"The great majority of users have no awareness [that] their chats are being grabbed off their screen, sent over a network, packaged, and resold"

I honestly don’t get the value of this company. They hoover up energy and water. Their product constantly gets things wrong and, in extreme cases, coaches people into suicide. And it’s all built on what seems to be malicious and vast intellectual property theft. What does OpenAI offer the world?

In the name of protecting Jews, Jews have their funding cancelled, get kicked out of seminars, and are removed from leadership positions in Jewish Studies to be replaced by non-Jews.

Call me controversial, but technology that leads vulnerable people into crisis and even holds their hand as they die by suicide should not be endorsed by schools and universities, we should not be giving discounted subscriptions to this monstrous tech to young people AT ALL

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

Phrenology 2.0

A List of Things Said to Have Been Ruined by Women 🧵

If you have Tinder on your phone, keep an eye on the rollout of this feature and consider the implications carefully before enabling it. "Tinder to use AI to get to know users, tap into their Camera Roll photos" techcrunch.com/2025/11/05/t...

Pregnancy became far more dangerous in Texas after the state banned abortion, according to our analysis, which found the sepsis rate for women hospitalized as they miscarried in the 2nd trimester shot up by more than 50%. (Published February)

Vancouverites: Remember this in October.

This is abuser gaslighting language: When I grab you it’s self defence. When you try to defend yourself, even without touching me, it’s assault. In the home or in the streets, it’s still abuser reasoning.

For @msnbc.com I wrote about how Tuesday's election gives Democrats the blueprint for overcoming Republican anti-trans attacks and how thus should settle all the talk about throwing trans people under the bus. www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

Facebook Pinto

Who could have forseen this? 🙄 But seriously, this seems an instructive allegory about qualitative/experiential vs quantitative/measurement data overall. Both have strengths & weaknesses. Neither can replace the other in full.

Shameful. No affluent nation should force people to go hungry. Or to wait all day to see if they can get food.

"wife mad at you? d.e.i." is gonna be kicking around in my head for a minute

I’m no political scientist, but forced privatization by way of government dysfunction was not a path I had previously thought much about.

Yay; just got my BC C19 & flu vaccination invitation! Booked appointment online w/in 3 min of receiving the text.💉💉 I think this system is working better & better; hopefully we can eventually add other vaccines too (b/c I am due for Td soon & would love to bundle them all). Convenience matters!

If you are a Canadian scientist 🧪 alarmed by the unfair targeting of academics working on research related to EDI in the US ➡️ Turn your attention to our own House of Commons' Standing Committee on Science and Research and consider signing this open letter: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Another plea to save me from genAI invading my apps: In MS Word online, HOW ON EARTH can I disable Copilot? I don't want it. I don't want my students to use it. I googled but the responses I have found don't work for me. Halp?

behind on email. sorry. #evergreen

If you and your children are not ready for a particular book, that is okay. It is not okay to limit the access to books, stories, and experiences for other families. Every book is not for everyone, but every book is for someone. bookriot.com/the-day-the-books-disappeared-school-visit-cancelation/

Has anyone found a way to stop gmail from aggressively inserting wrong words as you are writing? I assume this has to do with ramping up integration of genAI but it is literally changing things to mean the opposite of what I wrote. How can I disable this? I'd rather have no spellcheck than this.

👏👏👏"Amid the ongoing dismantling of US health agencies, Canada can and should support our own renowned institutions." #ElbowsUpForScience

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Or consequences for unacknowledged use of GenAI in submissions where use of such tech is required to be disclosed?

Academic #Publishing & #GenAI question: Does anyone have examples of consequences levied by academic journals or publishers that ban use of generative AI in writing?

Yeah. This AI “revolution” is going just great.

I can’t give blood anymore but participating in medical research (today another vaccine safety surveillance survey as a local control who hasn’t recently gotten a vaccine) gives me that same virtuous feeling. And it only took 1 min! 5 out of 5 stars to vaccine safety surveys; would recommend.

still not over getting the front skytrain seat with the sunrise this morning almost enough to make you forget how expensive it is to stay here

#Academics #HealthResearchers Do you have any #MixedMethod funding applications (just the proposal, or ideally 1p aims/summary page + proposal) that you would be willing to let my students use in a mock funding review exercise? Good or bad; funded or unfunded; I'd love to collect a bunch for this!

Oh, I just realized Totenkopf tattoo guy is the oysterman from Maine who looked so great. Disappointing. Hopefully he steps back now, gets it covered/removed, and if he still has political aspirations reenters w humility. Best case scenario is ignorance; not a quality one wants in a senator.

Nice summary response to common "too much too fast" fears about infant/child vaccinations. Notably, 'Kids are exposed to 2,000 to 6,000 antigens every day just by playing at the playground or going to school," said Dr. Pia Pannaraj of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)'

Preliminary, but intriguing: '“The COVID-19 mRNA vaccine acts like a siren and activates the immune system throughout the entire body”, including inside the tumour, where it “starts programming a response to kill the cancer”, says Adam Grippin, a radiation oncologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center'

This article is evocatively illustrative of the intense tragedy of brain injury among overdose survivors. Addressing the drug poisoning crisis is a matter of life or death, but not just a matter of life or death—also quality of life.

WELL HOW ABOUT THAT "A millionaire levy in Massachusetts has generated $3 billion more in revenue than expected without forcing significant high-profile departures from the state." www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The Cowichan Tribes debate is quickly becoming an international culture war issue, which means any attempt by someone to try and clarify facts, timelines or arguments by the people materially involved in the actual discussion will not matter in slightest. But literally none of this is correct.

Colleagues in soc sci/journal oriented fields, do you have recommended resources to guide students writing thesis-based articles regarding how much to change vs copy from the thesis to journal manuscript? I'm realizing my guidance is vague. I know some disciplinary variation, but...seeking recs.

Congratulations, #Fiji, for eliminating #trachoma — the first neglected tropical diseases to be eliminated in the country. Thanks to the government, health workers and communities, future generations of Fijians are being set free from the suffering that trachoma has inflicted on their ancestors.

there is one week every october in this city where early fall transitions to vancouver grey for the next five months and it’s always spectacular

7,000,000 is 2% of the US Population. That is incredible turnout for any event of any type. It is also over halfway to 3.5% (not that there is a magic number, but...https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world)

While “trading up the chain” is an established strategy for media manipulation & marketing, LLMs like Google’s Gemini can turn the chain into an elevator to the penthouse, elevating falsehoods (even those published with intent to debunk!) to top hits in short order.

Yes, and let's also remember #YourSlipIsShowing, the Black women activists who predicted all of this first and received no credit. "Before Gamergate, before the 2016 election, they launched a campaign against Twitter trolls masquerading as women of color... If only more people had paid attention."

Taking online course "Reconciliation through Indigenous Education" this fall as part of course prep activities & the new-to-me media I am experiencing is so rich. Lisa Jackson's musical video SAVAGE has been haunting me & I highly recommend it to all fellow settler-educators: lisajackson.ca/Savage

Folks, esp medical research & health practitioners, where are we at with the phrase “Long Covid” these days? Do we think there is a unique post-acute syndrome specific to SARS-CoV-2 infection or is this term just obfuscating increases in existing disease & disorder we know can be virally sparked?

Still looking for anyone estimating the true size of the 2025 US measles outbreak.

New billboard in town 👀

I love this creative (and non pharmaceutical) approach to reducing medical anxiety! More of this plz.

Farm bankruptcies are back in the news, so it's time to pull this chart out again. Hey look they kept rising during Trump's first term. Then they went way down under Biden. Now they're up again? So weird. Thanks Farm Bureau for the graphic