Tag Archives: canada

href weekly | Aug13-Aug19 2023

Bits

These technological infrastructures may disproportionately harm communities by making their private and sacred knowledges legible by . Data collection for AI could lead to the commodification of this sacred knowledge for profit. https://theconversation.com/zooms-scrapped-proposal-to-mine-user-data-causes-concern-about-our-virtual-and-private-indigenous-knowledge-211577

In this study, you will be asked to rate 20 news headlines as real or fake and answer a few optional questions about your background. It should take 2-3 minutes to complete.” https://yourmist.streamlit.app/

our findings suggest that new modalities provide substantial opportunities to increase the impact and accessibility of scholars, build and empower diverse research communities, and improve the sustainability of societies. https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/of-meetings-and-members/

Datasette Cloud is the new hosting platform for the project. It enables teams to create a private collaboration space, upload and share data securely with each other, and then selectively publish that data to the world. https://www.datasette.cloud/blog/2023/welcome/

the site is a one-man battle against entropy, constantly battling domain registrars, anti-scraping systems, copyright enforcement, easily spooked advertisers, and global financial system payment rails designed to obstruct Russian citizens. https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mysterious-guerrilla-archivist-of-the-internet/

FediFetcher is a tool for Mastodon that automatically fetches missing replies and posts from other fediverse instances, and adds them to your own Mastodon instance. https://blog.thms.uk/fedifetcher

combine.social polls your home timeline and notifications and fetches replies to all posts as well as all recent messages by any user who shows up in your notifications (e.g. likes, boosts or follows).

Music & Sound

harmonai.org tools

The new Rhodes MK8 is brilliant .. but the $$ is dizzying .. https://rhodesmusic.com/product/rhodes-mk8/?i4hA-1vET=bfDd-dyhq&bfDd-dyhq=vXx7-ybKl&j6ze-8Vlt=zgqv-XOaX&oK6Y-asRb=HUiz-sgeB&jG7J-ExmY=iQzh-TJM5&YwO3-BFJw=eCWS-zAkw&xs4p-XS62=W0P1-nCKw&W0P1-nCKw=EVri-vfvu&lbEE-ArPs=CG2D-gpja

“The music sounds old, but in the way a landscape can feel old; in the same way that a landscape promises it will renew itself, the music points to the future.” https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/americana-indigenous-roots-robbie-robertson/

Art

Amazing awards https://droneawards.photo/gallery

Politics & Economics

the structure of the industry colliding with the socioeconomic reality of defaulting debtors basically ensures that it will be a miserable place populated by miserable people who will project leveraged amounts of misery into the outside world in the hopes of collecting a tiny sliver of defaulted debts. https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/the-waste-stream-of-consumer-finance/

Great chat between @blindboyboatclub & Manchán Magan .. “mythology is the fruiting body of the human unconscious” https://play.acast.com/s/blindboy/mythology-rewilding-forests-and-indigenous-knowledge-with-ma

There is no province in where workers can afford an apartment at minimum wage. https://monitormag.ca/reports/cant-afford-the-rent/

“if you don’t do the impossible, we’re going to wind up with the unthinkable ..” https://unevenearth.org/2019/10/bookchin_doing_the_impossible/

The burden of student threatens to exacerbate existing income and wealth inequality in American society, as these borrowers have to choose between paying off the cost of their own education and saving for their own children’s college expenses. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/business/generation-x-retirement-student-loan-debt.html

“People change unconsciously before they change consciously. They begin to float dreams—daydreams are dangerous. Daydreams are pieces of imagination, they are bits of poetry. They are the balloons that fly up in history.” https://unevenearth.org/2019/10/bookchin_doing_the_impossible/

represent the best of our efforts to take care of one another. Their ongoing existence is a reminder that—not just in some far-off future, but even today—other ways of being are possible. https://popula.com/2023/08/07/are-libraries-the-future-of-media/

came before publishers. We came before copyright. But publishers now think of libraries as customer service departments for their database products. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/13/business/media/internet-archive-emergency-lending-library.html

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-wildfire-season-worst-ever-more-to-come-1.6934284

promoting social connection is key to reducing the harmful effects of #climatechange including its effect on . Other studies also show that the more connected we are, the better we will be able to discuss and respond to climate change. https://theconversation.com/it-is-not-just-heat-waves-climate-change-is-also-a-crisis-of-disconnection-210594

Whatever you may think of individual celebrities—I certainly admire a few—the phenomenon of celebrity is a grave social ill https://longreads.com/2023/08/17/lorne-michaels-saturday-night-live/

We are not convinced by the intertwined educational and data futures that investors are creating, as it is a reductionist view of the purposes of education, focusing on efficiency gains and learning as an individual activity that is primarily carried out for economic purposes. https://educationdatafutures.digitalfuturescommission.org.uk/essays/competing-interests-in-education-data/investigation-financial-power-brokers-edtech

href weekly | July16-July22 2023

Bits

Forest Eye combines satellite imagery, remote sensing, and government data to detect logging and road-building in the most rare and at-risk old growth forests. https://stand.earth/forest-eye/

Responsible : a guide for deliberation .. To meet the challenges associated with accountability in development, many public institutions, private bodies & international organizations have published charters of practice, declarations of principles & recommendations in this respect. They have shown convergence around key principles – however, principles are sometimes abstract and are not always defined in the same way around the world. https://www.docdroid.com/A2YxvQY/responsible-artficial-intelligence-a-guide-for-deliberation-pdf

Government of Algorithmic Impact Assessment tool https://www.canada.ca/en/government/system/digital-government/digital-government-innovations/responsible-use-ai/algorithmic-impact-assessment.html

Flashpoint Archive is a community effort to preserve videogames and animations from the web https://ooooooooo.ooo/static/browse/?search=

web app allowing you to create different patterns from a collection of 19th century ornamental granite tile illustrations https://www.deepakg.com/bringing-19th-century-ornamental-tile-illustrations-into-a-21st-century-web-app

What does the look like if we decide to erase everything we’ve done since the dot-com crash? What kinds of communities can we build with the people who’ve come online since then? It’s certainly possible — even delightful — to teach them the old ways. But more and more, I think I don’t want an intermediated experience; I’m not interested in your algorithm – I’ve loved online because there are people there. https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/22/23803538/google-facebook-myspace-internet-culture-web-dot-com-crash

Sound & Music

the ersatz folk songs belted out by young right-wingers in 1960s in a desperate attempt to copy the folk revival https://canada.unofficialbird.com/HeerJeet/status/1681375098907787264#m

Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville (The New Yorker) https://archive.li/g9MPE

Photos

Dolly Parton Pinball (1979) at https://drinkpropeller.ca/pages/propeller-arcade

My daughter turned 19 on July 19. https://www.flickr.com/photos/grantpotter/7544947164/in/photostream/

Comics

A great panel from the excellent https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/ducks/

Politics & Economics

In Metro Vancouver alone, more than 35 tons of good, edible food ends up in landfill every day. https://macleans.ca/longforms/food-banks-affordability-inflation-groceries/

Rebellious birds make nestsout of anti-bird pins https://www.naturalis.nl/en/about-us/media/press-releases/rebellious-birds-make-nests-out-of-anti-bird-pins