Benjamin Woo

Starting a unit of three weeks where students are giving quick, speed geeking presentations on specific methods to give them a sense of the menu of options available in the field. Today, we're focused on textual methods, so Weed and Sedgwick debating "paranoid" reading.

Iran war heralds era of AI-powered bombing quicker than ‘speed of thought’ Speed and scale of US military’s AI war planning raises fears human decision-making may be sidelined

every US war includes an assault on language—so now we get claims that Anthropic’s Claude “shortens the kill chain”

I'm disappointed and saddened tonight by the Algonquin College Board of Governors' decision to cut 30 critically important programs. Programs that led to employment, that built our community, that made our economy stronger. This goes way beyond Mr. Ford's "basket weaving" quip.

A sign that says "Pokemon" and also, separately "Panini"

The forbidden sandwich

Anyway, compartmentalizing by making design exercises for my students full of bad puns

How I Learned to Stop Worrying About the Rules-Based International Order and Love the Hegemon

Culture has to turn away from this shit to survive. We have to make our own stuff and maybe it’ll look like dogshit but we can call it ours and love the process

SIG member Melanie Kohnen talks to Amanda Lotz about her new book: aca-media.org

Yesterday I was trying to formulate a joke around the whole Einstein AI app thing about a $60K university degree for people who don’t want to go to class so it’s just a sweater and piece of paper that says like I almost tried. And then they just went and made it real.

Two years ago AI people were predicting the imminent arrival of the Singularity but what we’ll really get is intrusive surveillance Taylorism.

Unpopular opinion, I guess, but I just think it’s better to know things rather than not to know them and to be able to do things rather than not be able to do things

Survived this round!

Heavily edited photo of my chonky seal point cat Merry, lounging on the back of a couch with a very strong overhead lamp leaving his facial features delineated by deep shadows. It’s sort of like The Godfather.

Merry is making you an offer you can’t refuse

Every few years, American finance realizes this one thing called speculation (investment) and this other thing called speculation (fiction) are the same thing. AND THEY FREAK THE FUCK OUT. And then forget again almost instantaneously.

aeon.co/essays/the-f...

It was important to me to discuss online safety as part of this convo. ECRs are pushed into being visible online for lots of reasons (knowledge mobilization, uni PR, hustling for scarce academic jobs), and that exposes them to an uncertain amount of risk with unpredictable triggers.

Back to methods class after the reading break! Talking research ethics this week with the introduction to Mark Israel's great book and, to make things a little more concrete, chapters by Kristina Busse and Renee Ann Drouin focussing on the ethical challenges raised in fan studies.

“Computer literacy. Internet literacy. Social media literacy. Mobile literacy. Virtual reality literacy…The pitch to train schoolchildren on the latest tech has stayed roughly the same since the introduction of personal computers in the late 1970s…”

And yes indeed, we do fall for it every time.

I know that consistency isn’t the point, but I’m getting serious whiplash from 5 minutes ago when the conservative line on higher ed was that the whole point of university was exposing students to topics and ideas they disagree with.

The Great Olympic lie: untold story of Winter Games’ huge environmental impact Rivers drained dry to create artificial snow, a forest cut down for the bobsleigh track – IOC’s claims to prioritise sustainability at Milano Cortina exposed

“It is easy to forget from watching the pretty pictures on TV that these Games are not being held on real snow. It has been made from water taken from springs, torrents, valley rivers, dam reservoirs, drinking water networks, even groundwater that has to be pumped uphill and cooled before use.”

Gift link: www.thestar.com/gift-redeem?...

Is the textbook dead? Inside Ontario schools’ shift to digital — and the hidden trade-offs of paper-free classrooms The shift has put new burdens on teachers, students and parents and raised questions about the impacts on learning and fairness.

A lot of confounding variables at play here, but doesn’t seem great! (Nor does the closing, presumptively “hopeful” anecdote about Chinese kids working with pen and paper under AI surveillance!)

If nothing else the STEM majors lack the inventiveness to dream up the torment nexus on their own, how will they build the dystopia they want without Sci-fi authors to write it first?

Just gonna say, we are all #LowerEd now and it was never ever a doubt.

We Have Learned Nothing About Amplifying Morons “Looksmaxxers” are losers and freaks, but we let them steer the culture when we adopt their terminology.

“The good news is that these looksmaxxing people are freaks and losers. They are a tiny and insignificant group that has no power in numbers. The bad news is that the entire point of amplification is that it can give a tiny group of people incredible power by shaping culture.”

Our institutions are not hollow. If they were hollow we could crawl inside them, fill them with life - change their direction - call them our own. But our institutions are not hollow. Our institutions are not hollow. Yet.

A crab walks in

What does Chief Stubbs know about how dangerous the Downtown Ottawa Forum is that he’s not sharing with the rest of the class?

John Goodman in 'Barton Fink' runs down a blazing hallway with a shotgun, shouting 'I'll show you the life of the mind!'

Watching another research day get frittered away on emails and reimbursements and little tasks until I have to go in for the job talk at 5.

And thus also like one outsourced to a model trained on vapid but punchy pr language by a CEO who can’t be bothered anymore

Odds that this was written by an adult human being and not a chatbot?

The voice of America