Eliza Bettinger

Commercial knowledge dissemination predicated on proprietary systems and logics sutures hierarchies across spaces, places, and peoples. All to serve hegemonic, capitalist, power fantasies. They are tools of and for oppression, not liberation.

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Again, the public & parents about to send kids to colleges don't understand the scale of this threat & what it means for the quality & quantity of classes/degrees/etc, bc university leaders are totally MIA (bsky.app/profile/mcop...). Meanwhile, stuff everyone takes for granted is just disappearing:

Again, you cannot unplug 1/4-1/5 of an R1 university's budget & expect the same quantity or quality of "things" on campus. The math simply doesn't work. And pretending it does & we can uphold our "core values," & not talking loudly & publicly about how it doesn't, is not a strategy. It's madness.

New reporting on those threats against Tompkins County (Ithaca) from the feds earlier this year. #twithaca

Yessssssss.
Best description yet. Thank you for articulating that, @shannonmattern.bsky.social

Was talking to an actual machine learning scholar about this common phenom of researchers bringing us AI-generated fake citations for us to find for them. She was gob-smacked — “But why do they trust it so much?”

Extremely important to foreground that this is not only about faculty IP. Think hard about what students have divulged to you - health diagnoses, immigration status, political affiliations - either via private messages or personal essays.

How many of those confessions are warehoused on Canvas?

like you said, facebook for academics. in all the ways.

As was posted earlier, how to delete your account without agreeing to the ToS:

Opening this "privacy policy" link www.academia.edu/privacytakes you to a page where you can access the drop-down menu and reach "account settings." From there I was able to delete my account without agreeing.

yes.

It matters because this cursed platform is most likely also collecting behavioral data of researchers who create accounts, and then repackaging or deriving conclusions from that they can sell ... to funders, university admins, whomsoever wants it for prediction analytics or other.

By creating an Account with Academia.edu, you grant us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license, permission, and consent for Academia.edu to use your Member Content and your personal information (including, but not limited to, your name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness, city, institutional affiliations, citations, mentions, publications, and areas of interest) in any manner, including for the purpose of advertising, selling, or soliciting the use or purchase of Academia.edu's Services.

I'm sorry, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable permission to my voice and likeness? For what now? In any manner for any purpose???

This is in academia/.edu's new ToS, which you're prompted to agree to on login. Anyway I'll be jumping ship. You can find my stuff at hcommons.org.

A friend of mine was on Charlie Kirk's "watch list" of Black professors. She received so many death and rape threats that her university offered her a security detail for the walk to class.

This is Kirk's legacy.

You would never know it from reading all of these legacy newspaper op-eds about him.

The fascists will keep pushing and if there's no push back then they will continue to escalate. It's really that simple.

You can now buy this great book, Text and Data Mining Literacy for Librarians (alastore.ala.org/text-and-dat...)
ft. a chapter from ~yours truly~ on understanding why sociolinguistics is important for doing TDM research, that you can read right now for free
repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150...

I respect Anil so I want to talk seriously about harm reduction and public health messaging.

First let me acknowledge that yes, many regular, not-super-online people are trying out AI tools. Of course they are! It's been aggressively pushed into everything and given heavy institutional support.

Linguistics lesson for the day: Accountability is crucial to interpreting language. We make sense of something based on who we believe said it. Synthetic text extruded by LLMs was not said by anyone -- so a crucial step in the chain is broken.

>>

In the last few days, there's been a lot of fearful chatter about how "ICE NOW HAS THE CAPABILITIES TO HACK INTO ANY PHONE" with Paragon Systems Graphite spyware. This isn't an accurate assessment of how the spyware works and who is at risk, so at LFP we made some graphics to help folks understand.

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

Most of these private companies are also, at heart, data surveillance companies. Their real profits come from data collection, analytics, and resale of data products back to the university. Universities are paying big bucks for these services AND their faculty, staff, and students are the product.

People working in universities know a lot of the work that makes the organization function is outsourced to for-profit companies (catering, landscaping) or runs on platforms requiring payments to such companies: Workday, Canvas, Microsoft, Zoom.

This thread will be for less obvious examples. 1/

Academic or student in the USA? Our research techniques can be useful in assessing fake news. We're helping students to investigate and better understand the anti-democratic online ideologies that threaten their communities with two free webinars on digital investigation skills this September 🧵

AI in Libraries Survey Library Freedom Project is conducting this survey to understand library worker attitudes, experiences, and concerns towards artificial intelligence (AI). LFP is a values-driven organization, with a sk...

Library Freedom Project is seeking survey responses about library workers’ attitudes, experiences, and concerns about AI!

forms.gle/c9tt8zQ5zs8y...

I started at Case a year ago with a question: what role does a digital scholarship center play in 2020s when AI is pushed everywhere, there are too few staff, and personal computers are pervasive.

The Freedman Center reopens next week with some answers to those questions.

case.edu/library/news...

This is an excellent illustration of how useless the "Impact Factor" metric is.

The most influential multidisciplinary chem journals are JACS and Angewandte. They did not make the list.

In this short ad hoc 🧵 I will analyze in real time what made the list and why. I have a bad feeling about this.

She's here and ready for your eyes! repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150...

The whole volume, Text and Data Mining Literacy for Librarians, eds. Whitney Kramer, Evan Muzzel and Iliana Burgos, is headed to the printers and will be linked when its out. But for now enjoy this ACRL-approved preview

I can only imagine …

Where’d you find these? I’m morbidly curious!