Meg Doerr

What Tom Holland’s historic lip-sync showcase taught us about stormwater management Grab your umbrella and your tights.

just learned we won an award for our blog post about Tom Holland and stormwater management.

remember, when you see an article about stormwater management, you repost it. i don’t make the rules.

In the century leading up to 1975, nearly 6000 freighters went down in the Great Lakes.

The Edmund Fitzgerald was the last.

The last. In 50 years, not a single commercial freighter has been lost in the Great Lakes.

Why?

It's NOAA. Of course it's NOAA.

Nov. 13, 1957 | Texas Officials Threaten and Jail NAACP Officers for Not Disclosing Members Learn more about our history of racial injustice.

Authoritarian governments are not new to this country. If you want to know what comes next should resistance fail, look to the history of Black resistance in the South.
calendar.eji.org/racial-injus...

Three German universities offering post-docs for researchers "who cannot conduct or continue their work in the USA appropriately because of actual political pressure. "
www.uni-konstanz.de/zukunftskoll...

a Verge headline: The algorithm failed music Illustration: A colorful waveform starts to pixelate

The goal of Spotify’s algorithm isn’t to help you discover new music, its goal is simply to keep you listening for as long as possible. It serves up the safest songs possible to keep you from pressing stop.

Read more from @terrenceobrien.bsky.social: www.theverge.com/column/81574...

DNA scientist James Watson has a remarkably long history of sexist, racist public comments “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty,” he said in 2003. “I think it would be great.”

Hey folks, as news of Watson's demise spreads, please don't set aside his weighty legacy of misogyny and racism. He was truly among the worst of us. www.vox.com/2019/1/15/18...

Texas Banned Abortion. Then Sepsis Rates Soared. ProPublica’s first-of-its-kind analysis is the most detailed look yet into a rise in life-threatening complications for women experiencing pregnancy loss under Texas’ abortion ban.

Pregnancy became far more dangerous in Texas after the state banned abortion, according to our analysis, which found the sepsis rate for women hospitalized as they miscarried in the 2nd trimester shot up by more than 50%.

(Published February)

📽️ WATCH: We reviewed 700+ videos, hours of footage from ICE protesters and counterprotesters in Portland.

Trump justified the deployment of National Guard troops by calling the city "War ravaged," with an ICE office under siege. That's not what we found.

🔗 Full story: https://propub.li/43fRCmF

Every time one anti-vaxxer is quoted in the media, one million scientists and healthcare workers should also be quoted in support of vaccines.

False equivalence in the media is killing us.

For children and teens, heart and blood vessel complications of Covid overshadow the very rare and short-term risk of vaccinations, a new report from nearly 14 million kids
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

I was laid off from Teen Vogue this week, alongside multiple other phenomenal team members.

At our Summit, I was asked how it felt to be 1 of 2 Black women left and what that meant for representation. Now, there are no Black women at Teen Vogue and that is incredibly painful to think about.

thank you for all the support; the statement from our union is now live here with some more reporting.

now that this is public I can confirm that the majority of today’s layoffs were women of color. there are no longer any Black women working at Teen Vogue.

I was laid off from Teen Vogue today along with multiple other staffers, and today is my last day.

certainly more to come from me when the dust has settled more, but to my knowledge, after today, there will be no politics staffers at Teen Vogue.

Mike Johnson: ‘My Christian Faith Is More About Not Jacking Off Than Feeding The Poor’

Mike Johnson: ‘My Christian Faith Is More About Not Jacking Off Than Feeding The Poor’

Woman sits in car for 14 hours to get food during New Birth Baptist church food giveaway More than 2,000 people waited in their cars in line Saturday morning in order to receive food.

Some people waited in line up for 14 hours to receive a food box from a church giveaway.

500 people volunteered to help and they still ran out of food.

Remember for every one person a food bank feeds, SNAP feeds 9.

By turning off food assistance the regime is starving Americans.

I am certainly no seasoned strategist but I am a little skeptical of the political wisdom behind building a giant golden ballroom and sharing a dozen photos of a renovated marble bathroom at the very moment that millions of people are losing access to healthcare and food.

Can't overstate how fucked up it is that unraveling what is arguably the greatest achievement in the history of humanity is now a motivating issue of one of the two dominant parties in the U.S.

When goodbye comes too soon: How to wrap up science projects quickly Science projects are designed and funded on the scale of years, so what happens when researchers need to finish prematurely? This Community Page discusses solutions for quickly documenting partially f...

"Due to a variety of circumstances...many science projects will never be finished, despite years of invested resources and effort. By carefully and strategically documenting scientific work achieved, components of unfinished projects can be salvaged and preserved to benefit future researchers." 🧪

If I were running the DNC, there would be Democratic Party sponsored food relief banks across the country right now that specifically welcomed anyone regardless of party affiliation.

Along with the food, there could be voter registration and links to runforsomething.net

Chad.
Jimmy.
John.
Tim.

night shift goes to work when most of us are going to bed.

meet our Easterly night crew, a brand new web exclusive—After Dark. www.neorsd.org/AfterDark

Women are taking pay cuts as companies mandate return to office Researchers are identifying several key factors behind why gender pay gap – which had narrowed steadily over the years – has suddenly widened.

"For the first time since the 1960s, the earnings gap between men and women has widened two years in a row...with women earning 80.9 cents for every dollar a man earned in 2024. That compares to women earning 84 cents for every dollar a man earned in 2022."

www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

Want safer tech? It starts with real consent. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

In this spirit of fraternity, hope and caution, we call upon your leadership to uphold the following principles and red lines to foster dialogue and reflection on how AI can best serve our entire human family: Human life and dignity: AI must never be developed or used in ways that threaten, diminish, or disqualify human life, dignity, or fundamental rights. Human intelligence – our capacity for wisdom, moral reasoning, and orientation toward truth and beauty – must never be devalued by artificial processing, however sophisticated. AI must be used as a tool, not an authority: AI must remain under human control. Building uncontrollable systems or over-delegating decisions is morally unacceptable and must be legally prohibited. Therefore, development of superintelligence (as mentioned above) AI technologies should not be allowed until there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and there is clear and broad public consent. Accountability: only humans have moral and legal agency and AI systems are and must remain legal objects, never subjects. Responsibility and liability reside with developers, vendors, companies, deployers, users, institutes, and governments. AI cannot be granted legal personhood or “rights”. Life-and-death decisions: AI systems must never be allowed to make life or death decisions, especially in military applications during armed conflict or peacetime, law enforcement, border control, healthcare or judicial decisions.

Independent testing and adequate risk assessment must be required before deployment and throughout the entire lifecycle. Stewardship: Governments, corporations, and anyone else should not weaponize AI for any kind of domination, illegal wars of aggression, coercion, manipulation, social scoring, or unwarranted mass surveillance. Responsible design: AI should be designed and independently evaluated to avoid unintentional and catastrophic effects on humans and society, for example through design giving rise to deception, delusion, addiction, or loss of autonomy. No AI monopoly: the benefits of AI – economic, medical, scientific, social – should not be monopolized. No Human Devaluation: design and deployment of AI should make humans flourish in their chosen pursuits, not render humanity redundant, disenfranchised, devalued or replaceable. Ecological responsibility: our use of AI must not endanger our planet and ecosystems. Its vast demands for energy, water, and rare minerals must be managed responsibly and sustainably across the whole supply chain. No irresponsible global competition: We must avoid an irresponsible race between corporations and countries towards ever more powerful AI.

I was part of a working group on AI and Fraternity assembled by the Vatican. We met in Rome and worked on this over two days. I am happy to share the result of that intense effort: a Declaration we presented to the Pope and other government authorities

coexistence.global

PBS doing Gods work here

www.pbs.org/newshour/pol...

Idk it feels like something is shifting. This tweet was also the language of the AP push alert, and just now the Times chimed in:

Whaaaaaaaat is happening??

clearly calling out trumps blatant racism is something that should happen more often tbh

AI and Fraternity, Abeba Birhane, AI Accountability Lab I envision a future where human dignity, justice, peace, kindness, care, respect, accountability, and rights and freedoms serve as the north stars that guide AI development and use. Realising these ideals can’t happen without intentional tireless work, dialogues, and confrontations of ugly realities – even if they are uncomfortable to deal with. This starts with deciphering hype from reality. Pervasive narratives portray AI as a magical, fully autonomous entity approaching a God-like omnipotence and omniscience. In reality, audits of AI systems reveal a consistent failure to deliver on grandiose promises and suffer from all kinds of shortcomings, issues often swept under the rug. AI in general, and GenAI in particular, encodes and exacerbates historical stereotypes, entrenches harmful societal norms, and amplifies injustice. A robust body of evidence demonstrates that — from hiring, welfare allocation, medical care allocation to anything in between — deployment of AI is widening inequity, disproportionately impacting people at the margins of society and concentrating power and influence in the hands of few. Major actors—including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI—have willingly aligned with authoritarian regimes and proactively abandoned their pledges to fact-check, prevent misinformation, respect diversity and equity, refrain from using AI for weapons development, while retaliating against critique. The aforementioned vision can’t and won’t happen without confrontation of these uncomfortable facts. This is precisely why we need active resistance and refusal of unreliable and harmful AI systems; clearly laid out regulation and enforcement; and shepherding of the AI industry towards transparency and accountability of responsible bodies. "Machine agency" must be in service of human agency and empowerment, a coexistence that isn't a continuation of modern tech corporations’ inequality-widening,

so I am one of the 12 people (including the “god-fathers of AI”) that will be at the Vatican this September for a two full-day working group on the Future of AI

here is my Vatican approved short provocation on 'AI and Fraternity' for the working group

The Invention of “Sesame Street” Renata Adler’s 1972 review of the program that revolutionized children’s television.

“Sesame Street” and its sequel, “The Electric Company,” were, “with lapses, the most intelligent and important programs in television,” Renata Adler wrote, in 1972.