Nicole Pagowsky

Ok I was wrong. Clearly AI is gaining sentience, this thing realized it was a Cybertruck and immediately tried to commit suicide from embarrassment

Grammarly declined my request to interview CEO Shishir Mehrotra today. But it told me that in response to criticisms, it will allow experts to opt out of the feature by emailing expertoptout@superhuman.com. The company gave me this statement over email: We’ve heard the feedback about this tool and appreciate the engagement from those who have taken the time to raise thoughtful questions about the functionality and the experts surfaced. We agree that the product experience can be improved for both users and experts. The agent was designed to help users discover influential perspectives and scholarship that add value to their work. We want the people behind those perspectives to have greater control over whether their name is used, while providing new ways for influential voices to reach new audiences. Our goal is to improve Expert Review to deliver this outcome.

NEWS: Grammarly tells me it will let "experts" like me opt out of having their names used against their will and for no compensation as part of its "expert review" feature www.platformer.news/grammarly-ex...

Gullible, Cynical America The trouble with believing anything and nothing at the same time

The data economy has made us dumber in ways that also make us vulnerable to authoritarian takover. We are have become both cynical and gullible in the sense we think we are too jaded be fooled and as a result are tricked more easily www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

If an official commits an impeachable offense and nobody acts to impeach, it is no longer an impeachable offense.

People who oppose impeachment as “pointless” because it seems unlikely to result in removal do not understand this very simple point and seem unwilling to even try to understand it.

“The Women’s Issue” of Bakersfield Life magazine with two cover models who are old white dudes in suites.

Happy International Women’s Day!

What an embarrassment. A transfer of funds to private interests likely not benefitting the community served

"These state directives are telling us to abandon professional ethics & to refuse to root our lessons in existing sociological lit, abandoning norms of our prof org, the American Sociological Assoc. Instead, we are being openly threatened if we do not teach what amounts to state-produced propaganda"

Twitter conversation between sj and Amarion: sj: Its true, the 1/3rd pounder burger failed in the US because ppl thought quarter pounders were bigger Amarion: Yeah cause they are???? sj: 1/3>1/4 .33> .25 Amarion: what are those signs

Wanna see the greatest tweet of all time

Nature Report, Killed by Trump, Is Released Independently

By Catrin Einhorn

A draft assessment of the health of nature in the United States is grim but shot through with bright spots and possibility.

Gift link! @catrineinhorn.bsky.social

Grammarly is using our identities without permission Grammarly’s AI stole my boss’s identity.

Lawsuits when.

Couple things here:

1. What the fuck
2. I am allllllmost more offended by the suggestion that I would give this shitbox edit than having my identity stolen
3. The CEO is scheduled to be on Decoder soon and we will see if they back out!

www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Fun thing to think about very briefly: who currently has better lawyers, the United States or Nintendo

No. Peter Thiel cannot be allowed to annex the National Science Foundation via this Palantir proxy.

It would be like putting a pyromaniac in charge of the Library of Alexandria: destruction of a global treasure with no "undo" button.

This is a "to the barricades" moment.

Very real. I heard this reflected in my dissertation research interviews, not even asking about AI, but brought up by participants re burnout for instruction librarians

If your economy is being kept afloat by an AI bubble, one thing you can do to keep it ticking is have a war to make AI look really useful for profitable things that you love doing - such as bombing countries.

Been to multiple practitioner workshops now where the convo is "AI governance is important there are so many risks we need to responsibly manage anyways we integrated a bunch of agentic tools into our workflows and we're not sure how to use them please help"

Broad claims about gender and behavior fall apart when studies include ethnically diverse samples Behavioral economics relies heavily on studies of Western, educated people. A recent analysis provides evidence that ignoring racial diversity within the United States has led to flawed generalization...

"The research suggests that generalizations about human behavior are often flawed because they rely on samples composed largely of White individuals."

Balint to Noem: "You're the secretary of DHS -- for now. And you think you're immune from accountability. But I promise you this: one day he is not gonna be president anymore. And when that day comes, we will still be here. And in hearings like this, we are going to continue to prove your guilt."

Trump’s War on Iran Could Screw Over US Farmers The Middle East supplies a huge amount of the world’s fertilizer. Conflict in the region has sent prices soaring ahead of the critical spring planting season.

there's a lot going on right now but did you know a massive amount of the world's fertilizer flows through the middle east, and did you know that that fertilizer needs to be shipped to the us *right now* for planting season, and uh did you know we are at war with iran

Neguse demolishes Noem (2/2)

Thank you, Symphony! Assuming all goes well, it should be accessible in our repository in May(?)!

Within the doubly-feminized subfield of academic library instruction, value discourse materializes in policy and practice through what I term the “value gaze”–a panoptic enterprise of seeking substantiations of value for audit, while also perpetually self-surveilling as anticipatory monitoring. Constructed from deficit, librarians are exhorted toward allowable subject positions, primarily the ethical professional, achieved through compliance. VAL intertwines objectives from the fantasy economy into its rationalizing discourse; and rather than problematizing this power/knowledge configuration, the library/librarians instead are identified as the problem for not aligning to VAL’s moral imperatives. Going beyond approaches to assessment, this is a study on how calls for demonstrating value that uncritically reproduce reform in fact reinforce the very sociopolitical structures that work against advocacy efforts. Problematization of the dominant discourse and its disarmament of critique can offer the field an opportunity to engage in self-study on how these projects can better materially advocate for workers.

Abstract text, part 3 of 3

In alignment with such neoliberal reform projects, VAL’s rationalizing practices naturalize audit’s inevitability and urgency, making critique virtually unsayable and imagining otherwise consequently unrealized, which calls for problematization. The following research questions guide this inquiry: (1) How does library value discourse materialize in the field through policies and practices? (2) Do value policy artifacts produce disciplining effects on the design and implementation of library instruction programs? and (3) What is the network(s) of institutions, individuals, practices, and policies that govern library valuation projects? Applying Bacchi’s “What is the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) policy discourse analysis framework for empirical analysis of a 21-document corpus and nine practitioner interviews shows that VAL’s purported advocacy remains in the potential rather than the actual, and runs counter to practitioner experiences of material outcomes.

Abstract text, part 2 of 3

Abstract: This study problematizes academic library value dominant discourse–or, the advised obligation toward demonstrating the library’s impact to campus using audit practices–through a Foucauldian-influenced poststructural analysis. Calls to demonstrate library value intensified with the commissioned 2010 Value of Academic Libraries (VAL) Report published by the Association of College & Research Libraries. Audit has been installed in higher education to operationalize divestment from public goods, reinforced by discourses of responsibilization and deficit. As a manifestation of audit culture, I position Kraus’ (2023) notion of the fantasy economy as a primary theoretical framework, which can be understood as ideological reframing of the disenfranchised labor market being the fault and responsibility of the education system.

Abstract text, part 1 of 3

Dissertation defense presentation title slide: Materializations of the value gaze: A poststructural analysis of academic library instruction value discourse in policy and practice. Nicole Pagowsky, University of Arizona College of InfoSci

Getting these slides together for my upcoming defense, open to advice on approaching the presentation from those who have done especially poststructural qualitative studies! Abstract is here: www.nicolepagowsky.com/phd & in 3 parts threaded below...
#qualitativemethods #phd #libraryinstruction

The “shield” is intolerable here as well.

“Parents tried to shield their children from water. Instead they died of dehydration.”

That’s what the @nytimes.com headline here says. Both “shield” and “instead” appallingly reinforce anti-vax attitudes and frames.

The Feds Targeted Charlotte. Now a Local Democrat Who Helped ICE Faces Voters. - Bolts North Carolina lawmaker Carla Cunningham voted to mandate compliance with ICE, and derided immigrants on the House floor. The Democrat faces an intense March primary.

JUST IN: North Carolina's Dem lawmaker Carla Cunningham gave the GOP the decisive vote to pass a law forcing police to comply with ICE. She said "all cultures are not equal."

She just lost reelection BIG in the Dem primary to a progressive pastor & activist, Rodney Sadler. 70% to 22%!

Context:

He’s Running to Fill Jasmine Crockett’s House Seat From Her Left. He’s Also Her Pastor. Justice Democrats is endorsing Frederick Haynes III, seeing him as their best shot to add a new Squad member from Texas.

JUST IN: Frederick Haynes III has won his primary.

after absolutely eviscerating Kristi Noem and calling for her resignation, Tillis is applauded. He thens threatens to hold up nominees if she doesn't stop stonewalling him. My God.

okay, Ill bite.
What do you think the point of reading for and writing a literature review is? The process of reading and writing is crucial for THINKING. Your ideas are shaped by all of this, offloading it to gAI, no matter how "good" you think gAI is at it defeats the purpose entirely.