“It’s one part of a very cruel puzzle.”
Inhumane prison hulks return from Australia’s past to its present.
Outstanding work from The Continent. Its arrival is the most welcome message I get each week.
I rewatched V for Vendetta for the first time since it was in cinemas. I wondered “what did old mate Roger Ebert’s make of it”. Not quite what I was expecting.
Technical and lengthy but super-interesting:
The point here is that the artificial intelligentsia is dragging us into an archaic future where intelligence is quantified, fixed, and ranked, and smartness is fetishized. We would do well to remember that IQ is, above all, a eugenic concept, concocted to sort winners from losers and to justify the rules of the game. Eugenics … in the 21st century … among those who fancy themselves futurists?
This was mooted but the detail seems even worse than feared. It’s not really about DEI per se - it’s really about any research that recognises any health inequalities at all.
NIH to terminate hundreds of active research grants - Nature
"What’s the Matter with Abundance?" Malcolm Harris' worthwhile critique of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's "Abundance"
Cutaway view of a toroidal colony, by Rick Guidice. Source: NASA Ames Research CenterAbundance is the prefab, catch-all alternative to these forms of scarcity-thinking on “both the socialist left and the populist authoritarian right.” Large increases in material output, we are assured, can save liberalism from the civilizational choice between socialism and barbarism. I disagree; refusing to be forthright about society’s structural antagonisms opens the door to demagogues who peddle false conflicts that still ring truer than the liberals’ false peace.
The Abundance authors are hesitant to enumerate the tradeoffs their agenda will require. Prompted by the work of degrowth advocate Jason Hickel, they consider whether we should shut off or scale down destructive sectors of production, such as military investment, meat and dairy production, advertising, and fast fashion. “There is some appeal to this,” they write. “All of us can identify some aspect of the global production system that seems wasteful, unnecessary, or harmful. The problem is that few of us identify the same aspects of the global production system.” Hamburgers, they inform us, are popular in America. As is advertising, I suppose, insofar as we see a lot of it. But why can’t decent liberals like Klein and Thompson bring themselves to interrogate America’s trillion-dollar defense budget? It can’t just be an issue of popularity; after all, there’s nothing Americans like better than living in single-family homes, and the authors aren’t too afraid to call for the return of boarding houses. This country’s bombs don’t merely “seem” wasteful, unnecessary, or harmful. And disarmament is not scarcity—on the contrary.
The two-lane road to hell is paved with good intentions: why an all-or-none approach to generative AI, integrity, and assessment is insupportable
Unlimited genAI use (Lane 2/All), if applied to students in their early stages of higher education, is akin to handing a teenager the keys to a high-powered sports car and saying ‘have fun’. This approach ignores the fundamental need to educate students to build skills incrementally within sensible limits.
A helpful, considered article by Guy Curtis on the limitations of the two-lanes for AI use and higher ed assessment heuristic.
The $1m cactus heist that led to a smuggler's downfall
Reaching out of nooks in the cracked crust along the desert’s coast, there lie thousands of Copiapoa cacti. A cactus group made up of more than 30 species, Copiapoa are found only in Chile. They grow a mere centimetre each year in scorching, breathtaking desert conditions by absorbing the local evening fog, known as camanchaca.
These rare, aubergine-shaped succulents exemplify life’s ability to adapt to extremes – one of the traits that has made them highly sought after by plant collectors.
They’ve also just been at the heart of a landmark trial over an international cactus heist that might revolutionise how biodiversity crimes are dealt with the world over.
Operation Atacama: The $1m cactus heist that led to a smuggler’s downfall - BBC
Best sentence I’ve read in a while, courtesy of A S Hamrah:
British movies these days—from good ones like The Old Oak to OK ones like Bird to wretched ones like Saltburn—present British people as ruthlessly mean to each other, petty, conniving, classist, vulgar shits who add “innit?” at the end of sentences that aren’t questions but insults.
Lists colonise the mind and impoverish the imagination.
Elena Gorfinkel’s clarion “Against Lists” remains critically relevant.
Trump administration demands Columbia University:
- put an outside Chair in charge of Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
- adopt a new definition of antisemitism
- reform admissions
- ban masks
- overhaul student discipline
- comply immediately or risk funding.
U.S. researchers consider
This is a generous gesture but PACA is the heartland of the French far right, and the academy is a perpetual whipping boy for politicians. Anyone who moved would face another set of difficulties.
General practice use of A.I. scribes is already much more widespread than people realise
Legal expert warns patients' medical data at risk as GPs adopt AI scribes - ABC
Excellent points in this article. I’ve directly observed some cavalier attitudes about the use of A.I. scribes, and consent processes aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. I’ve also seen this issue dismissed as “table stakes” in a pollyannaish rush towards imaginary uses for patient recall and enhanced practice profitability.
Health data is amongst the most sensitive data there is. Data governance and data security are major issues with these apps. We shouldn’t be forced into using scribes based on the decisions of practice owners or individual GPs.