😶 stuart reeves 😶

I’m thrilled to share that my latest paper on the #EMCA community has just been published online in Symbolic Interaction! A big thank you to the participants, contributors, and anonymous reviewers for their insights, time, and support throughout the process.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

("this response" -> "this is a response" 😬)

#EMCA

Mike Lynch gets to the essential rub for ethnomethodology in responding to Eric Livingston's "Ethnomethodology's Broken Promise"

for some, doing 'true EM' means dissolving into the doing entirely - this response to the essential problems of 'doing EM'

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Zuckerberg claims ‘superintelligence is now in sight’ as Meta lavishes billions on AI Ahead of Meta’s quarterly earnings report, CEO says his company aims to bring powerful AI into the lives of millions

did I miss a few news stories or something? I thought we were still gunning for 'artificial general intelligence' [sic]? when did we skip that and get to 'superintelligence' [sic]?

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

(side note on genAI revenue vs. investment: www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-g...)

I once got told by a certain prominent researcher that my study on the collaborative organisation of usability testing was not CSCW and therefore I couldn't present it at CSCW

not that I'm bitter or anything of course

as we emerge from this crisis (and we will), UK HE must strengthen democratic-participatory structures of governance in universities

many have the above in name only - execs and councils are often unwilling to truly commit to this actually means, which is bizarre given their own poor track record

this is set against a backdrop of vast UK gov incompetence around university policy and regulation

'fee' income for each student has been frozen for a decade, intl. student recruitment has been left to mop up the financial gaps (aka 'exploitation'), and no-one in gov knows what unis are for

how did we get here?

the reason (IMO) is a combination of significant mismanagement at university and UK government levels

our own university has made a raft of huge mistakes (related to capital expenditure, restructuring projects, hiring, etc.)

these have cost us, and now staff are paying

a lot of us at UoN are on strike today because of the threat of compulsory redundancies as part of Phase 1 of Future Nottingham

right now, it's APM (admin, professional services, managerial) being targeted

next, it will be academic and associated family of staff

@uonucu.bsky.social

"we currently have a project trying to understand just how good..."

I'm sincerely hoping there was a budget line "Travel and subsistence for offspring researcher interrailing to testAI geo location services"

sovereign in the same sense as UK water infrastructure ownership

OpenAI and UK sign deal to use AI in public services The US tech firm behind ChatGPT say it will work with the UK government to "deliver prosperity for all".

ignoring the obvious problems with striking a deal w/a charlatan, even if this did deliver something tangible, what if it's a mere one-off 5-10% rise in efficiency with subsequent diminishing returns?

most likely outcome is tepid growth + raided by private interests

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) .@Replit goes rogue during a code freeze and shutdown and deletes our entire database

This thread is incredible.

One of the things this article makes very clear in between the lines is that the same policy entrepreneurs who've wrecked UK Higher Ed are still key media sources and still have influence. No-one who's been involved in designing this disaster should be listened to again.

what we also miss is the praxeology of genAI prompting itself - the practices of prompt crafting, curation, reading, etc. including coherence management's work by the user in pulling sense out of the interaction

I guess my question would be "why though?"

intersubjectivity and its methodical accomplishments is not "in" the data - phenomena are "out there"

I can see a value in a kind of brainstorming approach but ultimately we are talking about a very advanced horoscope machine

I ♥️ caulk

it is terrifying to think that all these people out there could be unwittingly generating KirmanCode

I'll take this as an opportunity to share my favourite Martin and Lynch paper

bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.tufts....

never underestimate the capacity for people who count things for a living to forget that counting things is a social practice

even better, get the computer to count things for you

when the current crisis is over (FSVO "over") we will be looking back at a university management style that has completely and utterly discredited itself

EXCLUSIVE: Dundee University pay £36k to replace finance chief who quit after just 6 days The university has been forced to replace its finance chief who quit after losing confidence in the new principal.

let's talk about "change management" at UK unis

what's happening at Dundee University should be a warning to all university execs, that management approaches *will need to change* - Dundee is just the most extreme example so far but incompetence is systemic

www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/politics/...

not once has this person studied actual, real people - I guarantee it

Why I kick down Peak District stone stacks Stuart Cox says he wants to raise awareness of the damage the stacks can do to the environment.

yes

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

academia.edu has always been absolute poison

This makes me so angry. Having imposed an absurd unplanned quasi-market on universities, they now yell 'fire' and point the finger and blame everyone else. Not serious people.

Project Vend: Can Claude run a small shop? (And why does that matter?) We let Claude run a small shop in the Anthropic office. Here's what happened.

it's telling that the conclusions here are merely to agentify and kick the can down the road - "AI will get incrementally better" - a story we've been told since the 1950s

a more curious analysis would centre the people involved in reasoning about the machine

www.anthropic.com/research/pro...

still from a folk horror film