Martin Ruskov @mapto@qoto.org

✨ jobs ✨ - we are looking to hire for five new roles in our department - please help us share with those who might be interested! 💌

Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture Education
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/073449-lecturer-in-digital-media-and-culture-education-aep

Lecturer in Social and Cultural AI
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/073450-lecturer-in-social-and-cultural-ai-aep

Lecturer in Lecturer in Digital Media
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/073465-lecturer-in-lecturer-in-digital-media-education-and-research

Lecturer in Cultural Computation Education
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/073467-lecturer-in-cultural-computation-education-aep

Lecturer in Digital Economy and Innovation Education
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/073468-lecturer-in-digital-economy-and-innovation-education-aep

#digitalmedia #digitalculture #digitalhumanities #ai #softwarestudies #culturalstudies #algorithmstudies #newmedia #platformstudies #internetstudies #commodon #sts #mediastudies #jobs

Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars

I love this.

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/26/1195695051/driverless-cars-san-francisco-waymo-cruise

The headline is misleading. Trees fix carbon, but the industry devoted to it has not delivered what it promised. Most of the tree-planting businesses are no better than carbon neutral and several are actually harming the environment.
https://www.salon.com/2023/08/24/why-planting-trees-to-offset-carbon-emissions-doesnt-really-work-according-to-experts/

How to tell if AI is conscious

Some comments about the recent interesting paper on assessing AI systems using major scientific theories of consciousness

https://selfawarepatterns.com/2023/08/26/how-to-tell-if-ai-is-conscious/
#consciousness #philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #AI #ArtificialIntelligence

I’ve just started to use #jitsi in place of #zoom. They are taking some heat for requiring third-party authentication (google, facebook, or github, hopefully others soon) to create new conferences on their free https://meet.jit.si/ site.

I never considered using their site. I am fleeing the architecture of centralized platforms, not particular “bad” firms.

#jitsi continues to support #selfhosting (and there authentication—or not—however you like). So I remain quite delighted with them. 1/

@carnage4life

And their Mars mission cost $74 million bucks. Not a typo!

And look at the scientists in their mission control room. Just look at it!

We can have space without space billionaires.

Putting all our eggs in the Elon basket is a choice, and not a good one.

4Humanities.org’s “The Humanities Matter!” infographic has been updated! https://4humanities.org/2023/08/updated-the-humanities-matter-infographic-is-out/ When the original appeared in 2014, people hung copies outside offices & at events. Humanists need a flag! (Thanks to Madeleine Sorapure for making the v. 2 update with new stats & sources.)

Full-text search allows you to search for words in the content of statuses (if your instance has ElasticSearch configured), compared to the current version which only allows searching for hashtags.

In addition, you get a whole lot of search modifiers for advanced search (no UI for those yet):

has:image / has:video / has:audio / has:media
has:poll / has:link / has:embed
is:sensitive / is:reply
language:en
from:account
before:2023-08-08
after:2023-08-08
during:2023-08-08

Full text search has been merged in #Mastodon `main` branch, and will be in the next (and final?) 4.2.0 beta 🎉

It is opt-in, so it will take some time to be filled with people content as they enable their profile to be indexed, but this was one of the most wanted Mastodon features for some time.

We plan to deploy it to mastodon.social and mastodon.online in the coming days to have a bit more feedback on it and see how it behaves in the wild.

Great write up from
@willknight in
@WIRED about Sarah Myers West, @Mer__edith and my new piece:

➡️ The rhetoric of "open" AI is misleading. Why? In short, because AI is controlled by Big Tech.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-myth-of-open-source-ai/

#open #AI #bigtech

Scientists are moving from X-itter. Almost half have opened accounts with Mastodon, the highest of all the other social networking sites according to a Nature survey.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02554-0

Yes, watching a video on #gunsafety made children more cautious when they discovered a gun.

It’s a simple but effective method to help decrease the increasing and heartbreaking statistics of gun-related deaths in the U.S.

https://theconversation.com/a-1-minute-gun-safety-video-helped-preteen-children-be-more-careful-around-real-guns-new-research-207404

This is someting I wish I'd realized a lot sooner in life.

Beyond melting ice caps: Why climate change is a security issue https://www.euractiv.com/section/defence-and-security/opinion/beyond-melting-ice-caps-why-climate-change-is-a-security-issue/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Found an incredibly useful app for finding people to follow on Mastodon. It crawls your social graph then finds the people who your followers follow the most that you don't follow.

https://followgraph.vercel.app/

@interfluidity @b0rk I found this to be particularly important:
"A lot of people are on smaller servers, so when they’re participating in a conversation, they can’t see all the replies to the post.

This means that replies can get pretty repetitive because people literally cannot see each other’s replies. This is especially annoying for posts that are popular or controversial, because the person who made the post has to keep reading similar replies over and over again by people who think they’re making the point for the first time.

To get around this (as a reader), you can click “open link to post” or something in your Mastodon client, which will open up the page on the poster’s server where you can read all of the replies. It’s pretty annoying though."

“Notes on using a single-person Mastodon server” by @b0rk https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/08/11/some-notes-on-mastodon/

// lots of good observations/information about mastodon and the fediverse

law trumps physics, sometimes. storing and streaming digital works is so much cheaper in real resource terms than maintaining a library of DVDs you phyically ship. and yet. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/13/business/media/internet-archive-emergency-lending-library.html?unlocked_article_code=SHhC1zCbybhNFFee1y2yE7uXqng9k_IfnWuZkvknItNyMGa8BjDb1bXtRT0vokzjJaZZ4n4b5tyDwKHX_OKblh5-fgx1H7U_y940V0RgncogyolvY7rx8-IY95ySMtAVyUXnSCINtoXVM-oHLsNncfS2VAmgWe5FGNQlJzFNLs7K-66gISBTvh364RoH3jmjvdf704Eoq-qNuSQEBshAMCUANLHBkCI9sJKVgDaiOsJwhoCfC2QXb5Kj7uwSQN78xBz6_V4R-HISPaCICnwsD-nwEhWDA0cxHLsC6PWPeRa_hhNetXGpM0wml5p0AqvzzAZ8idCCbUc-qcV9IuZ04aw92MN5ogprGrzF4bSZcBdsGFka7hzM13MxzQ&smid=url-share via @carlmalamud

What if the rise of ChatGPT wasn't just an opportunity to talk to our students about academic integrity, but to talk about the nature of knowledge, skill, and why they're pursuing education in the first place?

@jeffgreene @edutooters @psychology

Replies will appear in the Home timeline on Mastodon if:

- The reply mentions you

OR

- You wrote the reply

OR

- The reply mentions someone you follow

OR

- Someone you follow is replying to themselves to create a thread

Other replies will not be shown in Home, but they may be visible to you in other places such as profiles or threads, if the replies are using a visibility setting that includes you.

More info about post visibility settings on Mastodon at https://fedi.tips/who-can-see-my-posts-in-mastodon-how-do-i-send-dms-in-mastodon/