
[#]LLMs can produce results that look like research or summarization, but they do not engage in the discovery and assessment of facts or in the discernment of the core arguments and evidence of a written work. In their current form, they cannot engage in research or summarization.
📣 Spread the word 📣
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"...generative AI models do not understand the motives, meaning, and context behind interactions, such as easing a customer’s frustrations while troubleshooting a problem.
Workers’ tacit knowledge gained through customer service experience is embedded in the language that AI systems appropriate."
Therefore: 👇
"Reorienting our understanding of the type of labor or skill that generative AI is able to achieve, from creativity ➡️ replication of tacit knowledge, gives us a wider view of how occupations may be affected." (p. 7)
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This discussion of "tacit knowledge" is 👍 helpful for explaining how #GenAI can seem like it's doing something magical:
"Generative AI models can recognize patterns in data, such as transcripts of call center interactions, to identify the language workers use to build rapport with customers. When prompted, generative AI applications will replicate these elements in outputs, suggesting that some form of human ingenuity or creativity was required to generate these responses." (p. 7)
Human ingenuity was, of course, needed to generate these responses - in the form of the training data, for which the originators received no recognition or compensation.
But customer service is a skilled occupation:
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"The development of AI relies on a large global network of data workers who have been purposely made invisible in order to make systems appear more autonomous, even sentient. OpenAI flaunts that GPT, its LLM, is trained on millions of data points scraped from the internet, but hides the fact that workers must make this data suitable for training. Workers perform a wide set of tasks including cleaning, labeling, keywording, and semantic segmentation." (p. 6)
[#]OpenAI
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"This primer seeks to reinsert workers’ current and material experiences into the public discourse and question promotional language about the magical, infallible, and seemingly inscrutable qualities of AI.
In Part One, we define generative AI and discuss its different iterations as work technologies, and interrogate assumptions and claims about its capabilities.
In Part Two, we draw connections between different global dimensions of data labor, and how the underlying data behind generative AI technologies impact workers’ livelihoods.
In Part Three, we situate generative AI in the context of workplace adoption and identify how it is distinct from and connected to other forms of work automation."
https://datasociety.net/library/generative-ai-and-labor/
[#]GenAI #AI #Labor #Labour
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