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Clare Kelly

@clarekelly.bsky.social
2.3K followers 1.2K following 162 posts

Cognitive neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin. Uses neuroimaging to study 🧠 development. Increasingly teaching, thinking, & advocating on the climate & ecological crisis 🌍

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Reposted by Clare Kelly
Jed Brown @jedbrown.org · 4h
If you are an academic who uses arXiv, please consider signing this. **Give Authors Control: Let Us Decide If AI Bots Can Read Our arXiv Papers** math.mit.edu/~elmos/petit...
Currently, authors posting to arXiv have no control over whether bots scrape their full-text PDFs and LaTeX source files.

We are calling on arXiv to implement a simple permission toggle during submission, allowing authors to decide what automated scrapers can access:

Full Access: Bots can read and scrape the full text and source files.

Metadata Only: Bots are restricted to the Title, Abstract, and Citation metadata.

Open science for human readers should not mean mandatory, unconsented data harvesting by commercial entities. Advancing scientific knowledge demands immense time, resources, and intellectual rigor — we deserve a say in whether our original work is fed into massive, opaque training sets.
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 16/12/2025
I wrote this brief talk on why “augmenting diversity” with LLMs is empirically unsubstantiable, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful and a nice surprise to see the organisers have made it public synthetic-data-workshop.github.io/papers/13.pdf
title: Cheap science, real harm: the cost of replacing human
participation with synthetic data

author: Abeba Birhane

abstract: Driven by the goals of augmenting diversity, increasing speed, reducing cost, the
use of synthetic data as a replacement for human participants is gaining traction
in AI research and product development. This talk critically examines the claim
that synthetic data can “augment diversity,” arguing that this notion is empirically
unsubstantiated, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful. While speed and
cost-efficiency may be achievable, they often come at the expense of rigour, insight,
and robust science. Drawing on research from dataset audits, model evaluations,
Black feminist scholarship, and complexity science, I argue that replacing human
participants with synthetic data risks producing both real-world and epistemic
harms at worst and superficial knowledge and cheap science at best
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Jed Brown @jedbrown.org · 04/10/2026
He thinks it represents thoughts of people (as of a real focus group) extended to current topics, not merely linguistically plausible text. And he's making national policy decisions without awareness of his delusions. Media should report it as bureaucratic misconduct and question fitness to serve.
Narayan has used AI-generated synthetic focus groups provided by a private company, particularly while he was a backbench MP, to test public opinion on AI and other issues. The model is trained on data from real-life focus groups.

“They have a chatbot interface, and you can just say, ‘I want to try and do a speech about this; here is a broad-brush draft of my speech. What do you think, can you do some message testing with your synthetic focus group?’

"You might not get as much real-time understanding because there's a lag between when they did the real focus group, but segmentation and views don't change that much, so on broad-brush questions like how should I think about AI, doing static focus groups with that is very useful.
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Clare Kelly @clarekelly.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Sick to the back teeth of people in academia passing papers, reports, emails etc. through an LLM, ostensibly to improve readability or whatever but actually just transforming human writing into repulsive, staccato, marketing-speak that has a veneer of validty but little-to-no actual fucking meaning
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Clare Kelly @clarekelly.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Sick to the back teeth of people in academia passing papers, reports, emails etc. through an LLM, ostensibly to improve readability or whatever but actually just transforming human writing into repulsive, staccato, marketing-speak that has a veneer of validty but little-to-no actual fucking meaning
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IrishCycle.com @irishcycle.com · 01/10/2026
Ireland's first retrofitted Dutch-style roundabout opens in busy Dublin area irishcycle.com/2026/09/25/i...
irishcycle.com
Ireland’s first retrofitted Dutch-style roundabout opens in busy Dublin area
It’s not the first Dutch-style roundabout in Ireland, but a roundabout on Templeville Road in Dublin is the first Dutch-like design to be retrofitted at an existing busy roundabout. The round…
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Loki @lokideburca.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I've been trying to word my feelings between fascism and AI and this just sums it up beautifully, better than I could ever word it.
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Brian Caulfield @briancaulfield.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The gaping hole in Colm McCarthys article in the Business Post today is this "The only available evaluation of MetroLink’s costs and benefits was released as part of the TII’s preliminary assessment in 2022."..... A business case was published last week..... www.businesspost.ie/analysis-opi...
businesspost.ie
Colm McCarthy: There’s a gaping hole in the case for the €16bn MetroLink
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Elaine McGoff @elainemcgoff.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
On World Rivers Day let's remember the importance of rivers for our own wellbeing. I measure out the seasons in river swims. It gifts me resilience for my autumn, resolve for my winter, hope for my spring and pure joy for my summer. Our waters are life, let's protect them. #WorldRiversDay
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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
The Department for Education's AI tutoring initiative is getting pounded with criticism from both sides. Some critics have launched a call to pause this initiative docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
docs.google.com
OPEN LETTER: PAUSE THE NATIONAL ROLLOUT OF AI-MEDIATED TUTORING IN ENGLAND’S SCHOOLS
OPEN LETTER To the Rt Hon Andy Burnham MP, Prime Minister, and the Rt Hon Lucy Powell MP, Secretary of State for Education The Department for Education has announced plans to develop, what it calls, “...
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Trinity News @trinitynews.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Ireland’s shame: The game that should have been stopped Israel have just equalised against Austria. The scorer, Sayed Abu Farchi, runs to the corner to celebrate. With a gleeful smile on his face, he picks up the corner flag, takes aim and fires, before simulating the recoil of a gun.  Just two…
trinitynews.ie
Ireland’s shame: The game that should have been stopped
Israel have just equalised against Austria. The scorer, Sayed Abu Farchi, runs to the corner to celebrate. With a gleeful smile on his face, he picks up the corner flag, takes aim and fires, before simulating the recoil of a gun.  Just two months ago, experienced goalkeeper Saleem Al-Ashqar was cycling in the Gaza Strip. He was shot in the chest by a member of the Israeli Defense Forces and bled to death. 
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Tom Flood @tomflood.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
This event last night was unbelievable. Truly can’t believe how many people came out and just how passionate and energized people are here. Dublin and the people here are officially the greatest.
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Simon McGarr @tupped.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Money from foreign students (who pay multiples of the domestic and EU fees) is a critical source keeping Irish colleges afloat. The Minister for Higher Education’s complaint is another thinly veiled effort to address the synthetic bot army of X, and their demands to see fewer brown or black people
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 25/09/2026
Climate defiance are legends. Amazon are a fossil fuel company. Why are do they get climate week invites??
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 24/09/2026
This piece touches on an extremely important and terrible trend: AI-false-balance among polite centre-left politicians. Every critique HAS to begin with something like "AI is here to stay. With the right rules, it can be a force for good. But........." www.techpolicy.press/the-life-and...
Information integrity is one of seven critical issues in the Preliminary Report of the UN’s Independent Scientific Panel on AI released in July at the Global Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence. It warns that AI can erode shared reality and civic participation through “epistemic erosion,” the gradual wearing away of society’s ability to distinguish truth from falsehood. Opening the Dialogue, the UN’s secretary-general, António Guterres, tied that erosion directly to the viral and exponential nature of advanced data driven technologies: “A machine-enabled lie can now persuade as effectively as the truth, and authentic evidence can be dismissed as fake.”“A society that cannot agree on what is real cannot defend itself,” Guterres said.

And yet he did not reference the threat of AI to amplify inequality, unless governed effectively. Instead, Guterres casts AI as “the great equaliser of the 21st century ” achievable by developing countries on the technology fast-track through safe systems that honor human rights, with real transparency about labor and planetary impacts. Getting this right, he said, is “at the heart of our common future.”

Yet the Panel’s Report, subtitled as an “evidence-based assessment of the opportunities, risks and impacts of AI” provides no evidence that AI will be a ‘great equaliser’. On the contrary, despite its curious ‘balancing’ of every claim with a counter claim, the heavily referenced report actually demonstrates far more evidence of the negative consequences of AI, while doing very little to support claims that AI will help in the achievement of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Regardless, this did not stop the ‘great equaliser’ mantra from being repeated by numerous member states and heads of multilateral bodies who subsequently addressed the forum.

In fact the report highlights the lack of — and unevenness of — evidence, including on some of the big ticket items: productivity gains, labor market effects, value-chain impacts, and …
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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 23/12/2025
As a starting point I think the CEO of every company offering chatbots should be *personally* liable for all the text their chatbots produce. as though it was a direct conversation with them
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Paris Marx @parismarx.com · 24/09/2026
Just when I think I can’t hate OpenAI and Sam Altman any more, new details come out about how ChatGPT helped a shooter plan one of the worst mass shootings in Canadian history in Tumbler Ridge, BC. OpenAI made an explicit decision not to report the user to authorities.
motherjones.com
ChatGPT helped the Tumbler Ridge school shooter focus on guns, tactics, and terror, our investigation reveals
OpenAI’s chatbot fed the shooter’s violent fantasies and planning up to the massacre.
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 24/09/2026
over the past few weeks several AI evaluation/cybersecurity experts have explained how what's happening is a result of human incompetence rather than "AI going rogue". I'm begging the media to show a shred of journalistic integrity and stop parroting what altman or amodei say
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Tony - Pod Guy - Groves @tonygroves.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Thank you, US multinationals, for without you we would live in an unregulated tech dystopia that is algorithmically juicing the far right.
We have US multinationals to thank for the weakness of the far right in Ireland
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Dr Matt Winning @mattywin.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Looking forward to reading this
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Imbibe Coffee Roasters @imbibecoffee.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Patrick Collison is the third highest contributor (Sergey Brin of Google is first), of a campaign to stop a 5% wealth tax on billionaires in California. That he's put $22M into it shows the man really should be paying more tax. Can we perhaps give him to the UK. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...
giftarticle.ft.com
Nobel economists throw support behind California billionaire tax
Progressive laureates say November ballot measure could ‘start reining in the power’ of ultra-wealthy
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Amy Westervelt @amywestervelt.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I am very tired of people saying “inevitable” about problems that are entirely avoidable. drilled.ghost.io/the-unbearab...
drilled.ghost.io
The Unbearable Bleakness of "Inevitability"
My entire adult life people who are supposedly sensible have been telling me some catastrophe or another is “inevitable.” Nuclear war, climate change, and now the AI takeover. Apparently the “end of r...
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Lydia Mulvey @lydiamulvey.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
this coming on the same day that google is fined €403m over GDPR breaches is a real kick in the face i can tell you that much the irish govt is suckling at the teat of big tech and they are HOOKED
Screenshot from the Irish Times website with the headline and sub reading: "Irish data protection watchdog fines Google €403m over GDPR breaches. Users may have been ‘unaware’ that location data was being used to ‘influence them with ads’."
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 21/09/2026
"In a leaked document, the Irish Presidency proposes to EU Member States that the interest of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and SpaceX to make profits should take precedence over the fundamental right to data protection" noyb.eu/en/ai-eu-mem...
noyb.eu
AI: EU Member States plan “digital expropriation” of Europeans in the interest of AI companies
In a leaked document, the Irish Presidency proposes to EU Member States that the interest of AI companies to make profits should take precedence over the fundamental rights of Europeans.
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Nick Sousanis @nsousanis.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Here’s the thing, I’m looking at all the books I have - too many and yet never enough - and all of them are an opportunity to commune with another human across time & space, to know their thoughts and wrestle with our own. Why would we trade this away in the name of efficiency? Of product?
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Dr. Genevieve Guenther (she/they) @doctorvive.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
A mixed newsletter post this time! I list where I'll be over NYC Climate Week but also meditate on my identification with MLK's confession: "Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony." 😊 *link in next post*
NY Climate Week has begun! Yesterday I went to a Center for Earth Ethics event entitled "The Immorality of Climate Inaction," with speakers including the fierce and brilliant Elizabeth Yeampierre, ED of UPROSE, the absolutely ancient and majestic Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, the incandescent Bishop
William Barber II, and the heroic and indefatigable Vice President Al Gore. There were some elements of this event that I found uncannily moving and inspiring. I
thought I would share them in case they resonated with you too. First of all, the event was held in Riverside Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King gave his 1967 "Time to Break Silence" speech, in which he famously noted "a time comes when silence is betrayal" — an observation equally apt with respect to media and political silence on climate as it was with respect to clerical silence about US war crimes
in Vietnam. But King's speech offers us something greater than just a historical parallel. It offers us solace and encouragement in this dark time of the Trump / climate-hushing
regime. King said: '''A time comes when silence is betrayal' ... The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy ... Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on. And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited
vision, but we must speak."
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Clare Kelly @clarekelly.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
THIS is how AI kills us all. And also why the've been so determined to get everyone all frothed up about it "escaping" or whatever.
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Lauren Woolsey @cgsunit.com · 18/09/2026
This poem was shared in a group chat this afternoon and it's so good. Author: Samantha Bise, link to source: www.facebook.com/samanthalynn...
Poem by Samantha Bise, part 1: A student tells me I should teach how to write using AI as a tool. I tell him we don't use forklifts in the gym. Some tools can weaken us. This is less profane than what I really want to say to him: If you don't learn how to do the heavy lifting of thinking and writing, you will become an animal that survives eating only its own shit. Our words are what feeds the machine. AI becomes our mirror. When we only ever look at our reflection, the mirror becomes the meal. Soon we are eating what we already ate, chewing yesterday's language and calling it a new recipe. We harvest our own manure, dress it up as knowledge, and feed it to the system that feeds it right back to us. Mama and baby birds passing chewed worms from beak to beak. Never swallowing or digesting a thing, but calling it substance. A strange new carnivore. Not flesh eating flesh, but thought eating thought, until the words become marrow—I mean narrow. [Rest of Alt Text in second post]
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Simon Kelly @spk3lly.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I'm fundraising for my kids' Gaelic sports club by tramping in the mountains and trying not to get lost... please help with a few quid if you can: www.idonate.ie/fundraiser/s...
idonate.ie
Support Simon Kelly's Camino fundraiser on iDonate.ie
Simon Kelly's Camino fundraiser for Naomh Olaf GAA, created by Simon Kelly | iDonate.ie
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Jason Kint @kint.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Eye popping. Court just unsealed Summary Judgment motions in New York Times v OpenAI / Microsoft. Easy to see why the AI companies had so many redactions (pink). Their own people wrote the lede for NYT, the "largest theft of labor in human history"... "more and more substitutive..." /1
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 16/09/2026
HEY EVERYONE - NEW REPORT!!! NVIDIA is the largest company by market cap on the planet. But it hides key climate data, while claiming AI is going to be a 'net benefit' for climate. We (8 groups) put together the first ever broad critique of NVIDIA's climate record: ketanjoshi.co/2026/09/16/n...
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Jennifer Sano-Franchini @jsanofranchini.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
I made a shitty flyer without using 'AI' (soo 2026-core)
Flyer for byebot etsy shop
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Brian Merchant @bcmerchant.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
This conversation with @naomiaklein.bsky.social and @astra.bsky.social couldn't be more timely. With the AI industry talking about *its own products' potential to cause human extinction* we drill into who might still want to build such technology, and why. Hint: it's in the title of their new book.
bloodinthemachine.com
The End Times Fascists of AI, ft. Naomi Klein + Astra Taylor
Listen now (64 mins) | A conversation with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor about “end times fascism” in the tech industry.
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 10/09/2026
"Instead, the blame lies with the humans who failed at engineering safe testing conditions, and who train AI models using RL methods that incentivize high persistence, autonomous decision-making, and reward hacking."
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Ursula K. Le Guin Bot @leguinbot.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed.
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Clare Kelly @clarekelly.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Just when you think things couldn't get *more* dystopian...
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Annie West @anniewestdotcom.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Values, you say
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Eoghan Daltun 🌍 @irishrainforest.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
THE most impactful thing you can do as an individual, right now, to help stop the mass nature die-off humanity is driving? Reduce or stop consumption of beef and other animal-based foods.
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#CarbonReckoning (Andrew Boswell) @drandrewboswell.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
🧵 1/13 🔦 What the Government won't tell you on climate. 🔒 It buried its own intelligence report on ecological breakdown 👉 bsky.app/profile/geor... 📈 Now it won't tell us how it sets carbon budgets that let emissions roll on ⚖️ So we are taking it to Court 👉 www.crowdjustice.com/case/carbon-...
crowdjustice.com
Carbon Reckoning: Holding the Government to Its Own Climate Law
Carbon Reckoning are a science based group, committed to the strongest possible action to require the UK sets climate policy commensurate with the scale of the crisis we face.
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Lydia Mulvey @lydiamulvey.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
As always, when there's a big disaster and I feel utterly helpless, I donate to the World Central Kitchen, who are sending people as we speak to Nepal to assist those already doing vital, life-saving work on the ground If you have a few spare coins, consider donating 💚 wck.org/news/first-a...
wck.org
FIRST ALERT: WCK Responds to Flash Flooding in Nepal | WCK
World Central Kitchen's restaurant partners are serving meals in Nepal's Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts–downstream from the country's border with World Central Kitchen’'s restaurant partners are serving...
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
People can "just adapt" to a changing climate, a thousand rightwing voices keep telling us. Either they lack imagination or they don't care. Try "adapting" to this. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...
theguardian.com
Nepal flash flood: more than 1,500 missing, mostly tourists, after disaster kills at least 165 at Tibet border
Entire populated areas swept away after glacial collapse causes catastrophic flood in mountainous region popular with trekkers and pilgrims
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Conor O'Carroll @conorocarroll.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Tonight, we reveal how water use from data centres almost doubled during the summer, peaking in July when the hosepipe ban was introduced for households. The figures show data centres used over 514 million litres of water between May and July this year. Read on thejournal.ie just after midnight 🔜
A screenshot of an upcoming article on The Journal. The headline reads 'Data centre water use almost doubled during Ireland's long, hot summer months'
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Federica Genovese @fgenovese.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
@acalacino.bsky.social myself and others have crunched the numbers (work in progress, see sources and deets here: osf.io/preprints/so...) and have some hard evidence of that: decline of climate change in news reporting since 2023 is esp. dramatic in the Global North ⬇️
Patterns of climate reporting in Global North vs Global South HQ news matched to GDELT climate tag articles. For notes see "When the Tail Wags the Dog: Climate Exposureand News Media Behavior in the Global South", Anthony Calacino, Mats Ahrenshop, Federica Genovese, Hayley Pring (work in progress)See Calacino, Ahrenshop, Genovese and Pring. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/37juf_v1
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 19/08/2026
do we know of any universities/higher ed institutions that have explicitly stated resistance/refusal of genai as their official policy
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Nick Sousanis @nsousanis.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
As folks gear up for the new semester, a reminder if anyone needs it, my Ai statement is available for people to make use of in their own materials. It’s downloadable and printable from my site here spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-sy...
a snippet of a mini-comic, at top - straight line stretches from point A to B. Immediately below, same dot at A, then becomes a curving, meandering line that winds through the page and ends at a point with rays and a question mark emanating from it. Text reads: "Nothing can do this for you - for that robs you of experience and conflates answers with learning. Rather, it's all the decisions you make along the way, the mistakes, struggles, and surprises! These pathways you create - this is learning. 

https://spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-syllabi/
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 13/08/2026
🔇 🔇 🔇 My book, Deep Unlearning, is now available for preorders! I don't know how people write so many books because this one took a lot out of me. It turns out, I had a lot to say 😂, with editors cutting out 50k of my words 🫣 ✴️ You can now preorder it at www.simonandschuster.com/books/Deep-U....
Cover of my new book, Deep Unlearning: The Rise of AI and The Radicalization of a Tech Idealist. 

There are two concentric circles in the book, the left being circuits in black an white, and the right being a bunch of dots with orange accents. The cover background is cream. And the words are written in black except for "Un" which is in orange.
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vincentholst.bsky.social @vincentholst.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Shoutout to my co-authors @andresalgaba.bsky.social, FlorianoTori, @sylviawenmackers.be, and @vincentginis.bsky.social. This entire saga required incredible teamwork. Full paper, code, and data below Paper: rdcu.be/fzwzq Code: github.com/VincentHolst... Data: zenodo.org/records/1512... 8/8
rdcu.be
Dataset artefacts can partially drive the measured decline in disruption
Nature - Dataset artefacts can partially drive the measured decline in disruption
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vincentholst.bsky.social @vincentholst.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Instead of a decline in the disruptiveness of scientific and technological knowledge, the data mainly show an increasing metadata quality over time: relatively fewer papers with zero references due to database errors. 7/8
The decline in disruption (including zero reference papers, left panel) mirrors the relative decrease of zero reference papers which were wrongly counted as being maximally disruptive (right panel).
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vincentholst.bsky.social @vincentholst.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
In 2023, @nature.com published 'Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time', receiving world-wide media attention. Our Matters Arising, published after a 32 month delay (more on that soon), shows that the reported decline can largely be attributed to dataset artefacts. 🧵
The average CD_5 index per year for Web of Science. The original Park et al. decline (top curve) becomes essentially flat (bottom curve) when removing papers with CD_5=1. Those papers largely correspond to dataset artefacts.
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Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 13/08/2026
Past greenhouse gas emissions, primarily from burning fossil fuels, means that peak temperatures in the UK today are hotter (by around 3°C) than they would otherwise have been. Future burning of fossil fuels means heatwave temperatures will get hotter and hotter until we reach net-zero emissions.
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