We crave assurance that intimacy can survive independent of convenience. We dream of friendship that is interminable, impervious to the passage of time or changes in geography or individual growth.
Scholarly communication infrastructure has been beyond its breaking point for a while. Generative pre-trained transformers look increasingly like an epistemological omnicidal weapon that we've failed to contain.
Two main risks arise from the increasingly common use of GPT to (mass-)produce fake, scientific publications. First, the abundance of fabricated “studies” seeping into all areas of the research infrastructure threatens to overwhelm the scholarly communication system and jeopardize the integrity of the scientific record. A second risk lies in the increased possibility that convincingly scientific-looking content was in fact deceitfully created with AI tools and is also optimized to be retrieved by publicly available academic search engines, particularly Google Scholar.
Worryingly it is free tools like Google Scholar, and fields like environmental and health sciences that have obvious policy and practice relevance, that seem particularly vulnerable.
A wistful piece of writing. We’re each wealthier than kings of the past but we remain a kind of peasantry in the thrall of distant plutocrats. Unmoored without a sense of place. Indentured to the precarity machine of credit and capitalism.
NaNoWriMo Organizers Said It Was Classist and Ableist to Condemn AI. All Hell Broke Loose
But last Friday, the 25-year-old nonprofit, known as NaNoWriMo for short, shocked many in the writing community when it published a controversial statement detailing its position on AI. In it, NaNoWriMo asserted that the “categorical condemnation” of artificial intelligence has “classist and ableist undertones.”
NaNoWriMo Organizers Said It Was Classist and Ableist to Condemn AI. All Hell Broke Loose - Wired, via @hrb@wandering.shop
Google Scholar is more busted than I thought. Pay for citations schemes exist and may be more widespread than we realise.
A fascinating long read about the origins of Gaia theory, the early influence of systems theory, and NASA and JPL’s sexist culture in the ’60s.
A cool flame: how Gaia theory was born out of a secret love affair
“the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled against the long-running digital archive, upholding an earlier ruling in Hachette v. Internet Archive that found that one of the Internet Archive’s book digitization projects violated copyright law.”
The Internet Archive Loses Its Appeal of a Major Copyright Case wired.com
I tried to explain this t-shirt to my ten year old niece and she looked at me so pityingly, as if she thought i was suffering a major mental impairment.
Zuckerberg is clearly preparing for a Trump Presidency:
Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke - The Verge
“The lost Library of Alexandria could have fit onto the microSD card in my Nintendo Switch, and yet the cutting edge of technology is a handheld telephone that spews lies as a fun little bonus feature.”
Over the last five years the average open access article processing charge has gone up by 26% to AUD $4,945.
#research #openaccess
A sewage crisis in San Diego County reveals the unpolluted truth about the U.S.-Mexico border
Parts of NAFTA anticipated this dynamic; the agreement included a provision to set aside $100 million a year for environmental infrastructure along the border. As time went on, though, Congress lost its appetite for funding public health upgrades in Mexican cities. How about building a wall and making Mexico pay for it?
That’s the kind of solution that appeals to the American political psyche, but it suffers from a basic misunderstanding. You can draw the border as a line on a map, but you still have to deal with the world on the other side. A sewage crisis in Mexico can’t be solved with pipes in California any more than a migration crisis that spans the hemisphere can be solved with a wall across Texas and Arizona.