Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Laura Kurgan

Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 5d

Back in the day people used to have a slide at the end of their presentations saying "and that's how the brain works" as an inside joke about Hinton since he was known to talk confidently out of his ass.

Now, the Nobel committee brought this upon us like they give the peace prize to genociders.

⚡️🌙 @dystopiabreaker.xyz · 8d

anyway, here is 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics winner Geoffrey Hinton discussing what we know about large AI models on 60 Minutes.

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Laura Kurgan @laurakurgan.bsky.social · Aug 27

Sorry I won’t be in town. What a great idea. Cx

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Steve Farrugia @fasterandworse.com · Apr 29

A problem with LLMs, genAI products, and many SaaS products in general, is that the makers don't publicly assert the actual purpose(s) those products are created to satisfy. They prefer to give vague suggestions or more commonly put them out with a "here, see what you can do with this"

thread?

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Rob Kitchin @robkitchin.bsky.social · Apr 30

New OA book. Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity by Petter Törnberg and Justus Uitermark. www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edi...

Seeing Like a Platform | An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Mode

Power needs abstraction, to make the unwieldy complexity of the social world legible and manageable. The proposition at the heart of Seeing Like a Platform is

www.taylorfrancis.com

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Reposted by Laura Kurgan

Jacque Schrag @jacqueschrag.com · Dec 15

More than 300 people from around the world & from all corners of the data viz field have signed up 🎉 Couldn’t be more pleased to have helped play a role in bringing so many people together in the last year.

Be sure to pin the feed for easy access to all kinds of 📊 goodness

bsky.app/profile/did:...

Jacque Schrag @jacqueschrag.com · Feb 29

Welcome to the 📊 Data Viz feed! This feed is designed to encourage sharing work and all kinds of discussion related to the broad field of data viz.

To participate, you must:
- Include 📊, #dataviz, or #datavis in your post
- Be added to the account list. Sign up here: forms.gle/mcVVczaQCBJL...

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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · Feb 24

"The boxes were filled with hundreds of 35mm slides from the Dept of Defense [that] appear to be from the height of the Cold War... They are the perfect inverse of contemporary Pentagon graphic design in all its sprawling insanity, permanently poisoned by the vernacular of PowerPoint and clip art.”

Cold War Military Slides

A reporter stumbled upon a treasure trove of Department of Defense slides from the 1970s and 1980s depicting data from missile systems, Soviet capabilities and America’s nuclear arsenal.

www.beautifulpublicdata.com

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Schooley @schooley.bsky.social · Feb 17

We mock the egg price discourse but if Harris had won rising prices would have been the crisis cited as killing her presidency before it got started.

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Laura Kurgan @laurakurgan.bsky.social · Feb 12

So happy for you @luciarebolino.bsky.social can’t wait to see it installed.

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L.D. Burnett @ldburnett.bsky.social · Feb 9

for pity’s sake, I am BEGGING university leaders to stop framing this issue in terms of what this will cost the university. people dont care!

EXPLAIN WHAT THIS WILL COST THE PUBLIC: closed hospitals and clinics, skipped treatments, loss of access to experimental drugs, unemployment, recession

sreenshot from the new york times reporting that Stanford University’s provost is talking about how the loss of funding from national institutes of health funding will cost the university $160 million. that’s not the way to get this changed — the people think “stanford is rich; no big deal.” leaders need to talk about what this will cost the public

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KSV @ksvesq.bsky.social · Feb 8

Costco, which has come out saying it supports DEI, will make no changes to its existing programs, AND pays workers a minimum of $30/hour, is up 15% YTD.

Target, which announced it is ending all DEI programs and has a minimum wage of $15-$24/hour, is down over 4%.

Keep voting with your wallet.

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Kaja Kallas @kajakallas.bsky.social · Feb 7

Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia will tomorrow permanently disconnect from Russia’s power grid.

Russia can no longer use energy as a tool of blackmail.

This is a victory for freedom and European unity.

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Liz Neeley @lizneeley.bsky.social · Feb 1

The news cycle right now - even just for science & higher ed - is overwhelming. We have to do it, but fortunately, we don’t have to do it alone.

My team is focused on tracking what’s happening to research funding, jobs & salaries, shared datasets, university responses & safety of our communities

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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · Jan 12

Thank you @sifill.bsky.social

Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · Jan 12

Well you inspired me to create a Black democracy starter pack. Cause those are also overwhelmingly white.

go.bsky.app/6WTBzhX

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · Jan 12

The amount of stupid on social media right now is depressing. The billionaire Resnicks own a lot of land and a lot of water rights. They do not, contrary to a lot of the stupid, "own all California's water" or have anything to do with the L.A. fires.

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Republicans Against Trumpism @rpsagainsttrump.bsky.social · Jan 12

My God. Small fire tornadoes were spotted Friday night at the Palisades Fire.

Thank you to all the California firefighters risking their lives to protect others. Heroes. 🫡

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George Takei @georgetakei.bsky.social · Dec 25

Well would you look at that.

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Laura Kurgan @laurakurgan.bsky.social · Dec 21

Good question.

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Places Journal @placesjournal.bsky.social · Dec 6

As Black Friday purchases begin to arrive at your door, consider their packaging — more than likely in cardboard boxes. These "abject objects," @shannonmattern.bsky.social writes, are touchpoints to a global apparatus of commerce, consumption & waste. They bring the logistics chain to our doorsteps.

World in a Box: Cardboard Media and the Geographic Imagination

Cardboard boxes hold a world of meaning — a geography of consumption, disposal, and reuse — that spans from Amazon to the Container Corporation of America.

placesjournal.org

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Laura Kurgan @laurakurgan.bsky.social · Dec 3

Nadine Fattaleh is fantastic too:)) wish I could go.

Jer Thorp @jerthorp.bsky.social · Dec 2

Josh is wonderful, this will be a fantastic event.

Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · Dec 2

I can't attend this on Wed eve (we've got final presentations in my class!), but I'd ❤️ to hear Nadine Fattaleh in conversation w/ Josh MacPhee (of Interference Archive) at NYU

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Haunted Nick Seaver @nickseaver.website · Dec 2

50 Watts is such a good online store for weird, arty books: 50wattsbooks.com (I think shipping is US-only for the near future, though)

50WattsBooks.com - unusual art books, comics, zines, and picture books

50 Watts Books is a bookstore and indie publisher specializing in art books, Japanese art, underground comics, Surrealism, international picture books.

50wattsbooks.com

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Sasha Costanza-Chock @schock.cc · Dec 2

If you think text and image hallucinations are bad, wait until you see what Geospatial hallucinations can do

Sasha Costanza-Chock @schock.cc · Dec 1

Large Geospatial Models.

What could go wrong?

(Serious answers preferred, memes acceptable)

nianticlabs.com/news/largege...

Building a Large Geospatial Model to Achieve Spatial Intelligence

At Niantic, we are pioneering the concept of a Large Geospatial Model that will use large-scale machine learning to understand a scene and connect it to millions of other scenes globally.

nianticlabs.com

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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · Dec 3

"In season 3 of Getty’s Recording Artists podcast, [we examine] the groundbreaking art-science organization Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Through the stories of E.A.T.’s co-founders, Robt Rauschenberg + Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver" we explore the org's collaborative, creative rsch

Recording Artists | Getty Podcasts

What can happen when you introduce scientists to art and artists to science? Artists and engineers discover the creative potential of new technologies.

www.getty.edu

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Laura Kurgan @laurakurgan.bsky.social · Nov 28

This might be more important to do than previous years.

Melody Joy Kramer, MLIS @mkramer.bsky.social · Nov 27

Hello! Please share this widely. It’s done every four years and is quite useful for academics, journalists, and people who need specific datasets to do their work.

It’s legit.

- me, a librarian who specialized in digital archiving practices.

EOT End Of Term Web Archive @eotarchive.org · Nov 25

Every US presidential election period we do a wide crawl of all federal websites.

YOU can contribute to the 2024 End of Term Web Archive eotarchive.org/contribute/

- Nominate Gov URLs
- Upload bulk seed lists
- Help surface database deep links
- Spread the word #EOT2024 #EOTArchive

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · Nov 28

This is one of those examples that illustrates a harm of algorithmic systems that is often invisible—system “predicts” who is likely to miss appointments, and recommends double booking those slots, thus punishing poor people by wasting their time. arstechnica.com/health/2024/...

AI guardrails

Last, the administration's proposal also tries to shore up guardrails for the use of AI in health care with edits to existing policy. The goal is to make sure Medicare Advantage insurers don't adopt flawed AI recommendations that deepen bias and discrimination or exacerbate existing inequities.

As an example, the administration pointed to the use of AI to predict which patients would miss medical appointments—and then recommend that providers double-book the appointment slots for those patients. In this case, low-income patients are more likely to miss appointments, because they may struggle with transportation, childcare, and work schedules. "As a result of using this data within the AI tool, providers double-booked lower-income patients, causing longer wait times for lower-income patients and perpetuating the cycle of additional missed appointments for vulnerable patients." As such, it should be barred, the administration says.

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AbdouMaliq Simone @xazaaradjame.bsky.social · Nov 28

Although delivered in Fall 2022, it remains a crucial intervention in light of today's conditions.
parsejournal.com/article/the-...

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