The linguistic anthropologists have entered the fray: intro to a great looking (& OA) special section of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology on LLMs. doi.org/10.1111/jola...

Rob was a diehard Dodger fan even when they were awful. I was lucky enough to get to know him around the yard and at dinners during spring training that I’ll never forget. Please keep his family and friends in your thoughts. This is incomprehensible: people.com/carl-reiner-...

In the spirit of just making stuff to make the days a little better, here's an unfinished and rough sketch from last Sunday. It's based upon a painting by the great Rockwell Kent. Sometimes it's just fun to draw stuff, even if the details aren't perfect. Just make stuff. #coast #sketch

someone should invent a thing that's like a university but it's goal is to facilitate learning

Rob Reiner directed some of the most beloved movies of all time, including Stand By Me, This is Spinal Tap, and The Princess Bride. His production company also made movies like The Shawshank Redemption, Before Sunrise and Michael Clayton. The film industry has lost one of its titans.

If the so-called leaders of the New School had actually learned from the university’s history (instead of just endlessly recounting it), they would be seeking ways to provide an institutional safe-haven for another group of political dissidents from Columbia U.

If you're feeling down because you were wrong about something, just remember that, no matter how embarrassing it was, at least you didn't sign the Harper's "Letter on Justice and Open Debate" declaring that the greatest threat to free speech was "censoriousness" among liberal academics. 🫶

missed the discourse yesterday but, truly: the shootings were anti-jewish and antisemitic. jewish people were targeted during a religious celebration. period. what more information is needed? and the people trying to score political points against anti-zionism? SHAME.

The big sales pitch for brining AI into universities is all about “innovation” and all the usual tech Utopianism, but I’m guessing we’ll be seeing a lot of this kind of use in actual practice:

There have been at least 75 school shootings in the United States this year, and at least 391 mass shootings and 13,929 shooting deaths nationwide. This is insane.

Faculty and staff need to be fluent in the language and techniques of univ budgets. Budgets are how an institution's mission is operationalized. But they're arcane documents, cloaked in obscurantism. And upper admin and boards use that opacity to do all sorts of shit, unaccountable and unfettered

People should take a page out of New School faculty's book and start doing forensic accounting for their own institutions using public documents

Follow the money. This happened in the middle of Covid.

There is an absolute fucking scandal going down at The New School, wherein at appears that the university is funnelling to a MEMBER OF THE SCHOOL’S BOARD while purging faculty and staff. This should be headline news. x.com/uaw7902/stat...

(and incidentally I say this a lot but if you’re looking for a way to organize around a university issue, starting with an independent/collaborative budget audit is always a good place, as the @debtcollective.bsky.social has shown for institutional debt)

Take a journey through time down a new NSF COLDEX ice core borehole just completed by the team in #Antarctica! If you’re at #AGU25 stop by the COLDEX booth in the Exhibit Hall to talk to COLDEX team members from across the 15-institution center funded by NSF! @agu.org Follow us on IG @ coldex_stc

As a Purdue alum, this is a shameful move. What I valued about my Purdue CS education was the intentionality given to thinking about process, how to treat programming as a set of idioms to be thoroughly understood and implemented, no matter the programming language. >>

It is worth noting that so many of these universities mandating AI are in states that liquidated DEI programs & made them illegal. Just in case you were unclear about the trajectory of “intellectual diversity” in higher ed, this is what it looks like.

The anti-Semitic mass shooting in Australia will cause a national conversation and policy change. We know this because the 1996 Port Arthur massacre led to significant restrictions on guns. The shooting at Brown will do nothing. We know this because it occurred on the anniversary of Sandy Hook.

Here are the top 10 most popular post-1945 American authors at the Seattle Public Library over the last 20 years.

What this study found is that AI is pretty good at adopting formal linguistic analysis that treats language as a set of disembodied linguistic structures unique to humans, which is not surprising since it relegates the complexity of human language to “performance” outside of the scope of linguistics

relatedly, begging the authors to read @nelsonlflores.bsky.social and Jonathan Rosa's "Undoing Competence" article (or simply any piece of linguistic anthropology published after the protracted Chomsky vs Hymes / Silverstein showdowns of the 1970s)

Compassion is universal or it is nothing.

The original definition of academic freedom came from the American Association of University Professors--the union for professors--in response to suppression against professors for being "too left" & it focused a LOT on universities not being beholden to corporate funders or wealthy benefactors...🧵

Natural science, licks the rock Social science, watches someone else lick the rock and writes down if they die

Ask all the folks who want government to "run like a business" to explain the basic power structure of most corporations. Just try calling a large corporation to lodge a complaint and you'll get a good sense of the structure we're dealing with.

It's so great when universities are like 'We're going all in on AI' but they never talk about anything specific. It's all just vague language about innovation and the power and magic of tech. They might as well be making calls for going all in on alchemy.

These kinds of things are always missing specifics. What, exactly, does it mean to have "basic competency" in "AI"? Math? Stats? Coding? Critical thinking and reasoning? The ability to assess an analyze data? It's all just a big sales pitch and rebrand.

Sorry, folks at Wired, but this framing is ridiculous. Since LLMs can't think or reason in any meaningful sense, the claims in this piece just come across sounding like one more sales pitch.

I actually know about this kind of thing. Just because LLMs squirt out text that looks human does not mean they're doing what humans do when we use language. This is basically erasure of cognitive science and my gosh I'm glad I didn't examine his PhD.

It’s been fun while it lasted: “Purdue University will begin requiring that all of its undergraduate students demonstrate basic competency in artificial intelligence starting with freshmen who enter the university in 2026.” www.forbes.com/sites/michae...

In case you have never seen this.

Brown’s student newspaper is posting updates about the shooting at its campus. www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025...

Yesterday I put online my PhD dissertation from 1986, "The Impossible Press." pressthink.org/j/rosen-arch... It's the history of an idea. The idea of a public informed by the press, and thus able to make good decisions. Where does that notion come from? And does it still apply? 1/

The malicious compliance aspect of this is that students can apparently now submit a complaint against every professor in the university and shut the whole place down indefinitely.

Love this interview with @pmbigger.bsky.social by @mjhaugen.bsky.social. Scholar-organizer is so much better than scholar-activist for reasons Patrick lays out

Since I walked away from a tenure track job 4 years ago to move to think tank work, A LOT of people have asked me how and why; I tried to consolidate some of that thinking into this interview I did with @mjhaugen.bsky.social for @cplusc.bsky.social 's substack

👇👇👇

Computer scientists: "So with machine learning we can extract subtle patterns from massive datasets. What shall we do with it?" Business school professors, every single time: "You know, I think phrenology got a raw deal in the late 1800s."

I watched the 'Sketchbook' series and it was amazing. Such great portraits of the people behind the work and stories--and all the time and labor that goes into them. This decision by Disney just destroys all of that. Just a shame.

Weird because I thought I would pay money to Disney+ to in turn pay professional actors, writers, and tradespeople to make interesting stories that some random dipshit would not be as good at

We asked a follow-up question to learn more about those changes.️ About 1 in 10 U.S. Latinos say they now - Carry a document proving their legal status more often - Attend local community or cultural events less often Dive deeper with our National Survey of Latinos:

U.S. Latinos are now more worried about being asked to prove their legal status during their daily activities (43% today vs. 31% in March), and roughly 1 in 5 have changed their daily routines because of it.

Sounds like a great opportunity. #scicomm

Fire! Heh heh. Fire! -- Beavis 🏺🧪

What's ominous is all of the trusted women of color who know a lot about AI are saying that a crash is on the way and the white guys are pretending they are taking it to the moon. This means that a crash is definitely on its way.

A new analysis of a gypsum burial from Roman Britain revealed a series of fingerprints -- meaning someone smeared the plaster on as a paste rather than pouring it as liquid. 🏺🧪

The studio has announced a landmark deal and $1 billion investment with OpenAI to bring hundreds of Disney characters to its generative AI platforms.

*uses index finger to push glasses back up the bridge of nose* if it's trained off of the stolen creative output of humankind then technically, we are *all* the architects of AI...

Not great.