iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · 21h

Precisely.

Travis H. Olson @travis-h-olson.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The inverse pipeline of "this is terrible, and I know nothing" to "it's actually not that bad" is nice though. Hopefully what's in store for you tomorrow!

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Matthew Downhour @matthewdownhour.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Perfect example though of how corrupting tariffs are. Every town & business becomes dependent on little tariff carve outs, meaning that buying influence with Senators becomes mandatory to stay in business. The tariff is the mother of trusts!!!

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Travis H. Olson @travis-h-olson.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The honors curriculum at my Catholic undergrad that was explicitly focused on the development of Western ideas was more diverse than this list.

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Ned Resnikoff @resnikoff.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Incredible chutzpah from a Congress whose one major legislative act was a budget bill that among other things imposed significant new administrative burdens on Medicaid recipients

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Karen Benjamin Guzzo @karenguzzo.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It’s, um…interesting that the documentation req’d by disadvantaged folks to access social safety net programs - in the interest of “accountability” to ensure no improper use - is not req’d by the very politicians who rail about the need to be responsible with taxpayer dollars.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Earlier this evening a federal jury struck down a brazenly unconstitutional traffic stop scheme "that turned mass surveillance of American drivers into a pipeline of pretextual traffic stops and unconstitutional searches." ij.org/press-releas...

The unconstitutional program ran in five steps: First, surveillance cameras across the state and country recorded license plates and logged when and where cars went. Second, analysts and anonymous tipsters flagged ordinary travel, like driving toward the border and back, as suspicious. Third, Bexar County sheriff’s deputies invented a traffic violation to justify pulling over the flagged driver. Fourth, deputies pulled drivers into their front seats, interrogated them and asked consent to search their car. Finally, fifth, if the driver refused to consent to a search, a K-9 alert from a manipulated dog supplied the probable cause to search anyway. This practice happened for four years to countless motorists.

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The combined undergraduate and graduate student populations of all Ivy League schools is about 140,000 students. The CUNY system alone is 250,000.

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Steve Vladeck @stevevladeck.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Here's a graphic that does a better job of conveying the point than my original post: even by the (insane) standards of the first Trump administration, #SCOTUS is receiving—and granting—a truly unprecedented number of applications for emergency relief from the federal government:

A chart that shows the number of emergency applications filed and granted by the Supreme Court during each presidency dating back to George W. Bush, with the data annualized to show the far-higher frequencies since 2017, but especially during the Trump I and Trump II administrations.

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AP Stylebook @apstylebook.com · 23/09/2026

Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics.

apnews.com

https://apnews.com/article/openai-safety-ai-framework-089e75b95bc935af092da7b79d92706d

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Erin Vanderhoof @vanderhoofy.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

It took me an entire ass senior thesis and years working in education to get what this skeet expresses in a sentence lol

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Travis H. Olson @travis-h-olson.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

There’s obviously a lot of focus on the academic job market but this also shows why it’s become nearly impossible for more junior researchers to get interviews in any roles aligned with their skillset.

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Jon Becker @jonbecker.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The whole contemporary AI debate was predicted in 4.5 minutes of a 1973 episode of Super Friends. (h/t to colleague not on Bluesky) youtu.be/BLF1k_UXEGc?...

youtu.be

The Super Friends "1973" NOW A 2020/1 Reality! WOW!!

YouTube video by DJ Panras DaMostVersiteDJmaster

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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

AI psychosis and anthropomorphizing chatbots are a bigger problem than the risk of spontaneous emergence of super-intelligent consciousness. LLMs can already do a lot, will be able to do more, and are changing society. Yet much of the worry assumes they have dreams, desires, independent thoughts.

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Andrew Couts @couts.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

NEW: ICE agents demanded that REI turn over the names of "all persons" who bought a green beanie from the outdoor retailer over the past two years as part of their probe of protesters who entered a St. Paul church in March. @regret.bsky.social w/ the scoop: www.wired.com/story/ice-wa...

wired.com

ICE Wants to Know Everyone Who Bought a Certain Green Beanie From REI in the Last 2 Years

Homeland Security Investigations agents hit the outdoor retailer with a controversial subpoena as part of a dragnet search for the identities of protesters who entered a Minnesota church in March.

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Travis H. Olson @travis-h-olson.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

A middle step may be first requiring credits to transfer from other schools in the same state because a lot of states already have coordinating boards and that would encourage development of these systems in states that do not have them.

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Travis H. Olson @travis-h-olson.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I agree. I also worry that there may be some oversimplification of the credit transfer process. If we want the credits to meaningfully transfer between institutions (i.e., major classes not all turning into electives), that involves a lot of planning and some curricular coordination from outside.

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Travis H. Olson @travis-h-olson.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

The vast majority of people cannot understand the wealth these corporations have hoarded. Even if they were working well and enforced, our accountability policies are no where near sufficient.

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Leo C. Stein @duetosymmetry.com · 26/08/2026

Tim Curry and Dolly Parton both demonstrated how gender is a social construct. RIP legends

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 26/08/2026

Without competitors, the argument against enshittification becomes, "I would feel bad about myself if we did that." This argument always loses to the bad guys, whose argument is, "We will all get richer if we do this." 38/

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Travis H. Olson @travis-h-olson.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

...and had to accommodate insurrectionists because one of the parties embraced them. Instead, we could have said that those beliefs are incongruent with our nonpartisan values, but no one was ever willing to do that.

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Travis H. Olson @travis-h-olson.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Your comments on this have reminded me of what I saw working in DC at "nonpartisan" organizations. IMO, nonpartisan should mean something other than bipartisan, but that distinction was never drawn or protected. So, nonpartisan organizations got continuously pulled to the right...

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Jacquelyn Gill @jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Hey folks, this hasn’t gotten much attention, but remember those proposed OMB rule changes we all commented on recently? There’s a new attempt to sneak them just for NSF. We have three days to comment. Please don’t sleep on this!

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I don’t begrudge anyone their fear and loathing of AI. And I don’t condescend by asserting that it‘s merely a symbol. Americans fear AI because they know our lawmakers can no longer be trusted to rein in the worst aspects of new technologies. Look at Flock, or at secret deals for new data centers.

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Brendan Cantwell @cantb.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

You can find gender x race/ethnicity examples like this in lots of Anglophone countries over a similar time period (although not always quite so dramatic) and I put it to you that these examples and the current backlash against higher ed in these countries is not a coincidence.

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Travis H. Olson @travis-h-olson.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Yeah, pretty useless. They were doing more substantive work earlier on I think but they were never going to be vocal about it because red states would pull membership. I think you're right that unions of employees are the only place that this type of advocacy can come from given structural pressures

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Travis H. Olson @travis-h-olson.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

This doesn’t speak to the larger questions, but there is this new group. allianceforhighered.org And I know that APLU and other associations have been active around research funding but have stayed largely non-confrontational outside that.

allianceforhighered.org

Alliance For Higher Education — Home

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Brendan Cantwell @cantb.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

It is not possible to enter Michigan State University’s campus by car without passing a Flock camera.

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Travis H. Olson @travis-h-olson.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I think most pundits can also personally live with authoritarianism because it is less disruptive to the structure and privileges of their daily lives than radical progressive change could be.

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alec karakatsanis @equalityalec.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

THREAD. Contrary to what you are being told, 40 years of polling have established that shifting money away from police/prisons toward social services is one of the most popular public policies among *all* political demographics. But it's not just that, it goes way deeper.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

I will also say this. There is a real, authentic cohort of poor and working class people in higher education. They can speak to the complexities of being in and not of a class position without making broad, provocative generalizations. One day, someone should publish those people.

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David Dayen @ddayen.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Yesterday Mayor Mamdani endorsed a bill to force Amazon to employ its own delivery drivers, rather than outsource the work to subcontractors. The Prospect can report that Amazon's lead lobbyist on that bill is Chuck Schumer's daughter Jessica. prospect.org/2026/08/11/m...

prospect.org

Mamdani’s Taking On Amazon. His Opponent? Chuck Schumer’s Daughter. - The American Prospect

Legislation before the New York City Council would end Amazon’s subcontracting of delivery drivers. Jessica Schumer is the lead lobbyist against it.

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Stephen Wild @stephenjwild.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Causation is just correlation with some additional assumptions

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Daniel Suitor @danielsuitor.com · 07/08/2026

If you are a lawyer barred in Minnesota, I will personally sponsor your admission to the District Minnesota (you need one other person as well) and teach you how to do habeas cases. It's going to be all hands on deck.

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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Wow, "Don't be evil" really took a wrong turn.

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 04/08/2026

“A p-value is the most widespread statistical concept that is not definable in a single sentence“ CHECKMATE

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gwen howerton @kissphoria.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

New: Four Texas A&M professors are suing in Houston federal court over its policy prohibiting discussions of race, sexuality and gender in the classroom ~ www.chron.com/texas/articl...

chron.com

Faculty sue Texas A&M over limits on teaching race, gender and sexuality

Texas A&M is the second state university to be sued over limits on teaching gender, sexuality and race.

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Travis H. Olson @travis-h-olson.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

“The text of IL26-638 doesn’t establish who would conduct the sex-verification tests, who would pay for them, when they should take place, or even how the policy would be enforced across schools.“ Implementation nightmare in addition to being bigoted and cruel.

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Travis H. Olson @travis-h-olson.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

This also becomes a tax on poor and working-class people who cannot afford these tests.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

I like this notetaking example. it is a good case of how gender works. Notetaking has never been about producing a transcript. It is a bureaucratic skill in the 20th c. organixarion because it is SENSEMAKING. Those women socialized to take notes? They have been doing men’s metacognition for them

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jessamyn @librarian.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

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

An aircraft passenger oxygen mask: a drop down passenger mask with air bag and yellow plastic mouth and nose cover, oxygen tube has been cut; Demonstration model used by flight attendant crew for passenger instruction. Has text on the side indicating that it's non-functional.

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Travis H. Olson @travis-h-olson.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Large associations like APLU and the AAC&U along with large state systems could also spearhead initiatives like this for higher education. Universities do not need to be hostages to large tech corporations.

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

your apartment, the sport of basketball, and the Republic of Korea are all social constructs. mere recognition of this fact does not actually make the question of whether you are standing in your own apartment, playing basketball, or a Korean national up in the air until settled by op ed editors

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Yonette Joseph @sugarcane99.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

The nun said that on the day she was taken into custody by ICE, she begged the officers to let her say Mass and receive Holy Communion, but was refused. “For me, a nun, not to go to Mass on Sunday, not to receive Communion, it was very, very heartbreaking for me.” apnews.com/article/nun-...

apnews.com

Nun speaks out for first time about being detained by ICE while walking to Mass in Texas

A nun who was taken into immigration custody last month in Texas is speaking out for the first time about her arrest while walking to Mass.

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Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

"We found that at least 150 institutions of higher ed... are using Flock’s surveillance network.. many campus police departments have facilitated immigration related investigations, even when they are located in sanctuary states and are legally prohibited from doing so" by @torinmonahan.bsky.social

doi.org

Flock on campus: university police as appendages of a national policing apparatus

Dangerous new forms of networked surveillance are gaining traction with police departments across the United States. One popular example is Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR)...

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