S. Scott Graham

I’m starting to think that climate change won’t be solved by having every individual person volunteer to accept minor inconveniences

MLA, ACLS, and AHA lawsuit reveals use of ChatGPT in illegal termination of grants by DOGE. Motion for summary judgment asserts violations of the First Amendment; violations of the Equal Protection Clause; and violation of the separation of powers. mla.org/NEH-Lawsuit

The MLA, @acls1919.bsky.social, and @historians.org have filed a motion for summary judgment in our lawsuit to restore the NEH. Discovery documents reveal that DOGE rather than the acting chair led grant terminations and targeted grants using ChatGPT. More at mla.org/NEH-Lawsuit

Our campus archive has a some of their correspondence including the letter that accompanied Darwin's gift copy of Origin of Species for Herschel. Some great letters in there.

Exclusive: AI Error Likely Led to Iran Girl's School Bombing Pentagon investigators believe a bombing of a girls' school in Iran on Saturday likely resulted from inaccurate information provided by AI.

Local Massachusetts weekly says it's confirmed that the Pentagon was relying on Claude for strike targeting, which is how they came to bomb a girls' school.
thisweekinworcester.com/exclusive-ai...

There have been MULTIPLE early leaks of scientific discoveries via DECORATED CAKE. Scientists are good at many things, but shutting up is definitely not one of them.

We cannot therefore unproblematically map sets of predicates on to types of entity, precisely because predicates can be used to 'bring out' or 'suggest' or 'speak metaphorically about' the animate qualities of inanimate entities, and vice versa. For example, record players, cars and computers can be said to be temperamental. Space shuttles, at least until Challenger, can be said to be 'behaving perfectly', and so on. On the other side of the coin, animate (human) miscreants are sometimes said to have just behaved mechanically, or to have reacted automatically, without thinking, and so on. Obviously, our accounts of action and behaviour are constrained by assumptions about the acting entity. But this formulation can be misleading if it is taken to suggest that 'assumptions' pre-exist, or are antecedent to, descriptions of action and behaviour. For there is a reflexive tie between the practical description of action and the 'assumptions' which this description exhibits. Our discourse on entities thus both presupposes and exemplifies assumptions about the nature of the entity.

Of course, folks who've been around awhile are always lamenting that certain works are no longer in the mainstream conversation. Still, I wish more people interested in AI, agency, and personification would think with this Woolgar classic.

a person standing in front of a display of food ALT: a person standing in front of a display of food

I was complaining just the other day about the shocking number of food videos that feature men tenderizing chicken breasts using their fists. Apparently one must pummel the purchased and pre-trimmed meat with bear hands or masculinity will not be achieved.

What Can We Ask of Hospitals? Conceptual Foundations for an Ethics of Healthcare Organizations From aggressive billing practices to neglectful or discriminatory care, news stories about the misconduct of healthcare organizations abound. Yet there has been limited ethical scrutiny of hospital...

What Can We Ask of Hospitals? Conceptual Foundations for an Ethics of Healthcare Organizations www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... How can we make sense of hospitals being capable of moral harms?

‘Unbelievably dangerous’: experts sound alarm after ChatGPT Health fails to recognise medical emergencies Study finds ChatGPT Health did not recommend a hospital visit when medically necessary in more than half of cases

Study finds ChatGPT Health did not recommend a hospital visit when medically necessary in more than half of cases. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Nice- I was trying to find a word like this recently and ended up with "equivocation vortex." Whatever the term, it seems chaotic rotation is the mental image.

In the latest episode of Beyond the Knife, we’re joined by Louise Wilkie to explore the remarkable story of the Edinburgh Seven and their fight to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

shows.acast.com/beyond-the-k...

In Health Policy, we propose an independent third-party institution to conduct rigorous, technology-enhanced monitoring of drug safety and effectiveness without relying on pharmaceutical companies www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This looks great!

Cover of POROI with network diagram

🚨The new Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI) special issue on Method/ologies is now live at pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/poroi/. Check it out!

Written English has barely changed in 300 years. If you can read Harry Potter, you can read Robinson Crusoe (1719).

Occasionally reminded that Georgia added a “post tenure review” process bc they were so certain that professors became deadweight once they had job security, and all the outcomes have proven JUST THE OPPOSITE! People work harder and in more complex ways when they feel secure in their employment.

A lot of people, including me, were wondering how an IRB could ever approve this study.

The answer is that no IRB did. The person who “signed off” on approval from the only ethics board that reviewed it had resigned three years earlier. His signature was used without his knowledge.

🔥What if web text isn’t the best place to start training LLMs? Our latest work shows that warming up models on procedural data (e.g. from formal languages & simple algorithms) speeds up subsequent pretraining on language, code, and math, on models up to 1.3B parameters⬇️🧵

It’s that time of year again, everyone! ARSTM is now inviting submission of papers, paper sessions, and panel discussions for the upcoming 2026 NCA convention in New Orleans.

Laissez les bons temps rouler! 🎉 🎊 🥳

1/3

A real opportunity was missed in not calling this “Terminal Degree”

I think the special sauce is probably an authoritarian personality with a patina of iconoclasm. Danger vibes with institutional safety in many cases.

Headline from British Vogue I Ate Nothing But Sardines For 3 Days - Here's How My Skin Changed with a photo of a sardine

Only British Vogue has the courage to publish true science as it was practiced in the 18th century Transactions of the Royal Society

As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts Medical device makers have been rushing to add AI to their products. While proponents say the new technology will revolutionize medicine, regulators are receiving a rising number of claims of patient ...

“Researchers from Johns Hopkins, Georgetown and Yale universities recently found that 60 FDA-authorized medical devices using AI were linked to 182 product recalls, according to a research letter published in the JAMA Health Forum in August.”

AI could soon renew prescriptions without clinician help. Should the FDA make sure it's safe? In a pilot, Utah is testing use of AI for renewing drug prescriptions. Experts ask if it should be regulated as a medical device.

“Utah waived a series of local regulations for Doctronic… The company’s executives, meanwhile, told STAT they have not spoken to the FDA. The case highlights policy and safety questions that loom as AI companies wade into automating clinical care without a full accounting of the risks and benefits”

Rhetoric & Strategy of Classical China
The Human Instrument
Introduction to Primatology
Philosophy of Dostoyevsky
Music Physics

It's so bad! I got an article back recently full of copy edit confusions that only a robot could make. I was driven crazy for hours by a date typo "Hu, 1983" in refs and "Hu, 1982" in text. The system demanded I add "both" citations and wouldn't take "I made a mistake" as an answer.

One of the many extraordinary illustrations produced in 1745 by Gautier D’Agoty, which together form his Essai d’Anatomie, a remarkably detailed atlas of the head, neck, and shoulder areas of the human body, with explanatory text in French. More here: publicdomainreview.org/collection/c...

Open-Rank, Tenure Track Faculty in Writing and Rhetoric - Miami, Florida (US) job with Florida International University-College of Arts, Sciences and Education (Miami, FL) | 37941657 The Writing Program at FIU invites applications for a tenure-track position (Open Rank) in Writing Studies to begin August 13, 2026.

The English Department at Florida International invites applications for an open-rank tenure-track position in Writing and Rhetoric with a specialization in artificial intelligence.

jobs.chronicle.com/job/37941657...