Colin Madland 🇨🇦

Good article on why the GOP and Fox News want USAmericans to fear Canada willpresley181584.substack.com/p/the-real-r...

Why does freedom, when it involves cars, always look like congestion personified? “Invisible values are the most dangerous kind, because no one questions them. How urban streets are often discussed on social media.” - Marco Te Brömmelstroet h/t @tomflood.bsky.social @urbancyclinginstitute.org

Imagine that both the Canadian men’s and women’s hockey teams beat combined teams from the US and Russia by a score of 7-2 (or 8-3 if you’re rounding up). This is a story about the #AlbertaReferendum

As Canada awaits the Alberta separation referendum results, let’s remember how stupid this all is. Huge public money spent on a Russian & American-fuelled separation movement for an awfully-written and badly managed unbinding referendum on whether to hold a binding referendum that would be illegal.

So, hi everyone coming from @charleswlogan.bsky.social’s critical edtech starter pack!

Employers worldwide are pulling back on AI as they navigate a flood of errors and low-quality work that sap employee time, raise privacy and security risks, and drive up costs

I dunno, maybe there’s a metric in which USAmericans beat Canadians, but this for sure is not that metric. www.ekospolitics.com/wp-content/u...

Can the LLM-based AI agents that are supposed to be able to help with scientific research distinguish real work from pseudoscience, from fraud, or from long-discredited retracted starting papers? Take a guess.

Please remember these moments when we hear authorities preaching road safety to our kids or thoughts and prayers to those families who have lost someone to road violence.

Anthropic is out with new nonsense about Claude (or the collection of models called Claude) deserving moral consideration and/or be able to feel distress, so my inbox is filling up with journos asking me to comment. I've also got a day job, so here is a brief set of public comments on this: >>

No two words send AI industry advocates into fits of rage more than "stochastic parrots." The question is: Why? Why do they get so worked up over this particular critical framework time and time again? I sat down with @emilymbender.bsky.social, one of the coauthors of the original paper, to discuss

I am doing an online workshop next month for BCcampus about ethical practice and genAI tools. If you want to come hang out in a space where inevitability discourse is verboten, consider registering: bccampus.ca/events/the-f...

Ever looked at your graph and thought: this needs a more dramatic exit strategy? Make your R base plots self-destruct with style. If you must, download here: github.com/brandmaier/d... #RStats #DataVisualization #RProgramming #DataScience #OpenSource #AcademicHumor #noAI

The techbros don't want you to see this trailer. Pass it on.

There are wonderful humans in this world. They come in all sizes, patterns, colors, textures, and shapes. They have experiences that shape them, and those experiences probably don't look like the ones that shaped you. There are a billion+ ways to be a person. Be curious! Listen and see. Think!

Me after calling up PSG and Atlético Madrid for target prices and hearing '£120m' and '£150m' respectively.

If spending more on schools raises the earnings of the children who benefit, does it eventually make the whole economy richer? My new NBER paper examines this using school-finance reforms. 🧵 www.nber.org/papers/w35755

quarto-hub is really coming together, y'all! I'm so excited to share some of this with you at conf next week. Check out our upcoming collaborative wysiwyg editor working on a fully-styled Quarto 2 page:

Got my updated COVID and flu shots today because I prefer not dying and also fuck RFK jr and this whole willfully ignorant and malicious administration.

🤔

RS with your home river. Clearwater River at the confluence with Spahats Creek, just below Spahats Falls. Flows from Clearwater Lake in Wells Gray Park, BC into the North Thompson on its way to the Fraser and ultimately the Salish Sea.

Have you ever wanted to hear @cjdenial.bsky.social, @thetattooedprof.bsky.social, @liznorell.bsky.social, and me talk about the need for resisting AI in education? If so, you're in luck! On October 13th, we're doing a reprise of a session on this topic, and we're hosting it on Zoom FREE OF CHARGE.

I work at a public library. People who want to use AI seem to have no trouble doing so. People who don't want to use AI have a harder time. I crowdsourced and then finalized this document "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI" and then gave it a short URL: notoai.org Please pass along if it's useful

New online collection: critical scholarship on educational assessment 🚨 This collection brings together 15 earlier TiHE papers taking a socio-political viewpoint on assessment Guest editors: Juuso Henrik Nieminen, Jan McArthur and Tim Fawns www.tandfonline.com/journals/cth...

Nope. There is no animus. You're playing with an automated algorithm that's being assigned too many privileges with outcomes based on probability. That's like "shit I lost control of this giant bolder I was rolling down a crowded street, it must be magic."

This is set up for laughs, but it’s actually one of the best demonstrations I’ve seen of how being capable of producing convincing sounding language and understanding meaning are two completely different things. A chatbot does not understand you, it just has automated responses based on your words.

Major kudos to MIT, who just put out a report about AI on their campus that lucidly explains the threat posed by AI to cognition and the student experience, while at the same time prioritizes learning, students, and the value of education. 1/x aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/

I've been doing my "Today, in the data centers are not going to make it" bit for about a year. And, what a year.