Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Anna Koop @akoopa.bsky.social · 8d

The arrogance towards interesting humanities research is soooo frustrating. STEM isn’t everything.

Jennifer Ashby @jenniferashby.bsky.social · Aug 8

Tell me you don't understand the purpose of humanities research without telling me you don't understand the purpose of humanities research

@economist.com @eui-history.bsky.social

www.economist.com/europe/2025/...

"Soon after its founding, however, it became apparent that the EUI’s splendid digs might be distracting its scholars. As one insider explained to Charlemagne: “Left to their own devices, the academics began producing studies of the wool trade in 15th-century Flanders and suchlike.” He was joking—up to a point. A search for recent articles on the EUI’s database produced a list headed by “Silk consumption and dressing practices in late-medieval Catalonia”. In 1993 the university set up a new division, the Robert Schuman Centre, to keep things forward-looking and relevant, but with mixed success. In 2017 a School of Transnational Governance was founded in the hope that this would finally do the trick."

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Anna Koop @akoopa.bsky.social · 8d

Tech women! My friend is doing a study on women in tech and information systems. Interview and a few diary entries, easy. All tech connections welcome.

Mary G @libmaryan.bsky.social · Jul 23

🪅🪅🪅 I am recruiting participants for my doctoral research project. Please share widely. ✨✨✨

Are you a woman working in a technology-focused role?
Have you worked in such a role in the past 5 years? [photo of women discussing around a table with a laptop on it]
If this is you, contact me!
I am conducting a study on women's experiences working in the technology sector. For more information, please message me here with your email address or email me directly s3957798@student.rmit.edu.au
RMIT UNIVERSITY

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Reposted by Anna Koop

fairshare.help @fairshare.help · 15d

Please contribute if you're able or share the original if you're not.

Note that the most effective way to get help for people is to directly ask people you know

Olive 🍉 @limbischessystem.bsky.social · 29d

UPDATE NOUR ⚠️⚠️⚠️

She is pregnant
Her husband is sick and recently underwent surgery

„I do not want to die here.
I need your help urgently.
I live in a tower.
Two days ago, 50 residential
towers were bombed.
I need your help to survive.“

Emergency Relief for Ziad & Julia
tinyurl.com/HelpNourFamily

A photo of Nour with her family.

The photo is taken while displacement and famine in genocide.

An appeal from the hell of Gaza

My friends,
I am Nour, a mother of two children, one of them suffers from anemia.
We are living in tragic conditions in Gaza City.
My husband is sick and recently underwent surgery and needs to be in a comfortable health condition.
I am also pregnant.
Today, they issued evacuation orders for all of Gaza City.
I am besieged in northern Gaza. Displacement to southern Gaza requires $1,000 to buy a tent and the cost of transportation.
I do not want to die here.
I need your help urgently.
I live in a tower.
Two days ago, 50 residential towers were bombed.
I need your help to survive.

verified by molly shah

Please don't let us down.
Save us from death.

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Reposted by Anna Koop

Micah @rincewind.run · 17d

we have gone from a world in which we were told not to cite wikipedia because it was unreliable to a world where wikipedia might be the only reliable source left on the internet and we all owe a lot to the pedantic nerds who got us there

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 17d

for all people mock it wikipedia is genuinely one of the wonders of the modern world

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Reposted by Anna Koop

Ordinary Notes @hystericalblkns.bsky.social · 21d

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

The new TOC from academia dot edu.

By creating an Account with Academia.edu, you grant us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license, permission, and consent for Academia.edu to use your Member Content and your personal information (including, but not limited to, your name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness, city, institutional affiliations, citations, mentions, publications, and areas of interest) in any manner, including for the purpose of advertising, selling, or soliciting the use or purchase of Academia.edu's Services.

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Anna Koop @akoopa.bsky.social · 16d

Fair enough and kudos to you for the strength you show in doing good in this world. The trees are a hell of a legacy and undeniable fact.

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Josh Gondelman @joshgondelman.bsky.social · 18d

The debate around what is or isn’t “cancel culture” really just obscures a simple truth that it’s BAD to be massively racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic and it’s GOOD to speak out against injustice. Some things are good and some things are bad and it’s okay to say which you think are which.

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Anna Koop @akoopa.bsky.social · 17d

There’s a good chance your ancestors explicitly walked in the teaching that we carry seven generations before us and seven generations ahead.

Which means you were loved and honoured by the ancestors who would never get to meet you directly. They cared.

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Anna Koop @akoopa.bsky.social · 17d

If this is out of line, rage at me. But I’m haunted by this and it might help? I was taught about it by an Anishinaabe woman who was stolen, whose bio parents and grandparents were tortured by the residential school system.

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Anna Koop @akoopa.bsky.social · 17d

The plausible bullshit matching reality is a *uncontrollable and inconsistent* side effect.

Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · 17d

“OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws”

https://www.computerworld.com/article/4059383/openai-admits-ai-hallucinations-are-mathematically-inevitable-not-just-engineering-flaws.html

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Anna Koop @akoopa.bsky.social · Aug 31

We can care for each other.

Liz (or Lizzie) Kim 김혜성 💫 @lizzielizliz.bsky.social · Aug 31

Kindness saves lives.

Choose kindness every time. 💗

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Anna Koop @akoopa.bsky.social · Aug 31

It’s got to be terrifying as parents, knowing there’s a treatment that can make a lifelong difference and needing help to make it.

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Anna Koop @akoopa.bsky.social · Aug 30

I like the monocropping parallel. And it hadn’t occurred to me before how doing eugenics is essentially saying that the genes you prefer can’t win without help.

Like the whole anti-woke movement is straight up admitting you can’t thrive unless you keep everybody else down.

Cammy! @camelliagrass.bsky.social · Aug 29

eugenics is genetic monocropping. by no means does it prove "natural" genetic fitness. a program of eugenics does not see which genes outcompete others, rather such a program dominates & subjugates the environment (land and market) in artificial, unsustainable favor of certain gene expressions

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Anna Koop @akoopa.bsky.social · Aug 30

Help Fatima keep going in whatever way you can.
gofund.me/e25c636d

Donate to HELP FATIMA REBUILD HER HOME IN PALESTINE!, organized by Janiya Robinson

Hello. I’m here, helping to create this campaign to help a family in Ga… Janiya Robinson needs your support for HELP FATIMA REBUILD HER HOME IN PALESTINE!

gofund.me

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Reposted by Anna Koop

𝕍∃, Cyber closed shell syndrome relief fund coordinator @vortexegg.com · Aug 30

Data are necessarily biased because they consists of observations of particular phenomena taken by specific people, from specific vantage points, using specific instruments, for a specific purpose. Data are literally the encoding of particular biases—that’s what makes it data.

Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · Aug 30

I've had people tell me to my face that AI helps avoid biases and I haven't laughed harder in a long time.

Data doesn't grow on trees. We decide who matters and what to quantify about them. The very process bakes in bias.

Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · Aug 29

2. AI enhances inclusion. Maybe not. AI systems rely on datasets based on mainstream school populations "and often fail to adequately include children with complex, atypical or multiple needs.

As a result, learners with SEND may be statistically invisible"
schoolsweek.co.uk/ai-bias-pose...

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Anna Koop @akoopa.bsky.social · Aug 30

It is *tremendously* irresponsible of the article to use the word “persuasion” for interacting with a plausible bullshit generator. It does not “believe” anything. It’s even worse than simply statistical word frequency - it’s that skewed towards what people wanted to hear in artificial tests.

Aram Zucker-Scharff @chronotope.aramzs.xyz · Aug 30

You are not persuading the text pipeline! You are stumbling on to a mathematical vector in which you are causing the word delivery mechanism to replicate sequences other people typed up in which they are persuaded and that OpenAI likely stole without permission!

Techmeme @techmeme.com · Aug 30

A study focused on OpenAI's GPT-4o mini found that LLMs can be persuaded to comply with objectionable requests using the same tactics that persuade humans (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

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Reposted by Anna Koop

Sheryl Weikal and the colorful Parrotlegals @leftistlawyer.com · Aug 7

Huh maybe if they weren't kicking all the Palestinians off the app there would be more users

Maybe if they didn't welcome Jesse Singal there would be more users

Matt Navarra @mattnavarra.com · Aug 7

Bluesky has a growth problem

Bluesky has hit 38M monthly users, up 8M since March

Once adding 5M users per month, it’s now slowed to 1.6M. A 60% drop

But post volume is falling—more users, less activity

It risks becoming a ghost town with a loyal but shrinking core

#bluesky #fediverse

Bluesky Reaches 38 Million Users, Though Post Volume is Declining

Bluesky’s growth momentum has slowed, but it is still growing.

www.socialmediatoday.com

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Anna Koop @akoopa.bsky.social · Aug 5

I’m finding myself raging ever more at recaptchas. Not so much that it’s meaningless, because the data is absolutely being used to train models, but because I did not consent to this labour and they are lying about why it’s there.

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Anna Koop @akoopa.bsky.social · Aug 5

Oh this is true in work too. It’s amazing how debilitating it is once you start to suspect your workplace of demanding meaningless work.

Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · Aug 4

My philosophy and experience with students is that they can almost always do incredibly difficult work, but if you ever waste their time with soul-killing meaningless work, you have essentially poisoned the well when it comes to getting them to spend any additional effort on your class.

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Reposted by Anna Koop

Abby @arobertswrites.com · Aug 5

Billionaires could solve world hunger but instead they are making a Ring to enslave Middle-earth.

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Anna Koop @akoopa.bsky.social · Aug 3

Even here we have people getting urgent care while meeting basic needs can’t be done. I can’t imagine how it feels in Palestine, having only limited glucose solution to treat ongoing starvation.

Everyone needs food. Everyone should have food.

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Anna Koop @akoopa.bsky.social · Aug 3

I’m so, so sorry you have to do this to survive. I so very much want you to survive and be well and have your humanity and right to life protected and celebrated.

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Anna Koop @akoopa.bsky.social · Aug 3

Dr Menna’s campaign page now has a note reassuring donors that if the entire family is lost the money will go to help others. 💔

What a thing to have to consider, how *I* will feel about my money after *you and your entire family* is murdered!!

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Anna Koop @akoopa.bsky.social · Aug 3

Help if you can.
chuffed.org/project/help...

Help me to save my family and my sister

I am Malak Jamil, a Smart Systems and Computer Engineering student. I completed my high school education with an excellent grade, and it has always been my dream to study engineering and contribute to...

chuffed.org

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Reposted by Anna Koop

Sarah J McLellan #FBPE 🇪🇺🇺🇸 @ithacanexile.bsky.social · Jul 30

Please share as wide as possible, don’t just ‘like’ this message. Lives depend on making sure as many get this as possible. #Tsunami #Pacific #Earthquake #DemVoice1 www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Tsunami advisory issued for several parts of the B.C. coast after major earthquake near Russia | CBC News

A tsunami watch has been issued for multiple parts of the B.C. coast after a large earthquake in the Pacific basin near Kamchatka, Russia, on Tuesday afternoon.

www.cbc.ca

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