Nanna B Thylstrup

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers | RGS Journal | Wiley Online Library Svamitva drone survey in Rajasthan. Source: Author.

Such a nice paper on feature extraction as a project of perception - drone enclosures in digital India. “Feature extraction is an entirely speculative endeavour” rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Hey Colossal - spend some of your money on saving this real bird!

Author holding copy of book

Page with birds on left, text on right

Double page spread with a photo of diorama

Chapter 3 Cursed treasures on left, lion on right

It’s real!!
I just got my first copy of Ghosts Behind Glass and it is beautiful. You all really need to order your copies. You will not regret it. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Lotta “A.I. bubble” talk this week — but this time, it’s coming from the folks inventing it, selling it, buying it and financing it. 👀

@cnbc.com @fortune.com @axios.com
fortune.com/2025/10/03/s...

✨Deeply honoured to deliver this year's Annual Digital Lecture at The National Archives! Drawing on our @erc.europa.eu Data Loss project, I'll explore how preservation creates loss in the digital age and what that means for the politics of archives. Nov 20 6pm at Senate House, London. Do join us!

Poll: Public Confidence in Higher Ed Growing Despite the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on colleges and universities, American confidence in higher education is growing.

public goods

"47% have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher ed institutions, w a net positive rating of 33—up 13 points since 2023. more confidence in higher ed than in the police (44%), the medical system (38%)+large tech companies (25%)"

www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

To the surprise of no-one, #Albania 's supposed #AI Minister is revealed as a human actress on green screen... the whole thing being a smokescreen for some dubious government procurement dealings.

“We are not working on building an AI agent. We are working to protect Signal from the invasion of AI agents that threaten privacy and that are being implemented in irresponsible ways”

Can't believe I missed an Ombudsman report with that title! Media release: www.ombudsman.gov.au/__data/asset... (PDF)

Remarkable document: hundreds of European politicians are calling to mobilize European resources to protect the Sumud aid flotilla as it faces escalating attacks on its way to Gaza.

In other words: European politicians are trying to protect humanitarian volunteers *from Israel.*

Things that depend on the UN quietly doing work, #42:
The internet

From undersea cables to satellite radio links to the entire ITU (including the X.509 standard that's part of security for most popular websites), the UN has put in place pieces we would struggle to manage without. Really struggle.

Excited to co-host this seminar! Join us Oct 6 as Professor @daniel-solove.bsky.social explores and explains privacy rights in the age of AI. In-person @ucph.bsky.social or hybrid. Co-organized with Mette Birkedal Bruun/CoE PRIVACY & @tgammeltoft.bsky.social/@mobileucph.bsky.social! @erc.europa.eu

Huzzaah and congratulations Ben! Such a wonderful project- looking forward to the years to come

In rural Georgia, residents are waking up to the massive impacts that "hyperscale" data centre projects will have on local habitats, water and air quality -- and starting to push back.
buff.ly/7PyHWjc

Data dispossession

♥️

“Pirate Wires”—a media project of Peter Thiel ally Mike Solana—has been circling Greenland & Guantanamo like a hawk. Its latest is by Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril, which is backed by Founders Fund.

Solana is a VP at Founders Fund—started by Thiel & Ken Howery (now ambassador to Denmark). 1/

Certainly, Pasteur will have been well aware of the risk-laden use of inoc- ulation by smallpox itself to produce immunity. When he addressed the prob- lem, he mentioned Jenner, but one can only infer that probably he had in mind Jenner’s use of the milder form of pox that affl icted cows to protect against the more virulent smallpox. Having succeeded with chicken cholera, he turned his energies to anthrax (in the literature of the time also described as “splenic fever”). This disease was destroying 25% to 30% of sheep and cat- tle across much of Europe. To attenuate this organism was no simple matter. In its spore form anthrax retained virulence for years and could not be cultured. However, the organism also exists in an active form of rods or fi laments. Pasteur found a way around the diffi culty with spores by cultur- ing the rods or fi laments of the organism before they could form spores. Again a problem arose, in that injecting rod forms into animals apparently killed them, although in the dead carcasses no organisms could be found. Once more Pasteur undertook the attenuation of virulence by exposure of the rods to oxygen at the 42/43 degree centigrade temperature range. In 1880 he announced that he had produced a vaccine. Although triumphant, he was still not without the harassment of critics. Hippolyte Rossignol, editor of the Veterinary Press, cuttingly greeted the result of “the Pontiff, the learned Mounsier Pasteur” as “microbiolatry.” Thus challenged by skeptics, Pasteur devised a controlled experiment. He vaccinated a number of sheep, left the controls unvaccinated, and put them out to graze in a small anthrax-infected enclosure. Many skeptics and local luminaries came to see the outcome, which demonstrated complete effi cacy of the vaccine.

Always fascinating to read about replication before the 20th century.

Here it's Pasteur doing a live demonstration of the efficacy of his animal anthrax vaccine (the third vaccine ever developed).

YouTube video by BBC Archive 1970: WENDY CARLOS and her MOOG SYNTHESISER | Music Now | Retro Tech | BBC Archive

going down a bit of a YouTube rabbit hole this morning, and I've somehow never come across this clip of Wendy Carlos—the first trans Grammy winner all the way back in 1970!—giving the all-time greatest lecture about what a synthesizer is and how it works.

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

That's how I feel about defenders of "AI literacy" in the classroom; you've added additional tasks for your students to perform critical evaluation of tools that nobody asked for (except administrators and LLM salesmen).

5/5

M365 Copilot fails to up productivity in UK government trial : AI tech shows promise writing emails or summarizing meetings. Don't bother with anything more complex

UK government report based on internal civil service trial finds Copilot doesn’t increase productivity, and indeed makes Excel take longer and with more errors, and requires Powerpoint users to have ‘corrective action’ applied to their outputs. www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/m...

Ella Klik offers a haunting paper on interplanetary data storage + post-finitude. Not loss, but indefinite deferral. Data centers on the moon, archives in orbit. #StorageStudies #4S2025

Sofia Haytin presents her important ongoing work on Israeli user migration from Twitter to Bluesky as a “no-politics” platform where politics is only deferred. Escapist, wholesome, but avoidance is never neutral. #PlatformMigration #4S2025

Bono Olgado shares his beautiful work on Data Mortis: after database migration, some data disappears, other fragments persist. A fragile afterlife of information and a new political economy of data expertise in human rights. #databasing #Archiving #STS #4S2025

Melissa Vincent presents her amazing work on data loss grief: disenfranchised mourning in digital capitalism. Anticipatory grief, infrastructural grief. A neo-emotion for our times. #DataLossGrief #4S2025

@adamegriff.bsky.social offers a beautiful mediation of
LiveJournal as digital archaeology. Rehydration methods, ethical refusals, the remains of usernames and spam. Abandoned platforms. #DigitalArchaeology #4S2025

First of, @maxy.bsky.social discusses
cultural fragility and complicity. Easy to dismiss “small” losses—until we remember Beowulf and Bach nearly vanished. Data loss as corporate complicity, malice, or neglect? #Archiving #4S2025

It's 10.40pm here in Copenhagen and we've just entered the third session of this panel series on data loss at #4S2025! Here's are some ongoing reflections on the amazing papers in the series! #STS #DataLoss

Echoing (!) @ktmac.bsky.social — very glad to be bringing together three panels tomorrow at #4S2025 on #dataloss. We will be tracing how erasure, disappearance, and dispossession work as privative and constitutive forces and modes of resistance in digital systems. Please join us online or in-room!