Laura Kurgan

Data Rescue Projects receives support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to support data rescue efforts FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Since launching in February 2025, the Data Rescue Project has grown substantially. At this point, the DRP has enabled the rescue of more than 1,000 datasets from US Federal…

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.

Sorry I won’t be in town. What a great idea. Cx

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?

Seeing Like a Platform | An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Mode Power needs abstraction, to make the unwieldy complexity of the social world legible and manageable. The proposition at the heart of Seeing Like a Platform is

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:...

Cold War Military Slides A reporter stumbled upon a treasure trove of Department of Defense slides from the 1970s and 1980s depicting data from missile systems, Soviet capabilities and America’s nuclear arsenal.

"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.

So happy for you @luciarebolino.bsky.social can’t wait to see it installed.

sreenshot from the new york times reporting that Stanford University’s provost is talking about how the loss of funding from national institutes of health funding will cost the university $160 million. that’s not the way to get this changed — the people think “stanford is rich; no big deal.” leaders need to talk about what this will cost the public

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.

Good question.

World in a Box: Cardboard Media and the Geographic Imagination Cardboard boxes hold a world of meaning — a geography of consumption, disposal, and reuse — that spans from Amazon to the Container Corporation of America.

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.

50WattsBooks.com - unusual art books, comics, zines, and picture books 50 Watts Books is a bookstore and indie publisher specializing in art books, Japanese art, underground comics, Surrealism, international picture books.

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

Recording Artists | Getty Podcasts What can happen when you introduce scientists to art and artists to science? Artists and engineers discover the creative potential of new technologies.

"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.

AI guardrails Last, the administration's proposal also tries to shore up guardrails for the use of AI in health care with edits to existing policy. The goal is to make sure Medicare Advantage insurers don't adopt flawed AI recommendations that deepen bias and discrimination or exacerbate existing inequities. As an example, the administration pointed to the use of AI to predict which patients would miss medical appointments—and then recommend that providers double-book the appointment slots for those patients. In this case, low-income patients are more likely to miss appointments, because they may struggle with transportation, childcare, and work schedules. "As a result of using this data within the AI tool, providers double-booked lower-income patients, causing longer wait times for lower-income patients and perpetuating the cycle of additional missed appointments for vulnerable patients." As such, it should be barred, the administration says.

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-...

Episode 23: The Urbanisation of Conflict Displacement Urbanism · Episode

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...

YouTube video by Bellingcat How To... Track Your Satellite Search

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...

reads: The Ways AI Decides How Low-Income People Work, Live, Learn, and Survive The use of artificial intelligence, or AI, by governments, landlords, employers, and other powerful private interests restricts the opportunities of low-income people in every basic aspect of life: at home, at work, in school, at government offices, and within families. AI technologies derive from a lineage of automation and algorithms that have been in use for decades with established patterns of harm to low-income communities. As such, now is a critical moment to take stock and correct course before AI of any level of technical sophistication becomes entrenched as a legitimate way to make key decisions about the people society marginalizes. Employing a broad definition of AI, this report represents the first known effort to comprehensively explain and quantify the reach of AI-based decision-making among low-income people in the United States. It establishes that essentially all 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.

"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

Love that clock. How long will it be displayed?
Do you know.....