Megan Fitzgibbons

Pride and prose: Novels that illuminate queer lives in Japan From Yukio Mishima and Haruki Murakami to Li Kotomi and Akira Otani, dive into Japanese fiction’s LGBTQ+ narratives in honor of Pride Month.

Pride and prose: Novels that illuminate queer lives in Japan www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2025...

Here, I think we begin to understand the opportunity that companies see here — and why "web browser" probably isn't the best word for what they are building. Or, if it is, we should at least note that in this vision it is not a person who is browsing the web. It is an AI agent. That this would be the near-term goal of every search-adjacent company has been clear since at least last year, when Google announced its intention to do the Googling for you. What was not then clear, at least to me, is that so many companies would seek to challenge Google not just in search but in the software that generates those searches.

The economic foundations of the web are crumbling, but everyone is now racing to build a new web *browser.* I wrote about the AI browser war to come www.platformer.news/ai-web-brows...

May 24, 2025 On Thursday the Trump administration told Harvard University that because it had not handed over information on foreign students’ protest activities, violent activity, and coursework, the university h...

May 25, 2025

"Making AI Generative for Higher Education: Adoption and Challenges Among Instructors and Researchers." Includes photo of students working at laptops in a modern university library.

How are instructors and researchers using generative #AI for #teaching and #research?

Our new report shares findings from 246 interviews with faculty, postdoctoral students, and graduate students in collaboration with a cohort of 19 universities. #AcademicSky sr.ithaka.org/publications...

This data set helps researchers spot harmful stereotypes in LLMs A new multilingual tool aims to make it easier to evaluate AI models for bias in multiple languages.

🌍📰 So flattered and excited that our work on “AI” stereotyping and bias across languages and cultures is reported in @mittechreviewbr.bsky.social by @rhiannonwilliams.bsky.social !!
Really great overview of what we’ve been up to and why it matters.
www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/30/1...

CAPAL LIS Research Accelerator Thank you for your interest in our first Research Accelerator Program. Priority for this program is reserved for CAPAL members. We're limited to 30 participants. If you sign up, you are expected to a...

We’re excited to announce an opportunity for library students and new researchers - our free 6-week Summer Research Accelerator Program!
To apply or learn more about the program, please visit: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Applications close Friday May 2, 2025.

Given the rapidly evolving political landscape in the United States and reports of individuals encountering difficulties crossing the border, CAUT strongly recommends that academic staff travel to the U.S. only if essential and necessary.

Read more: www.caut.ca/latest/2025/...

Trans Day of Visibility 2025 - Duke University Libraries Blogs On the 31st of March, Trans Day of Visibility (TDOV) is observed internationally. Since its creation in 2009 by trans activist Rachel Crandall Crocker, TDOV has been a day dedicated to celebrating the...

My colleagues included a blurb about the Leslie Feinberg Papers and some other wonderful publications and resources for Trans Day of Visibility: blogs.library.duke.edu/blog/2025/03... (@oliverbaezbendorf.bsky.social I recommended your book!)

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 Episode 51

@mmelibrarian.bsky.social , @alexhanna.bsky.social & I explore the ridiculousness of setting up synthetic text extruding machines as ‘uncensored’, ‘unbiased’ sources:

www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/epis...

Thx to @whatulysses.bsky.social for production!

A tiny thing that made me happy (we had to wait a long time....)

OPINION: A librarian's summary of, and response to, the Clarivate announcement - UKSG Siobhan Haimé takes a look at detail the Clarivate announcement and its practical (and possibly unintentional transformational) effects.

An Opinion piece in response to the latest Clarivate announcement from @siobhanh.bsky.social (normally members only) - dub.sh/f9uF75E

Trump Cancels The SEC's Westlaw Subscription For Probably The Dumbest Possible Reason - Above the Law It will shock you not at all to learn that Trump and Musk do not understand what Westlaw is or why lawyers might need access to it.

Here:

The Onion's Sicko meme but with Lexis-Nexis on it

Trump and Musk canceled the SEC's Westlaw access:

Breaking Down Barriers to Knowledge: Western Libraries Waives Fees for Community Members Western University, in vibrant London, Ontario, delivers an academic and student experience second to none.

Kudos to #WesternUniversity for opening its #library to the public.
www.lib.uwo.ca/news/2025/br...

"Western Libraries is…waiving its borrowing fees for members of the general public…granting them free access to most of its extensive print collections and services."

#Academsky #Librarysky

Lingthusiasm - Lingthusiasm Episode 98: Helping computers decode... Lingthusiasm Episode 98: Helping computers decode sentences - Interview with Emily M. Bender When a human learns a new word, we’re learning to attach that word to a set of concepts in the real world. When a computer “learns” a new word, it is creating some associations between that word and other words it has seen before, which can sometimes give it the appearance of understanding, but it doesn’t have that real-world grounding, which can sometimes lead to spectacular failures: hilariously implausible from a human perspective, just as plausible from the computer’s. In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about how computers process language with Dr. Emily M. Bender, who is a linguistics professor at the University of Washington, USA, and cohost of the podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000. We talk about Emily’s work trying to formulate a list of rules that a computer can use to generate grammatical sentences in a language, the differences between that and training a computer to generate sentences using the statistical likelihood of what comes next based on all the other sentences, and the further differences between both those things and how humans map language onto the real world. We also talk about paying attention to communities not just data, the labour practices behind large language models, and how Emily’s persistent questions led to the creation of the Bender Rule (always state the language you’re working on, even if it’s English). Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here. Announcements: The 2024 Lingthusiasm Listener Survey is here! It’s a mix of questions about who you are as our listener, as well as some fun linguistics experiments for you to participate in. If you have taken the survey in previous years, there are new questions, so you can participate again this year. In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about three places where we can learn things about linguistics!! We talk about two linguistically interesting museums that Gretchen recently visited: the Estonian National Museum, as well as Mundolingua, a general linguistics museum in Paris. We also talk about Lauren’s dream linguistics travel destination: Martha’s Vineyard. Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds. Also, Patreon now has gift memberships! If you’d like to get a gift subscription to Lingthusiasm bonus episodes for someone you know, or if you want to suggest them as a gift for yourself, here’s how to gift a membership. Here are the links mentioned in the episode: Emily Bender Emily Bender on Bluesky and Twitter Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000: The Newsletter The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna ‘Data Sovereignty and the Kaitiakitanga License’ on Te Hiku wordfreq by Robyn Speer on GitHub Lingthusiasm Episode ‘Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane’ Bonus with Janelle Shane: we do a dramatic reading of the funniest auto-generated Lingthusiasm episodes You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening. To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list. You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon. Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic. Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo. Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles. This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Go here to listen to our full interview with Emily M. Bender where we get enthusiastic about how computers process language:

In what the company is calling a first for a major AI lab, the Clio paper also highlights the top three categories of uses for Claude: Coding and software development (more than 10 percent of conversations) Educational use, both for teachers and for students (more than 7 percent) Business strategy and operations, such as drafting professional communications and analyzing business data (almost 6 percent)

Clio is Anthropic's new system for identifying AI risks that it hadn't thought to look for — what it calls the unknown unknowns. I talked with team that built it and share for the first time the top three ways people use Claude www.platformer.news/how-claude-u...

１５日 不発弾撤去作業で地下鉄・市バス一部運休へ　名古屋｜NHK 東海のニュース 【NHK】名古屋で相次ぐ不発弾の撤去で、今度は、交通機関の一部が運休となります。名古屋市東区で見つかった不発弾の撤去のため市は今月１５日に地下鉄や市…

Nagoya news: subways and buses in one part of the city won't be running this Sunday as an unexploded US WWII bomb is removed www3.nhk.or.jp/tokai-news/2...

Saw a cyber truck in Montreal for the first time. Mr. 6's review: that's a silly car. It has a triangle butt