Excellent reading of the week: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia "We expound on why universities must take their role seriously to counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm" zenodo.org/records/1706...

“In the past, they killed and expelled us,” a tribe leader said. Now, “they make us invisible.” TikTok is investing in a $10 billion data center in Brazil. An Indigenous group who says the project is being built on their land is trying to stop it, claiming they were not consulted on the project

BBC: Thirsty data centres boom in drought-hit Mexico. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

🌱 The AI supply chains: "This means looking at the environmental impacts of AI at every stage of the supply chain, from mining the minerals used in the electronics hardware, to the emissions associated with the use of the models, to the disposal of hardware" www.bera.ac.uk/blog/the-env...

Israel mata a al menos 66 palestinos en lo que va de domingo, 33 cuando iban a recoger comida.

Just l'he acabat ara. Un llibre imprescindible!

@zoejardiniere.bsky.social dealing with ignorance. Is there a Nobel prize for patience? youtube.com/shorts/PnxLn...

Very glad to see (thanks, @jonasvalente.bsky.social!) that Prof Paola Ricaurte has been selected as one of the 100 Most Influential People in AI by The Time! You can check out the talk she gave at the @oii.ox.ac.uk on bio-socio-algorithmic assemblages here: www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/...

"Tech isn't about innovation, it's about power and networking chokepoints for power." Strong thread below (on an interesting FT opinion piece) And all very aligned with e.g. Nieborg & Poell's interesting research on institutional platform power journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

We’ve “watched the web mutate from democratic commons into a gamified engine of manipulation and misinformation. The dream of a cooperative knowledge society has faded into an architecture of monetized attention and algorithmic control.” lareviewofbooks.org/article/mind...

The genitally-obsessed bigots have decided that their apartheid rules apply even to people who’ve voted to be inclusive. If you can, please donate to this campaign to fight back 👇🏻 and/or share.

We now have some data on the environmental impact per AI prompt: Gemini: 0.00024 kWh & 0.26 mL water ChatGPT: 0.0003 kWh & 0.38 mL ...the same energy as one Google search in 2008 & 6 drops of water. Seems to be improving, too: Google reports a 33x drop in energy use per prompt in a year. But...

Interesting systemic risk/global risk paper from a diverse set of authors: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"The deputy prime minister has been hit with a legal challenge after she overruled a local council to approve a hyperscale datacentre on green belt land by the M25 in Buckinghamshire." www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Some reflections from #WorldCon on how to talk to friends about "AI" buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

'It is easier to take action when you know you are not acting alone.' Collective action on climate is crucial. Scientists play an important role in driving change, write @biology.ox.ac.uk's Dr Tristram Wyatt and Cardiff University's Aaron Thierry ⬇️ #OxfordClimate

Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it

🌊 The UK government asks to remove old emails and images to save water, but how many L of water are we saving? If 1GB uses 205L of water, we need to remove 100TB of emails and images to save the same water used to train one LLM. www.gov.uk/government/n... @oii.ox.ac.uk

🌻 I am very glad to realise that my recent paper on "Data Ecofeminism" is one of the most visited ones at the ACM FAccT Proceedings 2025! dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... @oii.ox.ac.uk

I'm in need of #MutualAid now, because I decided to be an anti Gen AI whistleblower. Please share or help me. @mutualaidvoid.bsky.social @vastramutualaid.bsky.social @mutualaidlanetwork.bsky.social ko-fi.com/kimatstopgenai medium.com/@kim_crawley...

Fire breaks out at Córdoba’s ancient mosque-turned-cathedral La Mezquita-Catedral

🌟Students have praised her encouragement of lively group discussions about the benefits and limitations of AI. Congratulations to Dr @anavaldi.bsky.social (Lecturer in AI, Government & Policy @oii.ox.ac.uk ) on receiving a #TeachingExcellence Award! www.socsci.ox.ac.uk/article/winn...

"Demystifying Publishing Landscapes for Early Career Researchers: A Reflection on ECR Panel at EASST/4S Amsterdam" published in EASST Review by Sarah Rose Bieszczad & Pouya Sepehr (w/ contributions from myself & Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner) #STS #EASST easst.net/easst-review...

Hi #STS friends, the holidays are coming up and I’m looking for recent and urgent reads. What are you reading? #books @noortjem.bsky.social @stsbot.bsky.social @keanbirch.bsky.social @penders.bsky.social @alondra.bsky.social @avastmachine.bsky.social @Dominicboyer.bsky.social @joedeville.bsky.social

A new study tested LLMs for stroke care. ChatGPT-4o was often the most accurate and actionable, but prone to hallucinations. Overall, all models performed suboptimally, frequently failing to meet clinical standards for patient advice. #MedSky #MLSky

Dying to see the Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms exhibit at the NY State Museum curated by Patricia Kaishian - maybe a sneaky trip before the semester starts is in order. 🍄 hyperallergic.com/1029741/mary...

This is not the time to step back from diversity, equity, and inclusion | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Hello! Please see the subscriptions page on our flagship instance: cryptpad.fr/accounts/ 5, 25 or 75GB for regular plans, 100, 150GB or even more for organizations ones.

ACL paper alert! What structure is lost when using linearizing interp methods like Shapley? We show the nonlinear interactions between features reflect structures described by the sciences of syntax, semantics, and phonology.

The Data Foundation is fundraising for a new initiative that will coordinate efforts among nonprofits, experts & companies to modernize US greenhouse-gas measurements, striving to build on a Biden effort that Trump nullified on his first day in office.

Kit Malthouse to Lammy "can he not see his inaction & cowardice is making this country irrelevant? Can he also not see the personal risk to him, given our intl obligations, that he may end up at the Hague because of his inaction?" Lammy tells Malthouse his language is unbecoming

"Researchers publish too many useless papers... Unfortunately, after reaching a critical mass, research communities become self-perpetuating due to the emotional and financial interests of those involved.”- Professor Andre Geim, a Nobel laureate. #AcademicSky www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

🌱 Oxford introduces water restrictions while becoming an AI Growth Zone. DCs scaling up to 500MW which could use millions of liters of water. While we welcome measures in drought scenarios, we need better urban and environmental policies for balancing digital infrastructure with planetary health.

Excellent piece by the @nytimes.com exposing the impacts that hyperscales have on local communities in the US: "What the data centers don’t understand is that they’re taking up the community wealth,” he said. “We just don’t have the water.” www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/t...

#OtD 15 Jul 1954 the right-wing dictatorship of general Francisco Franco amended the 1933 vagrancy law to criminalise homosexuality. Over the next 25 years, around 5,000 LGBT+ people would be imprisoned and subjected to brutal sexual violence stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/8682...

The most repeated line throughout the week was, once again, to go through things line by line and on pen and paper. I would sometimes even turn off the computer monitor in lab so that students stop looking at the computer and think things through and write things down on pen and paper instead.

For Times insider, where reporters tell the story behind a story, I wrote about how ChatGPT tipped me off to an important phenomenon, by telling the people affected to email me. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/29/t...

‘It can’t withstand the heat’: fears ‘stable’ Patagonia glacier in irreversible decline

The @houseoflords.parliament.uk organised a reception to discuss new report on "Big Tech’s Climate Performance and Policy Implications for the UK" by @mctd.bsky.social. We discussed how AI is driving up carbon emissions, so we need more policy-makers&scholars working on this topic! @oii.ox.ac.uk

📢 Hoy, 8 de julio, es la vista oral del caso BOSCO en el Supremo.‼️Un día histórico. El Supremo decidirá cómo se interpretará en adelante la ley sobre la transparencia de algoritmos públicos. 👉 Marcará un antes y un después. Te lo contamos.

¿Qué significa “poner la piel” en lugar de “ponerse en el lugar”? Quinny Martínez Hernández explica por qué la empatía debe ser vívida.

Hello & HAPPY FRIDAY, as promised an open letter by my lovely colleagues and myself. Everybody, feel free to sign this even if you are not NL-based and ‼️ share ‼️ (anonymous signature is poss): Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia openletter.earth/open-letter-...

🌊 @aljazeera.com has reported on the impact of data centers in México, located in a drought-stricken region where people lack access to water for social reproduction and care, highlighting the opacity and environmental impacts of AI supply chains. Watch it here: www.aljazeera.com/video/people...

New commentary! What’s the environmental cost of our increasing data usage? asks @aljazeeraenglish.bsky.social with an expert interview from @anavaldi.bsky.social @oii.ox.ac.uk discussing the impact of #datacentres on water supplies and local communities in Mexico. aje.io/if7puv #AI

🌱 The carbon impact of AI: "Having attended both NeurIPS and the United Nations Climate Change conference (COP25) in 2019, he noticed that the intersection between the two conferences was almost non-existent: I don’t know if anyone else was involved in both…" www.nature.com/articles/s42...

🌱My latest ACM publication: Data Ecofeminism "This paper proposes a critical rethinking of GenAI’s proliferation through an ecofeminist framing, which has historically interrogated the role of science and technology in the context of gender and environmental justice." dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

@surruiz.bsky.social from @oxfaminternational.bsky.social at #TaxMix2050 : "Big multinationals have benefiting the most from globalisation but they have not contributed up to the scale and they have created market concentration. The element of fairness within and between countries is key"

Vaya maravilla de mesa y qué jefa @surruiz.bsky.social presionando al ministro de Chile en directo para que se unan a España, Brasil y Sudáfrica en el impuesto mínimo global a los superricos😂

Stampede in Soho: puppet animals on an epic trek bring wonder and warning to London streets