Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 2h

Patriotic pumpkin pie by @jmollins.bsky.social

Two pumpkin pies decorated with pastry maple leaves on a table beside a cyclamen plant with a red flower.

A close up of a pumpkin pie decorated with pastry maple leaves.

Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 2d

The Portland frog person is a protest genius.

And this art collaboration between
@quinnanya.me, @queermedieval.bsky.social, @literaturegeek.bsky.social and @ryancordell.org is sublime.

Way to be, American cousins. Safe landings to you all.

Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · 2d

Experimenting with a new concept using @queermedieval.bsky.social’s Portland Frog woodcut. Embracing goofiness as protest.

A poster in green ink on off white paper. In the center is a woodcut style illustration of a protester wearing an inflatable frog costume standing up against two ICE agents. The text above and below reads:

VIVE LA
RIBBITSTANCE

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 5d

Awww. We really had no idea where we were going.

Internet Archive @archive.org · 5d

🐹 Before viral videos on TikTok or YouTube, there was Hampsterdance.

Full of dancing hamster GIFs & a sped-up tune, it became one of the internet’s first viral hits.

You can still dance to it on the #WaybackMachine ➡️ web.archive.org/web/19991222...

#Wayback1T

🧵

Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 10d

This is such a loving message on another day of violence.

Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 10d

On Yom Kippur many Jewish people in Britain have their phones off to mark the holy day.

As it ends at 723pm, some will hear the tragic Manchester news for the first time.

At that time, please join many of us to send a message of solidarity to British Jews.Thanks Together coalition for proposing.

To everyone in Britain's Jewish Community: you are not alone.

We will not let hate or those who spread it win.

We stand with you.

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 11d

@pmi73.bsky.social hee hee

Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · 11d

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 14d

I want to make this into a billboard. (But would anyone see it, or believe it?)

My Father’s Daughter @aninsggirb.bsky.social · 14d

The new virtual psychotropic delivery system. We mediate our lives in a constant state of distraction through screens - while simultaneously - the manipulative titans wield there sociocultural power by convincing us to deny reality, not believe what we see & know, and to trust their twisted lens

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 14d

Wow. You’ve captured the source of so much malaise in such a pithy paragraph. It’s no surprise so many of us are primed for authoritarian rule and fascism.

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 14d

I did follow the procession to the lake. I took this pic from east of Sugar Beach. They look great on the lake but to really see the colours, start with the launch in the river. Here is a pic but it is crappy. It looks way more impressive in real life.

A procession of black canoes on a lake under a blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds. Each canoe has three people in it — two paddlers and a person in the middle holding a large flag. The flags are a variety of colours — reds, purples, yellows,oranges,blues — dyed with inks made from local waters, plants and other elements. The colours are not showing up well in this photo because the canoes are at a distance and my phone camera can’t zoom that far.

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 14d

I went yesterday. It was lovely. You can see it today at 11 or 4. The canoes start in Biidaasige Park (at Cherry and Commissioner). Here are some of my pics.

A procession of black canoes on a river under a blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds and bordered by a grassy shoreline. Each canoe has three people in it — two paddlers and a person in the middle holding a large flag. The flags are a variety of colours — reds, purples, yellows,oranges,blues — dyed with inks made from local waters, plants and other elements.

A procession of black canoes on a river under a blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds and bordered by a grassy shoreline. The city skyline is in the background. Each canoe has three people in it — two paddlers and a person in the middle holding a large flag. The flags are a variety of colours — reds, purples, yellows,oranges,blues — dyed with inks made from local waters, plants and other elements.

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 14d

Thanks for sharing this. I agree — so good. It’d be interesting to find out how they landed on the word hallucinate. Were they consciously hoping to structure our feelings about generative AI as something dreamy and mind-altering — as opposed to wrong, corrupt and rife with bias?

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 14d

“We love your dataset.”

This is a fantastic essay about how the values we ascribe to tech and our uncritical positive framing of collaboration (even with flawed machines), start to shape our views about the possibilities of art, research, education …and bananas!

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · Apr 1

For the latest issue of Artforum I wrote about the culture of “AI” in my sector of academia, arguing that a focus on what it does distracts attention away from examining the exploitative conditions that the hopeful rhetoric of its promise upholds. www.artforum.com/features/gen...

MACHINE YEARNING

Sonja Drimmer critically examines art historians’ recent embrace of generative AI as a tool for humanities research.

www.artforum.com

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 14d

Wow. The story is not as scary as the headline. It’s sort of the opposite of scary on the AI front but it’s never good when the US economy tanks.

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 15d

I hope your recovery is speedy and as pain free as possible, that the new biologic works well and that things look up on the employment front soon — any organization would be lucky to have you and it’s only a matter of time until somebody realizes that.

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 15d

I made the famous plum torte (cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/3783...). It is delicious. Thank you Maria Burro.

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 16d

A petition to tell the Ontario government how you feel about the speed camera ban. (I assume that you, like me, think it’s dangerous and legislative over reach.)

Robert Zaichkowski @rzaichkowski.bsky.social · 17d

Thanks @progresstoronto.bsky.social for starting this petition calling on Doug Ford to keep the speed cameras. Please sign & share widely! #BikeTO #WalkTO #TOpoli #ONpoli #VisionZero progresstoronto.ca/petition-pro...

Tell Ford Keep Speed Cameras: Protect Kids & Pedestrians — Progress Toronto

Doug Ford announced plans to ban speed cameras—making it easier to speed. This move puts children and pedestrians at risk. Tell Ford and Queen’s Park: keep the speed cameras and keep enforcing speed ...

progresstoronto.ca

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 16d

While the Skills Development Fund seems to be a protocol for enhancing corporate welfare, this Maytree Research Brief shows that the design of the new Integrated Employment Services system
(especially performance-based funding!) means too many actual social assistance recipients are denied support.

Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 16d

Here’s another one. $2 million to train 349 people for 50 hours. 70 got jobs. Again, just imagine what a literacy program could do with $2 million.

TheTrillium.ca @thetrillium.bsky.social · 16d

Millions from Ontario training funding went to dentists’ brokerage with ties to then-labour minister’s wife

Dentacloud received more than $2 million through the Ford government’s Skills Development Fund

dlvr.it

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 16d

The Skills Development Fund paid an organization $6.5 million to train 720 people to work in a specific nightclub. 425 of them got jobs. Imagine if Ontario adult literacy programs were funded at this level and could report this level of achievement.

Jessica Smith Cross @jessiecatherine.bsky.social · 16d

Update to this story on a group that trains people to work in clubs run by Zlatko Starkovski, a longtime Ford Nation figure: Ontario's public accounts show the group got an additional $3.3M in grants from the Skills Development Fund last year, for a total of more than $9.8M.

TheTrillium.ca @thetrillium.bsky.social · 24d

Group training workers for ‘Rob Ford’s favourite nightclub owner’ got $6.5M in provincial skills development funding

Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 19d

Poor Ward 11. You almost had @normsworld.bsky.social in this seat. And so it goes.

Shawn Micallef @shawnmicallef.bsky.social · 19d

"The 7 Bathurst bus is unreliable, she explained, especially northbound and out of the station."

There was a proposal to fix this but it was watered down at the behest of the local councillor (Saxe). The mayor should have been on this, making it happen, but wasn't.

Is this Toronto’s worst commute? We test a TTC route so miserable, it forced one woman to move

As part of the Star’s series testing Torontonians’ commutes to find the worst in the city, we take Emily’s daily journey to her job in North York.

www.thestar.com

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 19d

Centrism kills.

Xtra @xtramagazine.com · 20d

Former U.S. presidential nominee Kamala Harris is the latest high-ranking Democrat to throw trans people under the bus

Kamala Harris backtracks on trans rights in new memoir | Xtra Magazine

In her forthcoming memoir, "107 Days," Kamala Harris writes that she understands “concerns” parents have about trans athletes in girls’ sports

xtramagazine.com

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 19d

Hee hee. Divine. A favourite of mine is Regina Giddens.

“I hope you die! I hope you die soon! I'll be waiting for you to die!”

Regina Giddens played by Bette Davis with her husband Horace played by Herbert Marshall.

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 20d

Yay! I’m in that part of town a lot and rides along Dundas there and points east and west makes certainly makes one appreciate the Bloor lanes — it is not a cycling-friendly area at all.

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 20d

Aaah. Monday. I am enjoying the rain however.

'Nope' by cartoonist Gemma Correll.

A woman in a red-and-white striped t-shirt and grey pants is lying on her stomach facing the viewer under the word “Nope.” written in large, red capital letters. Her hair is sticking straight up and her expression is blank.

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Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 23d

Ai developers and advocates can’t keep using the “garbage in, garbage out” excuse indefinitely. If Wikipedia can build in safeguards against bias and harm, why would we expect less from Ai tools designed to make judgments on questions of health, life and death?

If it’s garbage, throw it away.

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 23d

The findings “suggest that medical AI tools powered by LLMs have a tendency to not reflect the severity of symptoms among female patients, while also displaying less ‘empathy’ towards Black and Asian ones.”

AI medical tools downplay symptoms in women and ethnic minorities

Large language models reflect biases that can lead to inferior healthcare advice to female, Black and Asian patients

www.ft.com

Tracey Mollins @traceyehm.bsky.social · 23d

@jmollins.bsky.social FYI. As expected of course but crazy things are happening all around us.

christoaivalis.bsky.social @christoaivalis.bsky.social · 24d

I spoke with @donvdavies.bsky.social and he confirmed that ZERO NDP MPs applauded for Charlie Kirk

They stood AGAINST the Carney-Poilievre-Trump coalition

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