Tag Archives: highered

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 | June11-June17 2023

Bits

Audiocraft is a PyTorch library for deep learning research on audio generation. At the moment, it contains the code for MusicGen, a state-of-the-art controllable text-to-music model. https://huggingface.co/spaces/facebook/MusicGen

This Blog Now Powered By A.I. Levine https://cogdogblog.com/2023/06/powered-by-a-i-levine/

– reclaiming human scale https://ammienoot.com/brain-fluff/reclaimopen-reclaiming-human-scale/

20,000+ mods from over 7,000 subreddits with more than 2 billion collective readers” https://web.archive.org/web/20230612032340/https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplete_and_growing_list_of_participating/

Capcom rolling out their 40th anniversary with some browser emulation https://captown.capcom.com/en/retro_games

Why Is Everyone Watching TV With the Subtitles On? https://archive.is/CgLj3

“All I did was go to a website that is designed to facilitate cheating and set up a kind of camera to see who visited it.” .. a instructor, no less .. https://dailynous.com/2023/05/25/am-i-the-unethical-one-a-philosophy-professor-his-cheating-students/

One day, the entirety of our lives will be at our backs and the what-if of it all will still haunt me ..” https://www.newyorker.com/culture/screening-room/an-ai-generated-film-depicts-human-loneliness-in-thank-you-for-not-answering

The kind of change we need isn’t going to happen on an app. https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/in-1970-alvin-toffler-predicted-the

myth: you need to be original
myth: you need to be an expert
myth: posts need to be 100% correct
myth: writing boring posts is bad
myth: you need to explain every concept
myth: page views matter
myth: more material is always better
myth: everyone should blog
https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/06/05/some-blogging-myths/

if people prefer corporations as their digital landlords, this is fine, but they should be made aware of the consequences and the repercussions of this decision. We should all be allowed to make this decision on an informed basis, just like with our real, physical living spaces”. https://publicspaces.net/2023/03/29/framasoft-a-non-profit-committed-to-popular-education-around-digital-sovereignty/

A federated alternative https://lemmy.ca/instances

The dawn of large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4, Facebook’s LLaMA, and all sorts of massive models need to be trained on human text. is essentially a gigantic website full of highly organized, natural human interactions and makes for good training data. https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5yykm/the-reddit-protest-is-a-battle-for-the-soul-of-the-human-internet

ELIZA (1966) chats with ChatGPT (2023) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yZRNt25Wdo

Vibes-based search is very bad for research in situations where factual accuracy is important (legal briefs, journalism), but it’s not an entirely useless function.” https://maxread.substack.com/p/i-cannot-believe-the-shit-that-morons

We’ll still see each other from time to time, and maybe if you can Snap out of your midlife crisis one day we’ll get back together.” https://hackaday.com/2023/05/22/dear-ubuntu/

We need to move away from focusing on red herrings like AI’s potential “sentience” to covering how is further concentrating wealth and power. https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/media-coverage-chatgpt.php

is not magic
are not always right
The we use to train algorithms matters
AI comes with ethical issues like
https://algorithmliteracy.org/

Sound & Music

My God, It’s Full of Oscillators https://www.giorgiosancristoforo.net/softwares/

Great new guides https://vcvrack.com/Free

Winamp in your browser https://webamp.org/

Game Synth: Draw sounds synchronized with video playback https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeHqLyKdndE

We Hold This Myth To Be Potential https://www.ubu.com/sound/cage_ra.html .. When John Cage met Sun Ra – the avant-garde concert of the century https://thevinylfactory.com/features/when-john-cage-met-sun-ra-the-avant-garde-concert-of-the-century/

Wonky: The beat that captivated Questlove was made by the legendary James Dewitt Yancey, better known as J Dilla. Although he only lived to 32 and never had a mainstream hit, he is now considered one of the most influential producers in hip hop and popular music. https://pudding.cool/2023/06/groove/

The point is that these four minutes and four seconds have been all about you—you can come back here any time that you need. Now, go pick up your kids. And don’t forget karate classes at seven and gymnastics in the morning. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-note-for-divorced-dads-on-keith-jarretts-bordeaux-concert-live-part-iii

Politics & Economics

The series tells the story of why the 1970s book “The Limits to Growth” was, after positive initial reception, fought and since ignored. https://tippingpoint-podcast.com/the-problematique-part-1/

A group of 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research, and designed search tools for it.” https://aeon.co/essays/the-1970s-librarians-who-revolutionised-the-challenge-of-search

“New data from the University of Maryland (UMD), now available on Global Forest Watch (GFW), provides a more detailed view of how fires are driving tree cover loss across the globe.” https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/global/

Where does the library go from here? Because it’s clear that being “the last public space” isn’t a privilege. It’s a sign that something has gone terribly wrong.” https://thewalrus.ca/future-of-libraries/

moving to non-market housing would pose an enormous challenge to both private property developers, who profit from financialized housing, and the banks, who profit from all this debt. But it’s the only way to break the cycle of borrowing and that has created this dangerous overhang of debt for Canadians.” https://rabble.ca/economy/house-of-cards-interest-rates-household-debt-and-the-housing-crisis/

The Solutions Are Already Here – Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below https://archive.org/details/TheSolutionsareAlreadyHere/page/n3/mode/2up