Silvia Canelón
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silviacanelon.com
Silvia Canelón
@silviacanelon.com
Data scientist @ UPenn
Independent data journalist
https://silviacanelon.com she/her/ella 🇻🇪 🏳️‍🌈
Philadelphia #RStats #RLadies #ddj
Newsletter: https://silviacanelon.com/contact
Pinned
My first byline! I made #DataViz for an accountability piece by @emilykrizzo.bsky.social @kensingtonvoice.bsky.social abt a #Philly program that targets & arrests pple living outside who use drugs in Kensington. Emily collected data for 87 pple bc the City won't share results w the public #ddj
New Kensington ‘fast-track court’ lands most with warrants, back into the cycle of addiction and homelessness
Kensington Voice collected and verified data on 87 people who were arrested during the first months of the program and tracked their journeys through the court. Most ended up with Wellness Court…
www.kensingtonvoice.com
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
I feel this so deeply. As a person who likes to try crafts and talk about it people are so often like "I'd love to do that but I'm not good at it". But crafts and hobbies are about learning. There's no guaranteed way to be good right off the bat. You have to develop skills and trust yourself.
Of course I would say this, but we need to talk about the moral & ideological case for play & leisure more than ever. So much political discourse - especially from the super-rich - assumes we ought to construct society around forcing citizens to spend most of their one, unrepeatable life working.
November 24, 2025 at 2:14 PM
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪
November 22, 2025 at 4:50 PM
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
For people who don't already know all these words, what would be more useful is talking about how the technology works (e.g. what data does it use, where does the data come from), what it does (not what companies say it does), and how else it could be (mis)used.
Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪
November 23, 2025 at 3:00 PM
Just finished Yellowface by @rfkuang.bsky.social, and wow. It was whatever the audio equivalent is to “page-turner.” Kudos also to narrator Helen Laser who helped keep me on the edge of my seat share.libbyapp.com/title/9173603
Yellowface
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK Hard to put down, harder to forget. - Stephen King, #1 New York Times bestselling authorWhite lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… Bestse...
share.libbyapp.com
November 18, 2025 at 3:04 AM
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
Massachusetts drivers are being tracked and their data is being shared nationwide — thanks to police using license plate readers (LPRs) made by Flock and other tech companies.

Does your local police department use LPRs? Take action to find out: mobilize.aclum.org/a/email-your...
Email Your Municipal Leaders: Flock license plate readers threaten our privacy and safety
mobilize.aclum.org
November 17, 2025 at 3:06 PM
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
‘Wellness’ and ‘court’ are two words that should never be found together. More evidence of the failures of the Parker administration for a population that needs support the most.
The visualizations are awesome tho!
November 17, 2025 at 3:41 PM
Quick & easy visual tutorial for making a map using Census data & the relatively new mapgl #RStats package. I hadn't had a chance to explore mapgl yet & this tutorial offered the perfect intro. Excited to try it w large spatial datasets and see how it compares to rdeck! H/T @smachlis.bsky.social
November 17, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
🤖 Introducción a #Tidymodels
Aprendé a usar tidymodels para crear y evaluar modelos de #MachineLearning en #RStats
Con Francisco Cardozo y Edgar Ruiz

📅 1 Dic, 18:00–20:00 UTC-3 – Online
💵 Estudiantes USD 5 · Académicos USD 10 · Industria USD 15
🔗 www.eventbrite.com.ar/e/1962543491...

#LatinR2025
November 13, 2025 at 3:33 PM
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
Renting as An International: Three tips to protect your rights in Boston as a renter gobserver.net/6264/campusc... @Gobserver_nu #china #india #boston @AlumniNU @Northeastern @NUjournalism
Renting as An International
It has been three months since Boston introduced a long-awaited reform to its rental system: tenants no longer need to pay their fee unless they specifically hire a broker. But what international stud...
gobserver.net
November 11, 2025 at 5:19 PM
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
My old pal Pete Coviello — one of the best writers and thinkers I've ever known — wrote the piece of the moment

lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...
Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani
It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution—the term they tend to prefer is “elite”—and odds are that eventually someone who was a studen…
lithub.com
November 9, 2025 at 3:17 AM
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
Imagination is resistance, @ruha9.bsky.social reminds us that, " we need to reject the gospel that says technology is inevitable, that the train has left the station... In an error of automated bullshit, it’s time to become bullshit detectors,"
#MozFest
November 8, 2025 at 5:31 PM
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
New: The FBI filed a subpoena trying to unmask the person or people behind archive.is / archive.today, which have been running anonymously for 13 yrs. Site was widely used by GamerGate, and then to bypass paywalls but has become kind of core archiving infrastructure

www.404media.co/fbi-tries-to...
FBI Tries to Unmask Owner of Infamous Archive.is Site
The FBI has subpoenaed the domain registrar of archive.today, demanding information about the owner.
www.404media.co
November 6, 2025 at 2:53 PM
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
After hundreds of hours of reading and research, my 2025 Starter Guide to transfeminine literature is finally live!

No matter your experience level, there's a book for you! 🏳️‍⚧️📚 #transbooks

The list covers a vast range of genres. There are 78 handcrafted recs on this list, and I've read all but two.
Start Here (2025 Edition)
Are you questioning your gender and searching for fiction that’ll help you figure out what a transition might look like? Are you a trans woman or a femmeby who’s never seen herself on the tradition…
thetransfemininereview.com
November 7, 2025 at 2:11 AM
My first byline! I made #DataViz for an accountability piece by @emilykrizzo.bsky.social @kensingtonvoice.bsky.social abt a #Philly program that targets & arrests pple living outside who use drugs in Kensington. Emily collected data for 87 pple bc the City won't share results w the public #ddj
New Kensington ‘fast-track court’ lands most with warrants, back into the cycle of addiction and homelessness
Kensington Voice collected and verified data on 87 people who were arrested during the first months of the program and tracked their journeys through the court. Most ended up with Wellness Court…
www.kensingtonvoice.com
October 22, 2025 at 11:22 PM
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
Packed hearing, dodged questions. At the first-ever City Council hearing on Philly gov’s use of AI and surveillance, City Councilmembers asked powerful, basic questions to open up the city’s black box of technology, and were disappointed by the city’s lack of answers.
October 20, 2025 at 9:59 PM
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
Meta and Google want to free you from screens — by putting one in front of your eyes at all times.

This week @hypervisible.blacksky.app joins @parismarx.com to discuss the anti-social world they’re trying to create through mass adoption of smart glasses.

Full ep: techwontsave.us/episode/298_...
October 16, 2025 at 4:51 PM
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
Quarto friends! I need your help:

We are implementing a new QMD parser in Quarto. It will be super nice. But it's a big change, and we want to minimize the impact.

1. Can you share a link to your Quarto project at github.com/quarto-dev/q...
2. repost this and let your Quarto friends know too?
Epic: are we production yet · Issue #63 · quarto-dev/quarto-markdown
We need to check against many large sites to get a good sense for the impact of this new syntax in practice. autogenerated qmd quartodoc-generated sites (tbd meet with @machow) sites quarto.org Shi...
github.com
October 16, 2025 at 2:13 PM
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
Interested in learning how folks protect Black & Brown youth from Big Tech & AI-powered surveillance, discipline, censorship & criminalization? #School2PrisonPipeline2.0
Do you want to see how we can envision liberated futures with young people? Then follow @noticecoalition.bsky.social
January 24, 2025 at 6:51 PM
Excellent op-ed in the @inquirer.com by Devren Washington @peoplestack.bsky.social and @clarenceokoh.bsky.social

For the #Philly folks, check the post for info on how to attend the hearing! 👇🏽

bsky.app/profile/peop...
📰 Catch us in the Inquirer, and at City Council's first ever AI hearing on Wednesday.

Read up: www.inquirer.com/opinion/comm... & RSVP: www.phillytechjustice.org/hearing
October 14, 2025 at 8:06 PM
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
I don't even know what to say about @aaron.bsky.team announcing that actually they feed all images posted on Bsky into an AI that just a year ago they told everyone they had banned from using Bsky images
October 7, 2025 at 8:20 PM
After seeing this post I went looking and found an entire subreddit with examples of AI generated craft patterns for knitting, crocheting, cross-stitch, you name it: www.reddit.com/r/CraftedByAI/
October 1, 2025 at 11:58 PM
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
WHOA I just discovered the kbd shortcode in #QuartoPub, which automatically creates an OS-specific element, You can specify different OSes and it'll show them in an HTML title element, or expand them in print formats - documentation here: quarto.org/docs/authori...
October 1, 2025 at 4:42 PM
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
Ever get the sense that AI boosters seem to take all the wrong lessons from speculative fiction?

Join us for the next Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 live stream, in which @alexhanna.bsky.social & I get to dig into all of that with @reveleth.com

Mon, Sept 29, noon Pacific
twitch.tv/dair_institute
Twitch
Twitch is the world
twitch.tv
September 26, 2025 at 3:17 PM
Reposted by Silvia Canelón
A little bit of self-promotion, I @ivelasq3.bsky.social will be giving a talk on Positron for RStudio Users!

Hoping to share some perspectives, extensions, and other tips in case you're interested in exploring Positron.

Sign up here: www.meetup.com/rladies-gabo...
September 25, 2025 at 5:57 PM