This extract from @rossbrooks.co.uk's Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life reveals some of the tensions between the rich complexity of biological reality and the social norms that sought to contain it. yalebooks.co.uk/how-darwin-a... #history #pridemonth #naturalhistory #skystorians

kids are running a plant/yard sale this weekend to benefit RDK, one of the most rad orgs around #ROC www.rochesterdeafkitchen.com

they left the nest yesterday! fledglings hopping around 🥺

Warren Burger's response when a deaf lawyer asked for real-time transcription (at the lawyer's expense) when arguing before the Court (in a case about disability access!).

We have recently launched a Visiting Scholar Grant at Rochester to work with the Edward C. Atwater Collection of American Popular Medicine and Health Reform. See attached flyer for details! #histmed #fellowship

good morning to my 4 new housemates (robin parent and 3 nestlings living in the porch rafters)

spotted: hummer with 'tr33hggr' plate 🤔

read @novicsara.bsky.social 's new book 'Mother Tongue's on the sidelines of soccer practice this evening - great book that moves between the personal and the structural! 🙌 www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/670270...

tell me you don't sign or know any signers without saying so 🤪

More evidence of how fucking chock-full of eugenics silicon valley iss, has been, and will continue to be if steps aren't taken to name, acknowledge, and dismantle those connections. '“All my fundees have blue eyes.” [Jeffrey] Epstein and the tech world’s dark ideology'

so excited to attend Julia's film premiere today 🎉🥳 - with captions from @aat-transcribes.bsky.social 🙌 - check out the virtual premiere of "Where the Bomb Trains End" on May 4 m.youtube.com/@wherethebom...

A case for inclusive climate-disaster communication for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, from Abigail Block and @kstackwhitney.bsky.social doi.org/10.1525/cse....

"Brushing off these practices as unscientific implies that 'true' science is, and always has been, unimpeachable. It denies us a chance to examine what flaws may fuel our own ways of thinking." A new mailbag from @wbarlowrobles.bsky.social

Come join @civicsoftech.bsky.social's May book club on Wed, May 20, at 7pm ET. I'll be leading a discussion of @fractalecho.bsky.social's Disabling Intelligences: Legacies of Eugenics and How We Are Wrong About AI - and Dr. Williams is joining too! Register at: www.civicsoftechnology.org/book-clubs

Getting some thought provoking emails this morning

Both the Wall Street Journal and The Information confirming that OpenAI is killing Sora - both the app and *access to its video-generating model for developers*. This is a huge move that suggests things are a bit desperate www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open... www.theinformation.com/articles/ope...

Three years into the AI era, educators say they face a major crisis. Bosses and clients replacing tutoring jobs with AI. Replacing *athletic coaching* with AI. Many students now cannot grasp why they would *not* use AI for schoolwork. And worse. The 5th installment of AI Killed My Job—educators:

🚨 A new frontier of coordinated disinformation. Fossil fuel industry front groups are using AI platforms to flood clean air regulators with fake public comments—submitted under real residents' names, without their consent. @robbonta.bsky.social www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti...

the county is putting public records behind a paywall online, in large part due to bots/scrapers 😕

“Overall, the study participants who saw the biased AI text shifted their positions toward those espoused by the AI.”

Daily reminder that calling ai dead labor and stolen labor is literal.

I have said this before, but eliminating programs that teach a lot of students but don’t have many majors is like a restaurant not buying flour in its grocery delivery because people aren’t ordering flour on the menu.

over and over they say it out loud: big ideas for the elite class, and only widget grunts for the working people. ideas are for everybody. art is for everybody. education is for everybody.

foggy rainy afternoon, no blizzard here, alas

the closest I've ever felt to an Olympic athlete = Elana Meyers Taylor signing to her kids

“why do you hate technology” as though “technology” were some discrete entity divorced entirely from the context of what it does and what it creates, rather than a category so broad as to constitute reality itself

A genuinely alarming piece in the NYT about how the developers, scientists and assorted techbros behind "AI companions"/"synthetic care" do not even know or understand the potential harms of the tech they're developing but they're too greedy to stop themselves from developing it.

can't find a single *local* #ROC TV or print clip covering this! (plz send if you see one!) more info: www.yahoo.com/entertainmen...

great performances! (folks who didn't watch the [sadly separate] signed stream may not know that the halftime show was signed in Puerto Rican Sign Language by a Puerto Rican deaf interpreter who tours with Bad Bunny!)

👀

Every morning I wake up with a hollow anger that I have been enrolled, as a university worker, into a long-term objective of “enhancing” AI integration (“where appropriate”) into my undergraduate teaching

just finished @thewaroncars.bsky.social 'Life After Cars' - so good, myth-busting and oriented towards action + community building. excited to co-host a book club discussion w/ local walk/bike grp at library next month and dream up next steps for our (car-centric 😭) town

how your email finds me (until everything starts up again tmw...)

not exactly a resolution but read a lot of poetry + cut off a foot of hair to welcome in the new year

This book is titled “Disabling Intelligences” for many reasons. First, because so-called “AI” is built from historical commitments to the excision of disability from the classification of humanity. link.springer.com/book/10.1007/9…

kid#2 found a US history book in the little free lib nearby. it seemed ... off from even the first page. looked up the pub-- turns out it's a phonics reader published by a higher ed institution that doesn't allow women to wear pants on campus

👀👀👀

OTD in 1950, Judy Wajcman was born. A pioneering sociologist and feminist theorist, Wajcman reshaped the philosophy and sociology of technology by showing how technological systems are deeply entwined with gender, power, and social organization. 1/

tis the season (meals based around chex mix)

the pond is frozen

It’s an incredible success of ADA+IDEA: many disabled students can make it to college now. We should be thrilled to have student pool that better reflects society and shows the benefits of inclusion and accommodations in k-12. Celebrate that we have so many disabled students! This is a win.

We need to be able to see that the line "accommodations have gone too far" is an expression of the ableist notion that disabled students do not belong in higher ed. Its fundamentally an anxiety about the fact that disabled students get an "advantage" over abled students.

night walk in the snow

stumbled upon in the woods

went to wonderful talk by @maryfissell.bsky.social on the history of abortion that had the audience reflecting, making lots of connections, even laughing-- thanks to @slobogin.bsky.social and Corner Society for organizing