pam lach

Mellon Foundation The Mellon Foundation makes grants to actively unlock the power in the arts and humanities that helps connect us all.

“American Academy of Arts&Sciences reports 96.3% of humanities grads age 23-32 fully employed. Earnings in humanitiess comparable to social/life sciences, job satisfaction levels too. A serious mismatch bw actual employment for hum grads +general perception."
www.mellon.org/voices/human...

In Review: It’s Not Too Late for the Movies to Reject AI A dramatic week in the AI wars made it clear that the future is far from lost, and that we can't afford to fight for it on the tech community's terms.

In Review: It’s Not Too Late for the Movies to Reject AI

Via IndieWire

I'm so tired of hearing that we need to "teach our students how to use AI" when the thing they most need to use it is a critical-thinking skill set that can only be acquired by NOT using it. I'm tired of hearing that it's inevitable. I'm tired.

KODAK Mini Digital Film Scanner The Mini Digital Film Scanner is compatible with multiple film types, so you can scan, edit, and save film negatives and slides directly onto an SD card.

We bought a Kodak Mini Digital Film Scanner. We got it up and running pretty easily

www.kodak.com/en/consumer/...

A teenage girl holds a slide up to the light to look at her mother as a baby

My younger nibbling holding up a slide of my older sister (her mother)

Boxes of labeled slide carousels in a box. An 8mm(?) canister home movie rests on top of the box

Open box full of boxes of slides and 8mm home movies

Me holding an old yellow Kodak film canister

Two black-and-white photos of my dad in the army. In the left, he’s lounging among equipment, on the phone. In the right, he’s pointing at the camera, not quite ready for his closeup

We bought a scanner to go through/digitize old family slides during a long-overdue visit back East. My sister and I opened up boxes that we haven’t looked at in decades—slides and photos of our dad’s time stationed in a mobile radio unit (?) in Sendai, Japan (1955-56) + early family trips

Reminder: we will open for new submissions at midnight August 1 and close that window at midnight August 31.

Submission guidelines: www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/submission-g...

Air travel is the absolute worst. Red eye to Philly postponed til tomorrow morning. At least I can sleep in my own bed tonight. Oh and all seems fine here in San Diego despite the tsunami advisory (knock wood).Stay safe y’all

YouTube video by Algorithmic Justice League Comply to Fly? How Airport Travelers Experience TSA’s Facial Recognition Experiment

Did you know you have the right to opt out of facial recognition scans at airports? TSA isn't respecting that right. @ajlunited.bsky.social just dropped a new report, #ComplyToFly

youtu.be/v0Q0CvVesSA?...

Conservative Org. Requests Materials for 70 Chapel Hill Courses The Oversight Project, founded by the Heritage Foundation, is using an open records request to search for terms like “DEI” and “gender identity.” Faculty say it encroaches on academic freedom.

IMPORTANT: “‘At many public universities, syllabi are considered intellectual property. As such, professors are not required to share their syllabi in response to public records requests. Check your university policy prior to complying advance.’"

www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

Dublin-based nonprofit lays off 80 central Ohio workers, cites AI and federal cuts DUBLIN, Ohio (WCMH) — A Dublin-based organization that manages the Dewey Decimal System and partners with libraries worldwide has laid off dozens of central Ohio employees, citing the rise of…

OCLC has laid 80 people off, not just because of IMLS cuts but explicitly because they're trying to use AI to do the work of library professionals.

Ready to admit AI is a huge labor problem yet?

📚

www-nbc4i-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nbc4...

Here are my opinions:

Yes, it is very hard to leave a job, and yes it requires privilege to do it. There are definitely faculty and staff at Columbia who cannot leave.

And also: it is part of the culture of academia to perform lacking privilege and options when in fact you have both.

I canceled a trip earlier this summer because it was too complicated to deal with two instances of Concur (ours and the institution I was traveling to). Not to mention it was the end of the fiscal year and the other institution put up so many barriers I just scrapped it and Zoomed instead.

Our campus adopted it about a year ago. I swear it looks like something designed in late 90s or early 2000s (same with PeopleSoft, but at least that thing is semi-functional). It's made an already overly-complex process 100x worse 😭

There are many vile (corporate) platforms that have been forced upon us in higher ed, but I have to believe Concur is the absolute worst one. As a "travel management" solution, it is its own circle of hell

For sure. I think I can get a few more nights on this one before I have to move up to a bigger one

With newfound appreciation for how my mum must have felt reading my doctoral dissertation (also in History) analyzing things from her high school and college years 😆

Reading a History MA thesis analyzing events from my own lifetime (when I was in high school) 😱

If you want to know why the coming weeks are going to have some delicate decisions for how I share my syllabi (with my students & with interested folks):

An embroidery hoop of Zs in various shades of blue and teal in a spiral pattern on starry night fabric. A mix of orange, pink, copper, and clear beads are stitched into many of the Zs

Three more weeks added to my #DHmakes sleep visualization

New Report Calls for Faculty Control in AI Decisions Today, the AAUP released a new report, Artificial Intelligence and the Academic Professions, sharing survey findings and calling for the establishment of policies in colleges and universities that pri...

Today, the AAUP released a new report, "Artificial Intelligence & Academic Professions." The report calls for policies that prioritize economic security, faculty working & student learning conditions as AI tech accelerates.

www.aaup.org/news/new-rep...
🧵1/9

I actually choked I laughed so hard at this

Good suggestion. The person in question has something of an ego, so it has to be done in a way that they’ll be receptive to. I often use humor in this situation: “Did you email me that? I must have missed that. I can’t read an email longer than 2 sentences lol winky face”

How do you gently tell someone that their emails are way too wordy and detailed, and that they’d benefit not only from an economy of words but also a tl;dr in the opening? Asking for someone struggling to parse v long emails.

Thanks for the suggestion!

I'm considering starting a group for folks in shared governance to strategize+collab about how to fight the various threats we're facing (EdTechAI, erosion of acad freedom, program deactivations, manufactured austerity, activism crackdowns, etc). Would this be of interest? Does it already exist?

Wondering whether, on unionized campuses like mine, offloading grading to the LMS/LLM could constitute faculty breach of contract? Even tho admin pushes this slop, I fear usage could be weaponized against faculty. Yet another reason I’m pushing for an ethical tech policy in my senate work next yr

Honesty there is very little to say about the Columbia settlement. The government’s complaint wasn’t about antisemitism, the payment is extortion, the government has seized and protected control over university operations, university, independence, and academic freedom are weakened everywhere.

it's never been about antisemitism

The battle is not keeping AI out of Canvas— that’s already been lost. The battle is giving individual faculty (not administrators, not campus IT, not ed tech consultants) the power to turn it off at will. That can happen through governance and advocacy.