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Jenna Burrell

@jburrell.bsky.social
1.1K followers 327 following 136 posts

Currently: visiting researcher, University of Tokyo, based in Yokohama (GMT+9) Formerly: Professor at UC-Berkeley, Director of Research, Data & Society.

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Jenna Burrell @jburrell.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
But also dropping a link to what I observed at a city council meeting this summer in Salem, OR. Things are similar and also different between these two locales ... bsky.app/profile/jbur...
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Jenna Burrell @jburrell.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
City council meetings in Japan are open to the public, but there's no "public comments" portion of the meeting. The folks gathered at this forum didn't include government officials from what I could tell or any of the major developers.
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Jenna Burrell @jburrell.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
You can probably see where I'm going with this. It also means that there's no straightforward way for citizens to stop a nearby public golf course, beloved green space from being transformed into a logistics / data center as they are experiencing in Akishima - showanomori.info
showanomori.info
昭島巨大物流センターを考える会
〜GLP昭島プロジェクトから子どもの命と昭和の森を守ろう〜
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Jenna Burrell @jburrell.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Japan is famous for flexible zoning laws that many Westerners (myself included) have celebrated. High density housing, commercial, industrial co-exist and there are few avenues for citizens to stop this kind of mixed use.
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Jenna Burrell @jburrell.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
There are very similar concerns here. People don't want to live near large facilities that block sunlight, replace their green spaces, emit noise, and reverse progress on climate change goals. One presenter mentions tech harms such as deepfakes and children's social media addiction.
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Jenna Burrell @jburrell.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
I am quickly disabused of this notion. I ask one protestor from Akishima what their goal is. She says stop the data center. There are a few references throughout the forum to the data center moratoriums sweeping through the USA.
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Jenna Burrell @jburrell.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
The focus of the forum is sustainable co-existence between data centers and the communities who live nearby. I start with an assumption that there is perhaps a cultural difference at play. More collaboration, fewer mock 'guillotines' (as protestors brought to Salem, OR).
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Jenna Burrell @jburrell.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
More data center work! I'm in Japan at a 公開市民フォーラム (public citizen's forum) bringing together data center protestors from 8 regions around Tokyo. There are also professors, experts, and other speakers. The press is here as well.
A large conference room at a University about half full with attendees. Around 150 participants are present.
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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 03/10/2026
Killed. NSF’s SBE was killed, in violation of law. The President does not have the power to choose to kill programs at a whim by defunding them. The imperial presidency was a mistake and we are in a separation of powers constitutional crisis.
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Dr. Elinor Carmi @elinorcarmi.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
We just had a discussion on this in our editorial meeting of Internet Policy Review. It would be great to hear from other academic journal editors what are their policies around researchers using synthetic data. -> www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/20...
pewresearch.org
Can AI Stand In for Human Survey-Takers? Not Really
Synthetic surveys using digital twins do a poor job estimating the public mood and are especially error-prone for some subgroups, including Republicans and Black adults.
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Victor Pickard @victorpickard.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
A major structural hazard with extreme media ownership concentration is that oligarchs impose their ideological agendas--which almost always skew to the far right--on everyone. This capture of core info and communication infrastructures must be dismantled if we're to have any semblance of democracy.
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Paris Marx @parismarx.com · 21/09/2026
one of the 21st century’s great tragedies is seeing a media industry gutted by decisions made by the tech industry elevate a bunch of industry shills as the people meant to help the public understand how tech works and what impacts it’s having on the world
one of the 21st century's great tragedies is that millions of smart people were convinced to bury their heads in the sand by either stochastic parrots discourse or Zitron-style capabilities denialism and haven't updated based on new evidence. nature is healing but it's so late.
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 17/09/2026
So-called “effective altruism” actually just cuts the global poor out of the conversation entirely. Great piece: dear-humanity.org/effective-al...
dear-humanity.org
EA is worse than traditional philanthropy in the way it excludes we the poor.
Effective altruism is worse than traditional philanthropy in the way it excludes the extreme poor in the global south.   By Anthony Kalulu  @KaluluAnthony  |  December 3, 2022: —-   I have spent the v...
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Jeff (Hot Type) Jarvis @jeffjarvis.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I'm fed up with incomplete, credulous reporting like this. I sent the email below to reporters. Journalists: Google TESCREAL before you write about these dangerous nutters. The Anonymous Math Geek Who Quit Anthropic—and Became the Face of AI Safety www.wsj.com/tech/ai/jaco...
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Karen Gregory @karengregory.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Protect African Studies @ Edinburgh docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
docs.google.com
Protect African Studies @ Edinburgh
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Susan Rinkunas @susanrinkunas.com · 16/09/2026
Big lawsuit filed by the family of Tierra Walker, who died of preeclampsia at 20 weeks pregnant after being denied abortion care. Argues Texas' abortion bans violate the state constitution's right to life and should be struck down. More soon on @autonomynews.co abortioninamerica.org/wp-content/u...
screenshot from page 60 of the complaint:
Not one of Ms. Walker’s medical providers sought to rely on the exception to Texas’s abortion bans or offered Ms. Walker’s life-saving abortion. To the extent Ms. Walker’s medical providers believed that she was never sick enough to qualify for the exception, Texas’s abortion bans, combined with the associated definitions of “abortion,” “reasonable medical judgment,” and “medical emergency,” are unconstitutionally vague in violation of the due course of law provision of Article I, Section 19 and thus unenforceable. See Paxton v. Annunciation House, Inc., 719 S.W.3d at 589.
208. In addition, to the extent Texas’s abortion bans and associated definitions were a proximate cause of Ms. Walker’s death, they violated her right to life under the Texas Constitution and are unconstitutional. Vernon’s Tex. Civ. Stats. ch. 6-1/2; Tex. Health & Safety Code §§ 170A.001-170A.007; Tex. Health & Safety Code §§ 171.201-171.212; Tex. Health & Safety Code § 245.002.
209. Finally, to the extent Texas’s statutory scheme, taken as a whole, cumulatively denied Ms. Walker her right to life without due process of law, Texas violated her right to life under the Texas Constitution

https://abortioninamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Walker-Petition.pdf
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Ryan Calo @rcalo.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Banning "superintelligent" 🤢 AI plays right into industry rhetoric and keeps the focus off immediate, real world harms such as privacy, bias, and labor. Literally the same name of the silly Bostrom book everyone was reading 12 years ago.
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Michael Zimmer @michaelzimmer.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
They could just… not do it. Or turn it off. Deploying AI tools in uncontrolled ways is a choice. The risks tech companies keep struggling to “manage” are risks they choose to create. Why It’s Tough for Tech Companies to Keep A.I. Out of Trouble www.nytimes.com/2026/09/12/t...
nytimes.com
Why It’s Difficult for Tech Companies to Rein In A.I.
Researchers say artificial intelligence is developing faster than the systems put in place to monitor and control it.
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Gautam Kamath @gautamkamath.com · 16/09/2026
Nihar Shah did a heroic experiment for TMLR: he spent 20-25 hours over two weeks interviewing authors of seemingly low-quality submissions about their own papers. He confirmed what we all suspected: people submitting these papers have *no idea* what is going on in them.
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Jenna Burrell @jburrell.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I mean, doing way more desk rejects isn't enough. The incentive is still there for unprincipled researchers to keep throwing stuff over the wall and see if you can trick people into accepting it. There's no friction if you are having AI write your papers.
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Jenna Burrell @jburrell.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
People having papers written by AI, wasting the time of volunteer reviewers, unable to explain their own research ... this is research misconduct. How can we ensure there are consequences for this? i.e. you are no banned from this research community if you are caught doing this.
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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 16/09/2026
They should have taken the opportunity to combine the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator into a show where people assigned as guards or prisoners are repeatedly bombarded with either one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later.
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 15/09/2026
It's difficult to pick apart fears about AI & data centers that are intrinsic to the technologies vs. those that are connected to the fact that giant, fateful decisions about these things are being made by a small handful of insular brain-cooked oligarch narcissists.
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Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
They’re going to claim that trace amounts of birth control in drinking water is a public health risk, and then make birth control pills illegal, aren’t they?
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Jenna Burrell @jburrell.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
If you grew up in a white enclave and think that's what 'Americans' are supposed to look like, that's a *you* problem.
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Jenna Burrell @jburrell.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
**Nobody looks American** I say this all the time to people here in Japan. I try to convey this clearly to anyone I talk to who is not from the USA. It has never been a thing, not in 1776 and not now.
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Raffi Melkonian @rmfifthcircuit.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Random note; since my dad passed away last December, I’ve been handling all of my mom’s mail and accounts. It is incredible. How many scams are aimed at the elderly in this country, including my companies that superficially seem legitimate. Every week her mail is full of this crap.
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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Researchers across the country are turning to side hustles to fund their work. Behind the cuts sits a bigger shift: whether American science can still sustain durable research capacity. @lindseydcameron.bsky.social and I examine the stakes in a new piece @science.org: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
The wrong platform for science
Daniel Blumstein recently sat in a Colorado meadow waiting for yellow-bellied marmots to appear, as the ecologist and evolutionary biologist had done many times before, the New York Times reported. Bu...
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 09/09/2026
NEW: Our analysis found that from 2020 to 2025, the rate of deaths involving ectopic pregnancies nearly doubled compared with the previous six-year period. The uptick was steeper in states with abortion bans.
propublica.org
Ectopic Pregnancy Deaths Have Nearly Doubled. It’s Worse in States With Abortion Bans.
With prompt and appropriate medical care, experts say, people shouldn’t die from an ectopic pregnancy. Women in Texas and Oklahoma have sued over delays in care, which, coupled with our new analysis, ...
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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
They are coming for Mifepristone and have been for a while. I can't tell you how much worse things are going to be if they criminalize it. If you are in NYC, come to our teach in about abortion on October 3: www.interruptingcriminalization.com/events/all/a... - do not be passive.
interruptingcriminalization.com
Abortion: A Community Teach-In — Interrupting Criminalization
Are you curious about how the rightwing successfully overturned Roe v Wade? Are you wondering how organizers and advocates are thinking about what comes next? Join Interrupting Criminalization for a t...
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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Hey @ericlipton.nytimes.com 👋 AI is not “evolving” on its own. *People* are choosing how to build it. *People* are choosing how to train it. *People* are choosing how to run it. Maybe the problem is that they are the *wrong people* to make these choices.
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 07/09/2026
Guys, this is Bernie Sanders' guy for all things AI. Max Tegmark of the Future of Life Institute, funded to the tune of $665m by crypto billionaires, that's of course, after all the Muskrat + friends' money. Their "seed funding" was from Musk. 🧵 www.politico.com/news/2024/03...
politico.com
The little-known AI group that got $660 million
Powered by a massive cash infusion from a cryptocurrency mogul, the Future of Life Institute is building a network to fixate governments on the AI apocalypse.
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Megan Kovacs @megankovacs.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
The thing that makes this piece so deeply disingenuous is not only the willful misreading of the quote attributed to her which is obviously about patriarchy and not comparing communists to fascists; (cont)
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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
I genuinely think that one of the biggest feminist challenges right now is that feminism was so successful that a lot of people can’t even imagine what the world was like before it.
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Leah McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
When Gloria Steinem co-founded Ms. Magazine in 1972, the honorific “Ms.” was virtually unheard of. Unmarried women were referred to as “Miss [father’s last name]” and married women as “Mrs. [husband’s last name].” “Ms.” was an assertion of individual identity. Women who used it were widely mocked.
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Jenna Burrell @jburrell.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Unintended / unimagined uses was also a major theme of my book -- mitpress.mit.edu/978026201736... -- can send it along as PDF if you need it.
mitpress.mit.edu
Invisible Users
The urban youth frequenting the Internet cafés of Accra, Ghana, who are decidedly not members of their country's elite, use the Internet largely as a way to...
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Jenna Burrell @jburrell.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Claude Fischer's book 'America Calling' goes into detail about how the telephone industry tried to discourage people (well, women) for a decade or more from using the phone for making sociable calls. There wasn't some good economic reason, it was short-sighted on the part of the industry.
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Jenna Burrell @jburrell.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
I have some photos of nets being used to reinforce roofs in Uganda that I could dig up if you need them. Yes, also used as fishing nets, can confirm.
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danah boyd @zephoria.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
PhD candidates/new grads: Postdoc opportunity with me focused on political economy and tech. See details here: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/32502
academicjobsonline.org
Cornell University, Department of Communication
Job #AJO32502, Postdoctoral Associate, Department of Communication, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, US
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
I have seven invitations from student groups to talk about A.I. They know what I think about A.I. That's why they asked me. They aren't feeling it, y'all.
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Susan Rinkunas @susanrinkunas.com · 25/08/2026
Actual “pro-life” policy alert
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Mél Hogan / The Data Fix @melhogan.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
““[T]hese guidelines afford students the freedom to think for themselves, to listen to one another without the cacophony of other (disembodied and non-human) voices in the room, to make mistakes, and to change their minds
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 23/08/2026
I hope everyone caught this Lancet study confirming that Elon Musk & DOGE are responsible for genocidal levels of suffering & death.
thelancet.com
Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis
USAID funding has significantly contributed to the reduction in adult and child mortality across low-income and middle-income countries over the past two decades. Our estimates show that, unless the a...
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Jenna Burrell @jburrell.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
THIS
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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if you are signing a letter supporting a disgraced eugenicist famous for hounding a Black scholar to death your main concern is not academic freedom. This goes double if you don’t have the same smoke for the Trump administration’s attacks on academia.
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Andrea Mann @andreamann.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
"By writing, you are literally firing up your brain and therefore stirring up your conscious thoughts and something new emerges. You are not, or at least not always, transcribing something already present in your conscious thoughts.“ LOVE this piece. www.historians.org/perspectives...
historians.org
How Writing Leads to Thinking (and Not the Other Way Around) – AHA
Writing is stressful. Sitting in my computer chair my neck and shoulder muscles almost immediately tense up as I dig around in my brain for the best phrase or even any coherent string of words.
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Sarah Taber @sarahtaber.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Right? I feel like "oh noes AI is using up all the rural water" is very in keeping with one of white-collar America's most obnoxious habits, "Let's slap a rural mascot on extremely urban concerns! Because it makes the problem feel more 'real.'"
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Jenna Burrell @jburrell.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
anyways ... for the uninitiated, spread the word, let's use more publicly-funded institutions this way! Call it "parent's night out" call it "kid's night out" whichever!
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Jenna Burrell @jburrell.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
This is great, of course, but I guess I'm surprised that its being treated as novel. My kid's Oakland public school did this many years ago. Put the kids in the gym, serve popcorn, wear PJs, watch a movie. Maybe we contributed a small fee, but it was way cheaper than hiring a babysitter.
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 17/08/2026
“The concern is a person who is leaving a state where abortion is illegal and coming to Columbus to get the abortion care they deserve should not be followed into our city by this dragnet surveillance system that we have…”
woub.org
Abortion rights advocates fear Flock cameras could track women seeking abortions in Ohio
Texas officials used data from thousands of Flock cameras nationwide to track a woman in 2025, according to a report from 404 Media.
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