Michelle F. Bieger, PhD

“Even the term 'Artificial Intelligence' … is widely misused, with conceptual unclarity coopted to advance industry agendas and undermine scholarly discussions. It is our task to demystify and to challenge 'AI' in our teaching, research & engagement with society.” openletter.earth/open-letter-...

RELEASE: The climate is warming and sea levels rising way faster than governments are acting Only six of the countries the Climate Action Tracker analyses (1) have submitted their new 2035 climate targets in time for the Paris Agreement's 10 February 2025 deadline, and only one — the UK — is proposing actions at home that are 1.5°C-aligned.

Climate Action Tracker: The climate is warming and sea levels rising way faster than governments are acting

A quote from the paper stating that their results extend my advice about the importance of talking about climate change

Researchers found 15 people in Kansas City who had changed their mind about climate change, and asked them why. Fascinating!

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

As someone who coruns an independent media organization with a paywall…I regret to inform you that they do work and if you want independent journalism to exist you are going to have to subscribe to some publications. Doesn’t have to be all of them! You can rotate, which I do!

Today, the UK government announced a proposal to change copyright law - for the benefit of AI companies - that would cause huge, irreversible harm to creators.

More info below, but most importantly here's what you can do (wherever you live):

1. Email your MP. Template letter in 🧵 👇

1/10

we are not paying enough attention to commercially available phone-cracking and spyware being sold to any government who will buy it

List of news headlines about AI misinformation

More than 60 countries held elections this year. Many researchers and journalists claimed AI misinformation would destabilize democracies. What impact did AI really have?

We analyzed every instance of political AI use this year collected by WIRED. New essay w/@random_walker: 🧵

I made a new gif for a new site tracking JWST observations of exoplanets (still a work in progress): jlothringer.github.io/Dashboard.html

What an exciting ~3 years it has been! ✨🔭✨

table of contents of draft textbook SO!4R AND GEOMAGNETICFIELDS IN SPACE 2. TERitE.STRIALAND INTERPLANETARYMAGNETISM 3. MAGNETICFIELDS IN SPACE 4. MAGNETICFIELDS OF EARTHAND SUN IN SPACE A. J. Dessler I. Necessary Principles of Hydromagnetism 1. Introduction 2. Conductivity and current in a plasma 3. Frozen in fields 4. Plasma Pressure against a magnetic field 5. Diffusion 6. Hydromagnetic wave propag?tion 7. Hydromagnetic wave attenuation II. Description of Unperturbed Geomagnetic Field 1. Introduction 2. Main geomagnetic field 3. Magnetic coordinate systems 4. Spherical harmonic analysis

Going through my father's old papers and scanning them in.

Here's a PDF draft of a plasma physics textbook that he wrote in the early 1960s, but for some reason never published.

I would be happy if someone got some benefit from it.
drive.google.com/file/d/1V2F4...

a cartoon of perry the platypus wearing a hat and belt ALT: a cartoon of perry the platypus wearing a hat and belt

Here's my slides from my #AGU24 talk earlier today.

Lots of folks in the session already took care of the meteorological and climatological side of #Helene, so I spent a good time talking about the emotional side.

Buckle in folks, here comes a thread.

drive.google.com/file/d/1nhzL...

One thing that lacks attention: all of this is only possible because Romanian president declassified findings of their intelligence agencies and did so at an unprecedented scope and pace.

Declassification and transparency seem like one of the most effective ways of fighting a foreign influence.

Thank *you*; I really love your work and have learned so much from you about what it means to write stellar journalism.

A graph depicting the global monthly mean carbon dioxide (CO2) levels from 1980 to 2024, showing a steady increase in CO2 mole fraction measured in parts per million (ppm), with data points represented by red dots and a trend line.

Black Friday Deal Alert!

Enjoy our current atmospheric CO₂ because we'll never see it this low again!

This is gaining momentum - publishers are now starting to see more web traffic come from
BlueSky than other platforms (and not that horrid shit place).

Keep sharing your news source URLs here, both traditional and independent media.

pressgazette.co.uk/platforms/bl...

(I need to keep cataloguing all that I read more. I was able to do this thread because I started, a few months back, recording what I read in Zenodo. But there's oodles more I've forgotten to the sands of time...)

To me--I can see the links behind all my interests so easily. Connecting all the stories in this thread is to me, seamless (harder to write out in a 300 character not-tweet/tweet though). Anyway--please click, please read, please support journalism and the institutions that provide journalism.

YouTube video by Ayesha Tandon Investigating climate-driven migration in rural Thailand

Another multi-media format: @ayeshatandon.carbonbrief.org 's video on migration in Thailand due to climate change was incredible to watch and really married science and story in a deeply moving way. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ2N...

The Hidden Workforce That Helped Filter Violence and Abuse Out of ChatGPT - The Journal. - WSJ Podcasts ChatGPT is one of the most successful tech products ever launched. And crucial to that success is a group of largely unknown data workers in Kenya. By reviewing disturbing, grotesque content, often fo...

Something for the podcast listeners-- @karenhao.bsky.social has been reporting on the egregious ethics abuses behind ChatGPT and I've been keenly following her reporting on all things tech ever since. www.wsj.com/podcasts/the... This is an incredibly moving and tricky piece.

Weizenbaum’s nightmares: how the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum was there at the dawn of artificial intelligence – but he was also adamant that we must never confuse computers with humans

Continuing on in the tech theme, @bentarnoff.com 's profile on Weizenbaum was incredible and led me to reading more about the start of "AI." I loved reading every minute of this www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

@kashhill.bsky.social 's reporting I fell even more in love with after reading her book, Your Face Belongs to Us. There are, imo, 2 reasons why journalism is more important than ever: climate & tech. Hill consistently covers the Big Reasons to be tech cautious www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/t...

My Family’s Slave She lived with us for 56 years. She raised me and my siblings without pay. I was 11, a typical American kid, before I realized who she was.

I had no idea until I was putting together this post that Alex Tizon had passed. I loved the way his piece grappled with morality and I'm really looking forward to reading his memoir. Again, I nearly did a PhD on battling human trafficking with ML techniques. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

A Star in a Bottle An audacious plan to create a new energy source could save the planet from catastrophe. But time is running out.

@raffiwriter.bsky.social on ITER absolutely hooked me when I was studying physics, and put further fuel on the fire for my desire to pursue theoretical physics. (I did not end up doing my PhD in theoretical physics.) My go-to "this is how good scicomm can be" www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny - Blood Knife The human body has become a strange contradiction at the heart of the modern blockbuster. Sexy, yes. But sexual? No.

This incredible essay by @rsbenedict.bsky.social @bloodknife.bsky.social on how "everyone is beautiful, but no one is horny." I reference it a LOT when talking about cinema or literature these days, as desire is one of my favourite themes to explore in film/fiction bloodknife.com/everyone-bea...

The pieces I've chosen are those that I've loved based on: journalistic integrity, because the interviewing was top notch, or simply because the topic was near & dear to me. I've read publishers are seeing >> traffic from bsky and these pieces deserve it

(I considered doing 1 like = 1 more piece but my god. Social media is daunting enough. Feel free to steal this idea though if you fancy.)

After a week of ~illness 🤒🤧 I've done a LOT of scrolling. To reinvigorate my brains and introduce myself to this app, I'm going to post 7 pieces of both past & recent (mostly journalistic) writing that I've loved

1. Here's why I'll never use AI to assist my research or writing:
A. I don't want to know exactly what I'm looking for.
I mean that when I start researching a topic, I want to remain open to its contradictions and paradoxes, and to the unexpected paths that might lead off it. 🧵

Datasets 7 bluesky million alpindale/two-million-bluesky-posts Viewer • Updated about 13 hours ago • 2.11M • 452 • 91 bluesky-community/one-million-bluesky-posts Updated 1 day ago • 168 • 44 informatiker/20-million-bluesky-posts Preview • Updated about 7 hours ago • 48 • 26 nachoyawn/three-million-bluesky Viewer • Updated about 3 hours ago • 3.01M • 4 arimalabs/2.3-million-bluesky-posts Viewer • Updated about 3 hours ago • 2.37M • 2 evborjnvioerjnvuowsetngboetgjbeigjaweuofjf/bluesky-298-million-Posts Updated about 10 hours ago • 1 grm/three-million-bluesky-posts Viewer • Updated about 4 hours ago • 3.19M

Looks like the people who use @hf.co haven't reacted well to the original backlash - there are now six new large datasets of Bluesky posts uploaded onto the site, including one with 20x the amount of data as the original dataset that caused the issue

huggingface.co/datasets?sor...

The least surprising headline tonight.
- Facebook just lost dismissal motion of FTC lawsuit to break it up
- FTC also has show cause to ban Meta from collecting minors’ data
- Zuckerberg is personally named in massive Delaware suit
- last week SCOTUS rejected Meta’s appeal for Cambridge cover-up