Jehannine (J9) Austin

☀️B.C. is officially stopping time changes after this coming Sunday's "spring forward" and adopting permanent Daylight Saving Time!

This means more stability for families, less disruption for businesses, and brighter winter evenings for us all.

👉🏾 news.gov.bc.ca/33415

Job alert: open position for a Professor or Associate Professor of Computational Genomics in Health and Disease at University College London.

Based in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment of UCL, and UGI, and funded by the UCL Health Strategy.

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/... 🧪

🇨🇦 Canadians! Contact your MP and tell them you do not support the US/Israeli attack on Iran:
#cdnpoli

www.ourcommons.ca/en/contact-us

Sometimes it's the little wins that mean the most.

I'm just so fucking tired of this fucking nightmare hellscape of a society

GenAI exists at the intersection of anthropomorphizing technology & dehumanizing other people. It's a lot easier to ascribe meaning & intentionality to the machine if you don't believe that other people are people. There's no difference between AI & human writing if EVERYTHING is devoid of soul.

In a statement to The Crimson, Summers wrote that the decision to leave was “difficult” and that he remained “grateful to the thousands of students and colleagues I have been privileged to teach and work with since coming to Harvard as a graduate student 50 years ago.” “Free of formal responsibility, as President Emeritus and a retired professor, I look forward in time to engaging in research, analysis, and commentary on a range of global economic issues,” he added.

When academia's stars mistreat people, they're "punished" with relief from teaching, mentoring, and service responsibilities. This frees them to spend more time on the more valued work of research. And dumps less valued responsibilities onto colleagues, making it harder for them to become stars.

Oh where to start!! Harry, bobby, Audrey, the log lady, major Briggs, just all of them (for diff reasons) really!!! this is your FIRST watch?!? Youre in for a treat - I want a live skeet of your reactions! And it is 💯 if you can share the coffee/donuts/cherry pie experiences with them in real time!

Who is your fave TP character and why? 😃

His research method is impeccable.

This is great! Gonna be included in my contract around AI use that I start my teaching block with! Thank you! 🙏

Online Studies Psychological Science requires that authors who use samples from online data collection include a statement in the Method section explicitly addressing their approach to preventing and detecting automated or AI-generated responses. Rationale As large language models and other generative AI tools become more accessible, the risk of data contamination by non-human respondents has increased dramatically in research. Psychological science (and the social sciences generally) is particularly susceptible to this issue given its growing reliance on online data collection. Preventing automated responses during data collection and detecting them afterward often involve methodological trade-offs. For instance, technical barriers that aim to prevent LLM use (e.g., blocking copy-pasting functionalities) may eliminate behavioral indicators needed for detection (e.g., pasting rather than typing). This policy aims to enhance transparency and reproducibility of reported results by requiring authors to articulate their approach across both prevention and detection dimensions, enabling readers and reviewers to assess the likelihood of reported data being influenced by automated responses. Scope This policy applies to any submission with at least one study that includes data collected online without direct human supervision (e.g., via crowdsourcing platforms, student participants who complete the study online, online recruitment ads, or remote survey distribution tools). Required Reporting Authors must include in the Methods section either: A statement confirming that procedures were in place to prevent and/or detect and exclude automated or AI-generated responses, including a description of those procedures (e.g., explicit participant instructions against LLM use, disabled copy–paste functionality, CAPTCHA use, IP filtering, consistency checks, attention checks, adversarial prompting) as well as the types of automated responses that these procedures are suitable …

Maybe of interest: The submission guidelines of Psychological Science now demand an explicit statement on measures taken to reduce the risk of AI-generated responses for all online studies!

www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations

Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases

www.newscientist.com/article/2516...

The *energy* it takes to be calm/maintain the tone required… I end up feeling beaten half the time, & angry the other half. Actually, no, it’s both, all the time (not a comfortable mix). And people want to misread that Im “just scared of new tech” in a benevolent/kindly/patronizing manner 🫠🙃

Standing up to the small stuff might put you at odds w/ social trends. It might cause friction between you & your peers. It might threaten your employment prospects. It will be *socially uncomfortable*.

That's why the train gets going: by the time it's socially acceptable to say No, it's too late.

This creep's entire line of thought here is eugenicist trash. People are PEOPLE. You don't measure their value by energy consumption. They have inherent value as HUMAN BEINGS. A fucking LLM has no inherent human value. You cannot compare them.

Minister of Al and Digital innovation Ministre de l'IA et de l'innovation numérique The horrifying tragedy in Tumbler Ridge has left families with unthinkable losses and shaken communities across Canada. Like many Canadians, I am deeply disturbed by reports that concerning online activity from the suspect was not reported to law enforcement in a timely matter. Canadians expect online platforms, including OpenAI, to have robust safety protocols and escalation practices in place to protect online safety and ensure law enforcement are warned about potential violence. I am in contact with OpenAl and other AI platforms regarding their safety protocols. Our government is closely monitoring this situation as the RCMP investigation takes place, while reviewing a suite of measures to ensure the safety of Canadians, particularly children. All options are on the table to ensure that public safety and the protection of our children are the cornerstone of any technology built into these systems from the outset.

Evan Solomon’s useless statement on OpenAI not alerting police about the Tumbler Ridge shooter.
What an absolute waste of space at the Cabinet table.

The greatest risk of AI in higher education isn’t cheating – it’s the erosion of learning itself Automating knowledge production and teaching weakens the ecosystem of students and scholars that sustains universities, raising existential questions about their mission.

“Cognitive psychology has shown that students grow intellectually through doing the work of drafting, revising, failing, trying again, grappling with confusion and revising weak arguments. This is the work of learning how to learn.”
#AI #HigherEd #EduSky
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theconversation.com/the-greatest...

This is TODAY! Please come and join us, Vancouver peeps!

The literal face of fascism

‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, i...

ICE agents are paid a bonus for anyone they seize and that includes tourists- read this account from a retired tourist held for 6wks despite a valid visa and seriously think do you need to go to the States? World Cup and Olympics are huge issues imo

‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, i...

A retired British primary school administrator with a British passport and a valid visa was shackled, chained and detained for six weeks by ICE

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Assetizing academic content and the emergence of the ‘assetizen’: education platforms, publisher databases, and AI model training - Higher Education Higher Education - Academic content, such as teaching materials and academic publications, has become an economic resource. This has occurred through assetization as the key economic regime in...

Part of our recent paper led by @jkom.bsky.social was on how academic papers are assetized by being licensed tp big tech for LLM training - and now we see the subscription products appearing from publishers to double the financial yield of those agreements link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Screenshot reads: She and other publishing specialists question whether LeapSpace’s limited reach is worth the cost. Users will need either an institutional subscription (based in part on the institution’s size and amount of research) or an individual one, which costs $32 a month. Many libraries are already struggling to afford existing subscriptions. And if users want to read the cited content, they will need a separate subscription to that content’s publisher—akin to paying for multiple video-streaming services.

The inevitable next stage of academic publishers profiting from academics' work is here - scraping it for AI then charging subscriptions for access to the AI summaries, and then again for the citations. Academic content assetization as we called it in a recent paper. www.science.org/content/arti...

A photo of Vancouver's BC Place and above it the words, "Sign up to speak! Keep ICE out of the World Cup". The word "ICE" is crossed out.

To keep the FIFA World Cup fun for all, and be a successful event for the city, @ptfry.bsky.social is teaming up with @copevancouver.bsky.social's @seanorr.bsky.social on a motion to keep ICE out of our games.

The deadline for you to sign up to speak is Feb. 24 by 5pm.

vancouver.ca/your-governm...

Im sorry.... sending support...

Canada names its new chief public health officer Dr. Joss Reimer, a physician from Manitoba, has been named Canada’s new chief public health officer.

Canada has a new chief public health officer Dr Joss Reimer replacing Dr Teresa Tam.
www.ctvnews.ca/politics/art... @ctvnews-mirror.bsky.social

💯🎯😳

Nothing grinds my gears like finding a scale development paper and realizing that the items are NOT PUBLISHED IN THE PAPER.

IMO this gap in confidence around critical thought is probably *driving* some adoption of AI technologies, on account of people who lack that self confidence feel like an AI assistant will help them compete with people who know they're smart.