Folks have been telling me they’ve noticed I’ve gotten “a lot more political” on social media this year. Of course I have. The circumstances have gotten nightmarishly worse, and the consequences of inaction and staying silent infinitely more obvious. Everyone needs to get “a lot more political.”

'Artificial intelligence tools used by more than half of England’s councils are downplaying women’s physical and mental health issues and risk creating gender bias in care decisions, research [led by Sam Rickman, LSE] has found.' 1/2

Blue dots are UN aid distribution sites that existed in Gaza before the IDF and US mercenaries took over the process and blocked the UN. Yellow squares are current sites. The current system is aid theater and has created killing fields where dozens of aid seekers are killed every single day.

Whew 😬 “Being forced to use AI has turned a job I liked into something I dread. As someone with a journalism background, it feels insulting to use AI instead of creating quality blog posts about education policy.” — A marketing team-member at an EdTech co. www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-ai-is-...

Specifically, if you're looking for a CS job at a small liberal arts college check this list (later this summer): cs-pui.github.io And warning: many of these jobs have early fall deadlines! #FAccT2025

JUST IN: ProPublica’s “Life of the Mother” series, which exposes the fatal consequences of abortion bans, has won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. This is the second consecutive year we’ve been awarded this distinction and our eighth Pulitzer: www.propublica.org/series/life-...

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

Breaking news: I am now an "adult"

Our NEH grant was terminated this week. The reason? The letter reads, "NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda." www.olin.edu/articles/new... 🧵 (1/5)

If you're working on "fairness" "ethics" "responsible AI" and such at these companies while watching your colleagues getting fired for protesting this carnage and managing to be quiet about these lucrative "AI" for genocide contracts, you're providing cover for these companies to commit genocide.

I'm supposed to be at Sweet Briar College, where I was so excited to meet with the amazing students, faculty, and staff who organized my visit & made Mobility their Common Read. Hours before my flight I learned about their Board's exclusion of trans & nonbinary people. So now I'm not going.

Immersed in so much cruelty, I'm 🥹 to see that the Arnold Arboretum is hosting a ceremony to say goodbye to its silver maple view.hu.harvard.edu?qs=e61e0290f...

Proud to live in a precinct that went +87 for Harris.

Migration data is critical in the health, environmental, and social sciences. We're releasing a new dataset, MIGRATE: annual flows between 47 billion pairs of US Census areas. MIGRATE is: - 4600x more granular than existing public data - highly correlated with external ground-truth data 1/2

DOGE/Musk preferentially cancelled grants and contracts to recipients in counties that voted for Harris in 2024. Among cancellations with election data available, 92.9% and 86.1% cancelled grants and contracts went to Harris counties, representing 96.6% and 92.4% of total dollar amounts.

A small win: when I type "a" in my address bar, my browser autofills to amtrak.com and not amazon.com

BREAKING: We're sending an open letter to universities across the country, offering support and urging them to reject pressure to punish international students and faculty for exercising their First Amendment rights. Schools must hold firm against the Trump administration's censorship attempts.

Earlier this month, Olin students and faculty made a big splash in the scientific community - joining 4,000 attendees from 65 countries at the @aaas.org Annual Meeting. 📬 Read the recap: www.olin.edu/articles/sto... #science #technology #policy

Keep shaming them for this. I don't mean Musk, Bannon and the other turds doing the Sieg Heil very openly and purposely (we know they are Nazis). I mean the GOP members who people elect. They should not be able to get away with it and they should not be normalizing this. We know what comes next.

Ex NFL player @chriswarcraft.bsky.social protesting the inclusion of a MAGA acronym in the Huntington Beach library plaque at last night’s council meeting. He was arrested and cited.

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has threatened to annihilate 60 years of advancements in equal opportunity by eliminating all federal funding for schools that support and celebrate students from diverse backgrounds. 🧵 1/

I think corporations making billions in profit should pay a reasonable percentage of that in corporate income tax. And 0% is not reasonable.

Excited to share new work led by @vivekmyers.bsky.social and @crji.bsky.social that proves you can learn to reach distant goals by solely training on nearby goals. The key idea is a new form of invariance. This invariance implies generalization w.r.t. the horizon.

Suspension Bridge xkcd.com/3048

I bet doom scroll meant something way cooler in the middle ages.

Hell yeah. Hold the line. This is what we need people to do. Slow things down, don’t comply in advance so the courts have time to stop them. It’s starting to work.

Oh gosh. Found on the web. Anthropic (producer of Claude LLMs) asking job applicants to not use AI systems when filling in their application. simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/2/a...

Google, 2001: Don’t Be Evil Google, 2025: Fuck It www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

On Feb. 13-15 in #Boston, Olin will be at booth 823 at the @aaas.bsky.social Conference Expo. Come say “hi!” Also, w/ the guidance of faculty advisors, @vdean.bsky.social & Georgia Van de Zande, nine Olin students will present their research. More info on this year’s meeting: meetings.aaas.org

Imagine pulling a grant because it uses the term "historically"

Do not comply. Do not comply. Do not comply. Do not comply. Do not comply. Do not comply. Do not comply. Do not comply. Do not comply. Do not comply. Do not comply. Do not comply.

ICML writing breaks call for ice cream. Feeling grateful that I live minutes from JP Licks!

Academics have been perfecting our skills at flighting fascism during faculty meetings.

I’ve spent about 2-3 hours each day on calls or chats with my US gov friends. Here’s an anonymized recap of what’s going on. First, I am so very sorry that they are living our last year at Twitter. I never wanted to think about that time again, and I hope my advice is helpful. 1/

I tend to have pretty good timing. For example, I started getting therapy like four weeks ago.

Friends, for something to be open source, we need to see 1. The data it was trained & evaluated on 2. The code 3. Model architecture 4. Model weights. DeepSeek only gives 3, 4. And I'll see the day that anyone gives us #1 without being forced to do so, because all of them are stealing data.

As AI systems grow more efficient, will they reduce environmental impacts —or make them worse? Our new paper with @strubell.bsky.social and Kate Crawford explores how 𝗝𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗻𝘀’ 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗼𝘅 applies to AI, showing that efficiency gains alone won’t lead to sustainability 🌎 arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16548

NSF grantees - people who have already received their grants based on a previously funded and approved research proposal - are being told to stop any activities related to DEI and accessibility. Call this what it is: government censorship of ongoing research projects. www.opm.gov/policy-data-...

If you are scientists, researcher, or scholar of any kind, it's time to invest HEAVILY in science communication. If the government won't let the people know the facts, we must. And I already got you covered. #academicsky #science #phd #research medium.com/educreation/... bsky.app/profile/roxa...

Wow

Apropos of a co-panelist's remarks today: If you're asking how do we get people to trust this technology, you're asking the wrong question. Should be: How do we build technology that is trustworthy & sufficiently transparent so people can make informed decisions abt when to trust it.

The state of the world is pretty grim lately but check out this graph showing that throughout human history until recently, half of the people die before reaching the age of 15. Not even the convicted felon Donald Trump can take us back there. ourworldindata.org/child-mortal...

T. Rex Evolution xkcd.com/3042

lol whoops, somehow I’d missed that this morning Zuck had replied to me and insisted that I was making stuff up about him. So I explained to him how he could prove me wrong. www.threads.net/@anildash/po...

"There is no such thing as bad weather – only bad clothing," the California girl repeats to herself.

Today is the first day of our semester. Nothing says "welcome back, students!" like a low temperature of 4F 🥶