The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has generously awarded us funding to secure our own storage. This critical processing space will be instrumental in ensuring that large datasets can be temporarily stored, curated, and described. Thank you, MacArthur Foundation, for your support!

Back in the day people used to have a slide at the end of their presentations saying "and that's how the brain works" as an inside joke about Hinton since he was known to talk confidently out of his ass. Now, the Nobel committee brought this upon us like they give the peace prize to genociders.

A problem with LLMs, genAI products, and many SaaS products in general, is that the makers don't publicly assert the actual purpose(s) those products are created to satisfy. They prefer to give vague suggestions or more commonly put them out with a "here, see what you can do with this" thread?

New OA book. Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity by Petter Törnberg and Justus Uitermark. www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edi...

More than 300 people from around the world & from all corners of the data viz field have signed up 🎉 Couldn’t be more pleased to have helped play a role in bringing so many people together in the last year. Be sure to pin the feed for easy access to all kinds of 📊 goodness bsky.app/profile/did:...

"The boxes were filled with hundreds of 35mm slides from the Dept of Defense [that] appear to be from the height of the Cold War... They are the perfect inverse of contemporary Pentagon graphic design in all its sprawling insanity, permanently poisoned by the vernacular of PowerPoint and clip art.”

We mock the egg price discourse but if Harris had won rising prices would have been the crisis cited as killing her presidency before it got started.

for pity’s sake, I am BEGGING university leaders to stop framing this issue in terms of what this will cost the university. people dont care! EXPLAIN WHAT THIS WILL COST THE PUBLIC: closed hospitals and clinics, skipped treatments, loss of access to experimental drugs, unemployment, recession

Costco, which has come out saying it supports DEI, will make no changes to its existing programs, AND pays workers a minimum of $30/hour, is up 15% YTD. Target, which announced it is ending all DEI programs and has a minimum wage of $15-$24/hour, is down over 4%. Keep voting with your wallet.

Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia will tomorrow permanently disconnect from Russia’s power grid. Russia can no longer use energy as a tool of blackmail. This is a victory for freedom and European unity.

The news cycle right now - even just for science & higher ed - is overwhelming. We have to do it, but fortunately, we don’t have to do it alone. My team is focused on tracking what’s happening to research funding, jobs & salaries, shared datasets, university responses & safety of our communities

Thank you @sifill.bsky.social

The amount of stupid on social media right now is depressing. The billionaire Resnicks own a lot of land and a lot of water rights. They do not, contrary to a lot of the stupid, "own all California's water" or have anything to do with the L.A. fires.

My God. Small fire tornadoes were spotted Friday night at the Palisades Fire. Thank you to all the California firefighters risking their lives to protect others. Heroes. 🫡

Well would you look at that.

As Black Friday purchases begin to arrive at your door, consider their packaging — more than likely in cardboard boxes. These "abject objects," @shannonmattern.bsky.social writes, are touchpoints to a global apparatus of commerce, consumption & waste. They bring the logistics chain to our doorsteps.

Nadine Fattaleh is fantastic too:)) wish I could go.

50 Watts is such a good online store for weird, arty books: 50wattsbooks.com (I think shipping is US-only for the near future, though)

If you think text and image hallucinations are bad, wait until you see what Geospatial hallucinations can do

"In season 3 of Getty’s Recording Artists podcast, [we examine] the groundbreaking art-science organization Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Through the stories of E.A.T.’s co-founders, Robt Rauschenberg + Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver" we explore the org's collaborative, creative rsch

This might be more important to do than previous years.

This is one of those examples that illustrates a harm of algorithmic systems that is often invisible—system “predicts” who is likely to miss appointments, and recommends double booking those slots, thus punishing poor people by wasting their time. arstechnica.com/health/2024/...

Although delivered in Fall 2022, it remains a crucial intervention in light of today's conditions. parsejournal.com/article/the-...

I had a great, if not bleak, convo on the urban displacement podcast. We discussed urbicide in different contexts and its differentiated impact from Palestine to Sudan, the significance of materials like concrete as weapons of war and more. Have a listen! open.spotify.com/episode/4YAn...

Ever lost track of all the satellite imagery you wanted to analyse? The Bellingcat Search Grid Generator simplifies your task, by overlaying a grid that turns your geolocation search into manageable sections. Watch @galen.reich.me.uk explain how: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKNl...

"92 million low-income people in the U.S. states—everyone whose income is less than 200 percent of the federal poverty line—have some basic aspect of their lives decided by AI" www.techtonicjustice.org/reports/ines... this is a damning report

Follow @alondra.bsky.social to see all her resposts of her initial cup half empty, cup half full post. I'm not adding one - but they are all so funny. I reposted the AI one following my morning theme.

The recording of the AI Summit I organized is now online. Scroll down for the recordings of the 4 panels: #HumanAI, #LocalAI, #SpatialAI, #UrbanAI and #PlanetaryAI. @katecrawford.bsky.social and I are in conversation on the Planetary part. Many excellent talks. www.arch.columbia.edu/events/3601-...

So happy so many of my #mapping and #dataviz friends are here now. I was missing you all.

Also, if you're not hip to the miracle that is the Sun Noodle ramen kits: sunnoodle.com/products/miso/ These things changed my life.

"The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) invites applications from distinguished scholars for the Borough of Bklyn Chair for the Study of History + Culture. This endowed faculty position will advance student and public engagement in the rich history and diverse cultural heritage of Brooklyn..."

Finally, someone speaks some sense at @nytimes.com. Thank you Zeynep Tufekci. www.nytimes.com/2024/11/16/o...

Big news—a rare settlement!— in one of @knightcolumbia.org’s cases. www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/u...

Professor of literature @bardcollege.bsky.social Peter L'Official unearths the ambitious — and unrealized — work of architect/writer W. Joseph Black, who in the 1970s proposed building a sprawling Black cultural center in Harlem. L'Official links Black's work to the novels of Colson Whitehead. /2

It's been 12 hours so maybe everyone has moved on, but I created a graph with the all the missing lines. Visually, you could say White men without college degrees were ahead of 10 groups in 1980 (5th place out of 16), and only 7 groups by 2022 (9th place).

“What were the material, technical, epistemic, cultural, + political conditions that made the built environment computable? And, conversely, what are the implications of emplacing the history of computing in material + spatial settings – in the built environment?” IEEE CFP: abstracts due Dec 1!

The job is at DUSP, MIT

I have never seen a job description like this. Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, Computing and The Health of the Planet. apply.interfolio.com/156251

"Does Title VI Require Private Universities to Restrict Student Speech?" -- from @dorfonlaw.bsky.social, the latest installment in @knightcolumbia.org's series on Title VI and the First Amendment. knightcolumbia.org/blog/does-ti...

23andMe is teetering on the brink of collapse. It's not clear on what the company plans to do with the DNA data of its 15 million customers

“In 1977, Child’s home kitchen… inspired a remarkable piece of early design rsch, ‘Julia’s Kitchen: A Design Anatomy.’ In this 40pppolemic, Bill Stumpf, the industrial dsgnr who co-invented the Aeron chair, [and] Nicholas Polites [claimed] Child’s home kitchen as a model for user-centered design.”

thin blue line flag but the blue line has been resized to reflect the proportion of your city's municipal budget that goes to police

"This August, Finland is launching a world-first initiative on this scale: every ninth grader will receive ‘The ABC Book of Media Literacy’ designed to combat the rising tide of disinformation."

Welcome Brazilians to BlueSky! Here is a useful, detailed explanation of why there is a sudden influx: imagine if Jan 6 had been met with such FAFO measures in the US! (Not quite too late…)

I have decided to post a thread to explain the current situation to BlueSky users outside of Brazil.

As more families opt for charter and private schools or homeschooling in the wake of the pandemic, cities around the country are shuttering schools. The effects fall hardest on majority-Black schools and special-needs students.

Using the percent sign for both poll results and probabilities is confusing! We need different glyphs, something like: 47% - proportion of voters for candidate X 47‽ - probability that candidate X wins

"New York City runs on algorithms, at least 46 different algorithmic tools to be exact. Behind the rapid expansion of these tools is an example of how America’s biggest city is aiming to be transparent about which departments use these tools and what kind of data is being processed and by whom."

Hi all! I'm going to be doing something a little different next month and teaching a six-week course on disinfo and propaganda, its goals and tactics, and all the ways people can properly fight it. This will be fairly structured and geared toward nonprofits and newsrooms: