M. S. AtKisson

"...essentially shifted NSF away from its role as an independent agency that funds all fields outside clinical medicine using input from the research community into a vehicle for administration priorities."

🫤

Kansas Sends Letters To Trans People Demanding The Immediate Surrender Of Drivers Licenses "The legislature did not include a grace period."

It seems all Kansas-issued trans drivers' licenses are invalid, effective tomorrow

It is now illegal for trans people to drive a car until they surrender their license at a DMV (that most will need to drive to) and have it reissued with the wrong gender marker

This was never about woman's sports

Axel. Quelle surprise

Yep. It was so rubbish they had to put a human layer in, which means reading the assignment AND the AI feedback. I can't see how that saves anyone time, and the perverse incentives to skip the review phase when our workloads are so heavy are very obvious

This holds true a lot of places, that we are impacted by elements we couldn’t consciously articulate. Traveling Broadway shows need a few real instruments playing along with the track to give it the feel of “live“ music and a more satisfying experience to human ears.

Only after I studied martial arts could I see (real) Keanu Reeves’s fluidity and grace notes in the fight scenes, while the Agent fights like this. Reeves’s real skill and the contrast between is a big part of why the subway scene works, even if you can’t consciously see it

My quote of the day

Science is the search for truth, that is the effort to understand the world: it involves the rejection of bias, of dogma, of revelation, but not the rejection of morality.

Linus Pauling

New blog post: How I'm Teaching about Gen AI, complete with games, ethics discussions, and thinking about disinformation catherinedenial.org/blog/uncateg...

The president, who drones on about protecting women’s sports, publicly mocked the women’s gold-medal hockey team. A reminder this was never about protecting women’s sports and it was always about transphobia and misogyny.

this is an absolutely astonishing feat of independent journalism, top to bottom, and proves that the only way to truly fight billionaires is not being funded by them. just…read the whole thing.

Five years on, the right’s Covid narrative has been turbo-charged into the mainstream | Laura Spinney Before the next outbreak, we need a serious conversation about how to cope – but first, the more strident, misguided voices must pipe down, says author Laura Spinney

Covid, 5 years on:
"The mRNA vaccines prevented millions of deaths. [...] Masks worked. And as with every pandemic in recent history, subsequent reviews have found that the advice to go early and hard with containment was correct."

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I had a department chair who roomed with RFK at Harvard because they didn't quite know what to do with either of them. He was Jewish and RFK was Catholic.

Waves from Carabelle, FL. This is why we get on a boat and go south.

"Nice is not kind."
I say this a lot in my professional context. Someone who reads your proposal and says, "I found some typos," but doesn't tell you they think there's a critical flaw in Aim 2 because they're being nice, is actually unkind. They're leaving you to the wolves (peer reviewers).

Here's a link for Bookshop bookshop.org/p/books/mind...

Moltbook Looked Like An Emerging AI Society, But Humans Were Pulling The Strings Moltbook is a platform described as a social network built exclusively for AI agents, but now it seems that humans were pulling the strings.

Wait no further: www.forbes.com/sites/ronsch...

An image of the Earth from space.

04:07 on Tuesday February 17th, over the Timor Sea

Tax the rich. It works. MA also showed that affordable healthcare unlinked to a job meant reduced absenteeism, lower rates of ED use for chronic diseases, and more businesses started.

wooooooooooooof

This is exactly what I've been telling the teams I work with and folks asking for advice: the academics are not going to solve this one for you. It will take years for them to cohere around more quality and less junk. You don't have years.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

And!! What you practice can shift how you use the rest of your time. This is using the complexity of interventions to your advantage ;). I've been hearing from folks that using this Skill has nudged them into noticing when they can incorporate more writing their own code, more agentic use of agents

Biologists Reopen Debate on Which Came First: Jellyfish or Sponges “For a long time, everyone had worked under this paradigm that the earliest animals were the simplest animals.”

Congrats to our contributor Rohini Subrahmanyam, who has been named one of three 2026 early-career fellows by @theopennotebook.bsky.social!

Check out this feature she wrote for us in 2023 about which came first, sponges or comb jellies, and why it matters for us:

www.thexylom.com/post/if-phyl...

This is what I try to help people understand. If you could see the way my daughter smiled and laughed for the FIRST TIME IN YEARS after she came out to us as trans, you would get it.

One of the textbooks I use when I teach my "Qualitative Data Analysis and Interpretation" Masters/PhD-level course is the Bryman and Burgess edited volume, "Analyzing Qualitative Data".

I found a #Free2DownloadAndRead copy here: www.gmu.ac.ir/Dorsapax/use...

In addition to promoting entertainment, X's feed algorithm tends to push more conservative content to users' feeds. Seven weeks of exposure to such content in 2023 shifted users' political opinions in a more conservative direction, particularly with regard to policy priorities, perceptions of the criminal investigations into Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. The effect is asymmetric: switching the algorithm on influenced political views, but switching it off did not reverse users' perspectives on policy priorities or current political issues.

We show that exposure to algorithmically curated content led users to follow conservative activist accounts. In contrast, when the algorithmic feed was switched off, users continued to follow the accounts they had engaged with previously. This indicates that exposure to feed algorithms has a lasting impact on users' feeds and their political attitudes.

This is a very interesting new paper in Nature about the role that feed algorithms on X play in influencing political attitudes.

No paywall: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

ChatGPT promised to help her find her soulmate. Then it betrayed her ChatGPT sent screenwriter Micky Small down a fantastical rabbit hole. Now, she's finding her way out.

This was published February 14, not April 1 😐😶😶‍🌫️

We gotta touch grass, really. I'm online a lot, but tangible same space connection is essential.

(g) (1) Any driver's license issued prior to July 1, 2026, that identifies the gender of the individual named on such license in a manner that is contrary to the definition of such term as defined in K.S.A. 2025 Supp. 77-207, and amendments thereto, shall be invalid. (2) The director shall correct any driver's license records that identify the gender of the individual named in such record in a manner that is contrary to the definition of such term as defined in K.S.A. 2025 Supp. 77-207, and amendments thereto. The director shall send written notice to each such individual notifying such individual that such license is invalid and to surrender such license to the division of vehicles. Upon the surrender of any such license, the director shall issue a new driver's license to such individual with the correct gender identification for such individual.

KANSAS JUST ENACTED A BILL THAT INVALIDATES AND REVOKES THE DRIVER'S LICENSES OF TRANS PEOPLE.

www.kslegislature.gov/li/b2025_26/...

Everyone in the generative AI industry desperately needs everyone else to believe that the technology is incredibly powerful with limitless future capabilities, that it will generate unfathomable amounts of productivity and value and wealth, and that anyone who refuses to invest or engage is a fool

People working for large banks and mortgage firms were insisting with great certainty and enthusiasm that these securities were money-good, that the models all checked out, that everything was going great, that housing prices were simply never going to go down

Something that I feel like way too many people don’t engage with enough is that when impressive claims are made about gen AI—technical and financial—they are more often than not coming from people in the goddamn industry

That doesn’t mean immediately disregard, it means be immediately skeptical

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…

I find this whole "AI agent wrote a hit piece" thing really troubling for reasons that have nothing to do with bots getting "mad" and "deciding" to take down open source contributors. theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...

Why do we keep wanting to give AI so much agency that it lets humans off the hook??