Anne Jonas 🌻

Because of the National driver register, since their licenses are suspended, trans folks cannot move to another state and get a new license until they remove the suspension on their existing Kansas license.

They can't even escape this by moving to another state.

On Nov. 16, a mental health counselor recorded in Kamilla’s medical records that her mother reported the girl had lost her appetite after being “served food that contained worms.” A week later, the couple said, children were told to gather in the gym for what they believed would be a Thanksgiving celebration. Excitement spread as families saw tables set with turkey, sandwiches, pastries and pies, they said. The children waited expectantly. But when a parent asked when the celebration would begin, Oksana said, staff told them the holiday meal was for employees, not detainees. The children, she said, watched despondently as the feast was packed away.

On Thanksgiving, the immigrant children held at the Dilley detention center gathered in the gym for what they thought was a holiday feast.

The kids salivated over a spread of turkey, sandwiches, pastries and pies, a family told me.

But the food wasn’t for detainees — it was for the staff.

I think some people are even giving up on the notion that the elite should have access to the liberal arts, there are ways in which the ideology transcends class

He fled torture in Uganda. ICE is trying to send him back. People like Pastor Steven Tendo “are exactly who our asylum system is meant to protect.”

“I followed the rules. I’ve done great in the community. I’ve never abused any of the conditions of the stay or of my supervision…I’m so scared, I cannot go back."

ICE brutally detained a minister in Vermont. Now, the Trump administration wants to send him back to Uganda, where he was tortured.

UNC-Chapel Hill Preps Policy on Recording Professors The school aims to clarify guidelines after a secret recording controversy and growing fear of surveillance.

UNC is close to finalizing its policy which outlines permissible circumstances to *SECRETLY RECORD FACULTY IN THE CLASSROOM.*

Palantir Defends Work With ICE to Staff Following Killing of Alex Pretti “In my opinion ICE are the bad guys. I am not proud that the company I enjoy so much working for is part of this,” one worker wrote on Slack.

SCOOP: Palantir Defends Work With ICE to Staff Following Killing of Alex Pretti

WIRED obtained Slack conversations + an updated internal Palantir wiki defending the company's work for ICE to outraged workers.

More here:
www.wired.com/story/palant...

What if none of these things is a distraction from the other things and instead they're all just horrible things

Drugs are the primary boogeyman used to justify imperial intervention in Latin America. When academics and activists like myself talk about legalizing drugs, it's not only to keep drug users safe from the toxic supply (which is reason enough), it's about geopolitical stability. It affects YOU

There’s a funny Politico story showing that the latest polling on AI shows 80-20 in favor of heavy regulations, an absolute slam dunk platform, but Dems are worried about not winning back mask-off tech CEO donors
www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Revisiting this now that I have a moment to reflect, and I'm so pleased with how this article turned out, esp the ways we were able to connect w/ work by @allisonpugh.bsky.social @jessicacalarco.com @dmgreene.bsky.social & so many other scholars who've had such a profound influence on my research.

In the US, we're only encouraged to "think of the children" when doing so serves capitalist ends.

damn. I just searched and the piece I wrote for them years ago about domestic violence and Title IX is gone

"Researchers found that withdrawing support for rapidly advancing mRNA vaccine technology could result in over 49,000 preventable deaths annually among patients diagnosed with four major cancers..."

Pro-death administration.

Hundreds of Big Post-Election Donors Have Benefited From Trump’s Return to Office Well into his second term, the president and his allies have continued aggressively raising money. Many donors have interests before his administration, The Times found.

The New York Times investigated 346 people who donated at least $250,000 to Trump and found that more than half of them (197) have received pardons, jobs, government contracts, special treatment, or favors.

Yup. For example, if you ask someone who writes books (novels or non-fiction), or screenplays, or in my case academic papers, what kinds of ideas they have -- they'll probably rattle off a half-dozen things that they want to get to, but daily work and other commitments are the limiting factor.

lugh's comment on "We’re EFF and we’re fighting to defend your privacy from the global onslaught of invasive age verification mandates. Ask us anything!" Explore this conversation and more from the privacy community

Big thank you to everyone who participated in our AMA on the harms of age-verification mandates over on Reddit’s r/privacy this week. We got some really good questions—did we answer any of yours? www.reddit.com/r/privacy/c...

“a new paper published in the New Engl Jnl of Med…argue[s] that clashing incentives in the AI marketplace around ‘relational AI’…have created a dangerous environment in which the motivation to dominate the AI market **may relegate consumers’ mental health and safety to collateral damage**” [OOF]🧪🛟

Texas State canceled Black history exhibit, citing anti-DEI climate Civil rights organizations say the move to uninvite the Black history museum is viewpoint discrimination that is part of a pattern of silencing diverse voices.

“If I remain silent in a situation or injustice like this, that is betraying the history that I go out and promote and that I’ve given my life to for the past 35 years now,” he said. “This is not a time to be silent.”

www.statesman.com/news/educati...

When Everyone Can See Your Syllabus More states are requiring public colleges to make class syllabi available to the masses. Proponents say these measures boost higher ed’s credibility, while faculty fear being targeted.

NEW: Public universities in red states, from Texas to Florida, are increasingly required to make their syllabi public. The University of North Carolina may be next. Does "syllabi transparency" help combat distrust in higher ed, or feed ill-informed suspicions of it? www.chronicle.com/article/when...

Text reads: About synthetic panels Recruiting the right participants for a study can be difficult. You may not get the exact demographics you need, and the shorter the deadline, the less sure you can be that everyone will answer on time. One possible solution can be to use synthetic panels. Synthetic panels are powered by a first party proprietary AI model developed here at Qualtrics. Our synthetic panel is trained on thousands of responses from a variety of demographic backgrounds in order to more accurately predict how certain populations would respond to a survey. Our synthetic panel is based on the United States General Population, and is only available in English. This panel comes with ready-made quotas and target breakouts in order to represent your chosen population and make it easy to launch your survey right away.

Text reads: Question-writing best practices To get the most reliable and actionable results from synthetic audiences, consider these question-writing best practices: Ask forward-looking and attitudinal questions. Synthetic panels perform best with perceptions, preferences, and intent-based questions. For example, “How likely are you to try…?” Synthetic panels are less applicable for studies on past behaviors, detailed recall, brand recall, or awareness questions. For example, “When did you last visit…?”

Text reads: Discussion The current study aimed to conduct a meta-analysis of the TPB when applied to health behaviours which addressed the limitations of previous reviews by including only prospective tests of behaviour, applying RE meta-analytic procedures, correcting correlations for sampling and measurement error, and hierarchically analysing the effect of behaviour type and sample and methodological moderators. Some 237 tests were identified which examined relations amongst model components. Overall the analysis indicated that the TPB could explain 19.3% of the variance in behaviour and 44.3% of the variance in intention across studies. This level of prediction of behaviour is slightly lower than that of previous meta-analytic reviews which have found between 27% (Armitage & Conner, 2001; Hagger et al., 2002) and 36% (Trafimow et al., 2002) of the variance in behaviour to be explained by intention and PBC.

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)?

Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

Yes it is curious. It’s because they lie.

Someone on here mocked me a little when I (gently) explained that edtech’s entire use case in higherEd is to build a higher quality training dataset than the ones AI can scrape from the internet. And to labor bust.

I don’t know how else to say it!

🧵 NSF is reducing external review requirements and eliminating routine expert panels, citing staff shortages that this administration implemented. This change expands program officer authority. But the solution to flawed accountability isn't less public accountability.

Very much reads like they are significantly reducing the influence of peer review on scientific funding, which under the current regime opens the way for more politicized funding instead.

I really want the Dems to explain what they think this is supposed to accomplish. Because I don't think they know what 230 does, why they even would want to consider it, or what the possible consequences could be. If it is successfully repealed it would prob be a huge disaster.

I am adjusting my syllabus for next semester's Computing ethics class (undergrad, online) - would love to hear suggestions for course activities and projects that have worked well for others!

Head Start programs are being told by the federal government to remove a list of nearly 200 words and phrases from their funding applications or they could be denied.
The list of words includes "accessible," "belong," "Black," "disability," "female," "minority," "trauma," "tribal" and "women."

Zoe Weissman - survivor of 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, FL

Mia Tretta - survivor of 2019 Saugus High School shooting in Santa Clarita, CA

Both are now students at Brown University in Providence, RI.

Statement on the Brown University shooting.

In my 25yrs in the academy I 👀 the proliferation of expensive enterprise software that shifted the burden of sooo many basic administrative functions — reconciling receipts, paying honoraria, booking travel — from competent, efficient staff to faculty + students. I’d spend entire days on this crap.

AI "Companion Bots" Actually Run by Exploited Kenyans, Worker Claims A new testimony from a remote worker in Kenya details the grueling and exploitative work behind romantic AI chatbots.

“The work was emotionally exhausting, with chat users confiding intimate details about their real-life relationships, as well as their own emotional trauma, falsely believing they were talking to an unfeeling AI chatbot.”