Meanwhile the paper on the benefits of the COVID vaccine that Bhattacharya censored as Interim Director of the CDC is now out in JAMA Network Open. This is a paper he really didn't want people to view and download. You know what to do.

This outcome has been in the tea leaves since we first accepted the idea that the highest purpose of higher ed is job training and career advancement. It's been there since states legislatures stopped treating University line items in their budget as investments for the greater good.

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Someone please mash up Narcissus and the Portrait of Dorian Gray into the tale a demented man who thought to see his own magnificence reflected in, well, a Reflecting Pool and instead saw failure and algae and decay.

Why does all the planning and thinking that goes into writing feel like WORK they ask! Maybe all that work is a useful and valuable skill and is actually part of the point?! But you can just skip over all that and get the end result to claim as your own...for a fee of course.

This is the whole game right here. Companies like this marketed themselves as just 'helping' with editing etc with a wink wink that was all just cover and groundwork for what they're doing now.

"In some cases, the very same companies selling detection tools are also making apps that allow students to cheat, including by writing papers for them or rephrasing text written by others." Sylvester McMonkey McBean approves.

They're saying the quiet part out loud now. Jenny Maxwell, head of education for Grammarly/Superhuman: “We’re doing a huge pedagogical upheaval in education,” she said, calling it a “burn it down moment. We’re just in the early stages.” Burn down higher ed without any plan to rebuilt. Gift link.

Did you see the forum in the latest American Ethnologist? anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15481425...

@mkevane.com this line at the end: "...encourages the capitalists to support a coup against democracy and set up a repressive system." 😬

Trying to write a piece about what "AI" has meant for me so far in teaching. Not a lot of exciting or innovative stuff. Mostly just problems related to machine-facilitated plagiarism. And the big time suck of dealing with those issues and having to make huge adjustments to my classes. Super fun.

Thinking through the whole problem with AI submissions to journals, it seems like it's kind of a cross between an inflation and counterfeiting issue. And there's a big challenge when it comes to both slowing down the flow of submissions and verifying our currency (so to speak).

Happy Father's Day 🖤

Giants announcer Mike Krukow took to the airwaves to voice his displeasure with the players who either wrote Bible verses on or opted out of wearing their Pride hats at the team’s Pride Night.

Good on Krukow for speaking out on this.

Mike Krukow is just the best. Duane Kuiper is just the best. Jon Miller is just the best. How did San Francisco get so much goodness?

Just sayin'... (thanks to University of Utah College of Humanities fo this image)

The Giants honestly deserve this for the mess they created. Posey hired Vitello, who was either too stupid or too bigoted to stop this little hate stunt, which players under his charge had apparently been discussing for weeks.

by request i'm going to share a quick thread of collections where people have pulled together articles / resources / arguments about ai harms and how to resist them this is by alphabetical order in my bookmarks, it's not comprehensive, feel free to add to the list of lists

Says a lot about Vitello that he seems to think the primary concern with the backlash is that it could impact player performance. Saying the only opinion that matters is the one in the locker room when your fanbase is begging you to respect and acknowledge their existence is pathetic.

This is an important thread.

I'm attending a digital humanities event in Montreal. There was a keynote on AI and something about the talk made me wonder if it had been written by Claude. I said as much in the Q&A. As I posed the question, the speaker shifted, looking slightly uncomfortable. What he said next shocked the room +

If you're hosting an international sporting event, you should be required to actually host all of the competitors. This isn't hard.

“like” is neither imprecise or redundant.

Remember this scene the next time a corporate reporter tries to insist that a rural diner full of white men in their 60s is somehow a more authentically "American" place, somehow more representative of who we are as a nation.

Oliver is so good at this. Absolutely devastating account of how Rufo and DeSantis destroyed a college and fucked up its students’ education. youtu.be/jFMc07F1UUU?...

Ok fine I'll get back to grading.

THISSSS 👇👇👇👇

Professor Joyce is a renowned scholar on the archaeology of gender. Her thread here is outstanding and nuanced (as always).

Quote for today: "Sports take on the role of defending fundamental structures of power by putting those structures on public display in embodied form. Such public events are typically organised by elites, who try to control what is put on display so that their social status remains unchallenged."

Anthropological research on subsistence is offered in the dangerous and authoritarian “report” on the humanities as a key example of supposed ideological weakening of scholarship. This critique begins to show how the key example cited actually proves the opposite. Let’s go into it in some depth 1/

Good thread to read all the way through. Thanks for this @rajoyce.bsky.social

13/ Anthropologists have empirically broadened discussion of how sexual biology develops, is understood, and becomes a basis for human action in such profound depth that we can’t really use a simple binary anymore. That is apparently really disturbing. But it’s not ideology. It’s biology.

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Excellence from @sckennedy24.bsky.social

"The choices made by Roupp, JT Brubaker, and Ryan Walker to chalk a Bible reference onto to their SF Giants Pride logo hat ... will have a much, much longer shelf-life in the community’s collective memory than their pitching performances on Friday night, or throughout the year."

New: I wrote about everyone intently watching the long process of removing Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center and how it revealed our insatiable thirst for accountability — and for his humiliation.

As an anthropologist, I endorse this message!

Searching for something else, I re-encountered these great John Collier bulletin board photos

My assessment of the “Report” and its misrepresentation of anthropology in @chronicle.com … a mini thread www.chronicle.com/article/are-...

From 500 views in the first two months to over 100,000 views in the last few days. The ADA opinion piece that was too scary to be distributed at the ADA meeting has gone full Streisand. Y'all are doing the Lord's work.

Y’all doing good. Keep ‘em coming.

This is really the frontier of anthropology and genetics in my opinion. Culture is to humans as water is to fish; essential, in contact with our every surface, so that it becomes unnoticed until it suddenly changes. www.johnhawks.net/p/how-human-...

"Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not 'free students up for higher-order work.' It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all." www.chronicle.com/article/my-s...

Hi real archaeologist here, worked in the field for nearly 30 years, this is total bullshit, Indus valley (as one example) had major cities with clean water and clear equality (no rulers, similarly sized housing), we have rats today (ancient Egyptians had cats as pest control) etc, stop boosting 💩

This afternoon's reflection on AI and the dying internet.

The Metro NY Library Council is hiring a Library Field Ranger for our Library Field experimental outdoor library in Westchester County!

What kind of archaeologist, what kind of human do you want to be? How should we do science in a way that centres craft and non-alienated labour? How do we honour the dead through our practice?

Update: Supposedly the ADA not the NIH called the police. This makes sense: of course the ADA spontaneously and without coercion opted to forcibly remove from their annual meeting the editor-in-chief of their own flagship journal for sharing a paper they themselves published in that same journal.

Remember the current NIH director going on about protecting researchers from government censorship? Today his people called the police in to forcibly remove my colleagues from their own society meeting for sharing an editorial published in their flagship journal that was critical of him. Gift link