Academic authors 'shocked' after Taylor & Francis sells access to their research to Microsoft AI
https://www.thebookseller.com/news/academic-authors-shocked-after-taylor--francis-sells-access-to-their-research-to-microsoft-ai
Authors have expressed their shock after the news that academic publisher Taylor & Francis, which owns Routledge, had sold access to its authors’ research as part of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnership with Microsoft—a deal worth almost £8m ($10m) in its first year.
Events like this are why tech needs crisis researchers who are obsessed not with "productivity" or whatever the hot little project metric of the day is but with the human behaviors and cultures that help people navigate, coordinate, create immediate community under stress, and all the things that we do when large systems in our lives break down. And I am not making that comparison lightly at all (having family deeply and inextricably involved in traumatic natural disaster crisis work)
I've been shouting that URl shorteners were a bad idea for a *long* time.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/11/the-perils-of-url-shortners/
Now it looks like Google is finally killing off goo.gl. Still, it lasted longer than some of their products!
Hundreds of thousands of books with irrevocably broken links.
So that's a million academic citations deleted.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=90&q=%22https://goo.gl/%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5
Slightly amusing: The Republican National Convention is the "Superbowl of Grindr".
https://www.pride.com/republican-national-convention-grindr#rebelltitem9
There's a reason decades of psychiatric research and feminist theory eventually converged on: "Fuck it, who cares what gender is. Just let people do what makes them happy."
Because the alternates were untenable and always ended up being abusive and oftentimes deadly.
To which the conservative response has been: "But we like that."
Behind every "family values" conservative is the belief that them having power over someone else is more important than that person's happiness. And that's evil.
Ten reasons I’m happy to be autistic 😎
A thread...
🧵 ⬇️
"Good data is not cheap to collect — but it is good value, especially when thoughtfully commissioned or built into policymaking by default." Tim Harford on the warped priorities that have been handed to the Office for National Statistics.
https://econtwitter.net/@TimHarford/112808830670751890
Lovely little film, one for my fellow misanthropes.
https://www.orartswatch.org/sometimes-i-think-about-dying-qa-with-the-director-rachel-lambert-and-actor-dave-merheje-of-the-oregon-shot-film-starring-daisy-ridley/
Look, having goals is great.
Working towards something can give your life meaning and direction. But the self-help industrial complex has turned goal-setting into some kind of extreme sport. It’s not enough to have goals anymore. You need to have SMART goals, stretch goals, 10-year vision goals. And you better be crushing them, smashing them, absolutely obliterating them.
What happened to just doing your best?
When did that stop being enough?
Similar time, similar story:
Trevor Brooking:
"I think a lot of older players in the system are damaged goods because technically they're not able to cope with the demands," he conceded.
"If you can't play it from the back, or in tight areas, it doesn't matter how good the coach is, you're not going to make it."
Yes, it's the Daily Mail, yes, it's 2007, but doesn't this sound familiar?
"#England and the #FA get themselves in this position because they do not learn the lessons of history and are thus destined to repeat them.
...
Never mind the performances of its foreign-driven club sides, the English game is on its knees. It didn't need its own governing body to kick it when it was down."
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/article-502576/Same-old-England.html
You read this and it gives you hope the #Olympics in #Paris2024 may actually be a sustainable and lasting celebration of sports and its infrastructure
#green #architecture #Sport
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jul/15/french-revolution-can-paris-deliver-the-leanest-greenest-olympics-yet
Unpopular opinion: Apart from the one manager who led England to victory in the 1966 England World Cup (side eye), Southgate has been the best #England manager ever: WC QF and SF, two Euro finals.
Via reddit:
#TimothySnyder : Political Violence: Reflections from the 1920s and 1930s
"Nothing in recent American political life resembles Trump’s call for “Second-Amendment people” to kill Hillary Clinton, his mockery of Paul Pelosi after an attempted murder, his belittling of Gretchen Whitmer after a kidnapping attempt, the stochastic violence he directs against critics to intimidate them and against his fellow Republicans to keep them in line..."
Just another worried little citizen of this modern-day Pompeii. Techie at UCL, working on Process Automation with MS Power Platform. Scatterbrain, interested in education, languages, Space and lots of disparate things. sorry.
Keeping my space toots at @astrodad as an experiment in self-moderation :)
*Background banner is a photo Yorkshire flag in blue and white, in front of a classic bell tent, in a field of similar tents at a festival.