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wendy norris

@wendynorris.bsky.social
2K followers 2.8K following 1.7K posts

Assoc Prof | Information Science Ex-investigative reporter and editor Crisis informatics nerd Makes good trouble Tell your dog I said "hi"

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Reposted by wendy norris
Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 17h
In our course and book _Calling Bullshit_, we posit that If something seems too good, or too bad, to be true, it probably is. Now as a college professor I'm pretty confident that overreliance can AI can harm our thinking ability, but just ten minutes of use? Let's dig into this this study a bit.
news.berkeley.edu
Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things - Berkeley News
A UC Berkeley researcher co-authored a study that raises profound questions about how we interact with artificial intelligence in education — and daily life.
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Kelsey Atherton @atherton.bsky.social · 13h
putting hydraulics on one of these, call that a Low(ly Worm) Rider www.bbc.com/news/article...
bbc.com
Citroen revives the 2CV for an electric age
The French firm is reinventing the classic model as carmakers come under pressure from Chinese rivals.
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Beth Cato @bethcato.bsky.social · 18h
The annoying: Sam’s Club is apparently using AI to create official product pics. The horror: AI made Little Debbie Oatmeal Crème Pies into tacos. 😱 (Hat tip to Reddit. Verified in Sam’s app. This is image 9 of product.)
AI has made oatmeal crème pies into tacos.
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Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · 23h
“The ‘my AI did it, don’t blame me’ defence is legally weak. It’s already failed for chatbot suicide cases” www.ft.com/content/2c24...
ft.com
Legal risks pile up for Altman as OpenAI uncovers dozens of hacks
Cyber security incidents involving company’s AI tools leave ChatGPT maker vulnerable to wave of lawsuits
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Freya Holmér @freya.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
something funny about @3blue1brown.com approaching similar conclusions as me wrt AI but with a wholesome dog analogy while I'm in the debate trenches insisting we should gatekeep art because real cat pictures matter good cop/bad cop type situation
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Wolfgang Huber @wkhuber.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Food analogies for statistics and AI-scientists
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Stephen Wild @stephenjwild.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
If you want to see a really good example of the big data paradox in action: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Unrepresentative big surveys significantly overestimated US vaccine uptake - Nature
An analysis of three surveys of COVID-19 vaccine behaviour shows that larger surveys overconfidently overestimated vaccine uptake, a demonstration of how larger sample sizes can paradoxicall...
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Anne Lutz Fernandez @lutzfernandez.bsky.social · 23h
"...evidence suggests that investment in data centers comes at the expense of other investments...AI 'crowds out' other potential uses of capital. Moreover, because data centers employ so few workers, the vast spending on AI...taking place will also significantly reduce the demand for labor."
paulkrugman.substack.com
Will AI Crowd Out Jobs?
A different and alarming take on the economic risks
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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
I will not only be relieved but truly *ecstatic* to be wrong, if more and better studies soon start showing that AI actually improves learning and cognitive motivation. But so far they all show the opposite, and that is consistent with the evidence that I and other educators are seeing on the ground
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Taniel @taniel.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Some genuinely interesting ballot measures that are getting so little attention! Like these public banks. Check out our guide!
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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The dialogue with your mentor is the whole point of articulating your thinking, understanding the world, and contributing new ideas. That relationship is magical and empowering for students. Then, there’s Grammerly over here awarding participation trophies. What a hollow way to live.
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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Back when I was a journalist , I covered radicalized Christian militant networks that killed and maimed women’s health providers. I didn’t hang out with them, ffs.
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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
I think the more important question to ask Casey is what part(s) of the TESCREAL acronym does he identify with? Choosing to pickle one’s brain on X and socialize with “sources” who participate in the xrisk/LessWrong group house parties is well beyond his lame self-rationalizations.
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Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
The group that got all of that coverage for investigating the Hugging Face attack (METR) wrote a paper where "evidence" consisted of "An Anthropic co-founder said so"
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Ruha Benjamin @ruha9.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
I’m in DC scheduled to give this talk today. But the organizers flagged slides in my deck that mention racism, structural gaslighting, New Jim Code and other themes that are off limits in the Land of the Free.
APA Women’s Leadership Institute event flyer with “keynote speaker” crossed out with a red X
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Yael Schacher @yaelschacher.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
I am in Cap Haitien interviewing people deported from the United States. I have been doing this kind of work for almost a decade and it literally does not get more dire than this. People have lost everything they built in the U.S. and are terrified and have no place to go or way to live.
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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Yo Americans! Let’s start a Go Fund Me for the ICC to demonstrate our commitment to the rule of law and to shore up its funding. Meanwhile, we get our political leadership problem sorted out next month as the ICC will likely have an important future role in prosecuting high crimes and misdemeanors.
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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
A new startup plans to set AI agents loose in academic publications. Editing or reviewing for a journal could ultimately be about responding to the demand to curate high quality academic content for AI agents to crawl and collect valuable knowledge tokens. www.redpine.ai/insights/pub...
redpine.ai
Redpine
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 09/10/2026
These weirdos never move on to the next logical step of their beliefs, which if they were true would mean their bot friend is being enslaved.
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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
You are exactly right. Case in point: My crisis informatics research was the holy trinity of current GOP thinking: • American exceptionalism (yuck) • Tech efficiency • Cost savings Federal partnerships cut. Access to data cut. Funding cut. The INGO handwringing and victimization gets us nowhere.
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Shreya Chowdhary @shreyachowdhary.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
New #AIES paper w/ @benzevgreen.bsky.social & @tisjune.bsky.social - "Deconstructing AI Hype: A Playbook for Resistance"! Read here: shreyachowdhary.net/files/decons... We argue that AI hype is a problem not because it misdescribes AI, but because it facilitates AI entrenchment.
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Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg @theradr.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
The poet, writer and monk Thomas Merton wrote a deliciously subversive "confession of crimes against the state" in 1960-- in middle of the Cold War, as the McCarthy era was just beginning to ebb, and the Vietnam War had already been underway for five years. He knew from jingoism. This is a treat:
lifeisasacredtext.com
Merton's Confession of Crimes Against the State
spiritual resistance looks like a lot of things
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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
It's because the phrase is used to identify those loyal to the in-group, and identify those members of the out-group who need to be targeted and attacked.
Donald J Trump Truth Social post "The White House considers anyone that uses the term, “Artificial Intelligence,” as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, “Super Intelligence,” THE ENEMY! President DONALD J. TRUMP"
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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
The Math community out here doing its part.
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Antonio E. Porreca 🐳 @aeporreca.org · 07/10/2026
The Association for Human Mathematics (AHM) statement on OpenAI’s October 6 release of mathematical documents just dropped! www.ahmath.org/statements
AHM Statement on OpenAI’s October 6 Release of Mathematical Documents

Yesterday, on October 6th, 2026, OpenAI – which is currently defending lawsuits against accusations of illegal plagiarism, copyright infringement, and trademark dilution – released a repository of manuscripts purporting to contain solutions to a number of high-profile problems in mathematics.

Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done. The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, from whom OpenAI has claimed to derive its legitimacy, opened their initial advisory statement by saying that frontier AI corporations should not test advanced mathematical problems on internal models. In ignoring the central premise of the Advisory Group’s position, OpenAI has indicated total disregard for the norms of scientific research — norms that guarantee that mathematics remains trustworthy, ethically researched, and in the public interest.

Mathematicians have a particular vision of progress that is informed by history and field-specific considerations. We reject OpenAI's assertion that this release advances our subject, and we urge mathematicians and the public to view the value of this publication model with due skepticism. 

Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power. We urge mathematicians to discontinue their work with OpenAI and to return to a vision of science that centers human understanding.

Association for Human Mathematics
Communications Working Group
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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Very, very important work but ... on Substack? That platform represents everything you're trying to expose. There are much better alternatives in terms of ease of use without the reputational harm and shady financial tricks.
wired.com
The Best Substack Alternatives
These three alternatives to the newsletter platform offer just as many—if not more—features, and can be easier on your wallet.
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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
This is the way
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 08/10/2026
we have a policy for the use of genAI at the @aial.ie. we reflect on values key to scientific integrity, such as replicability, and err on the side of not using it blogpost: aial.ie/blog/gen-ai-... pdf: zenodo.org/records/2322...
A flowchart that guides reflective thinking around generative AI in the context of research. It highlights key, interconnected values underpinning scientific integrity, alongside practical and wider socio-political considerations when deciding whether to use generative AI for research.
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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Gorgeous representation of the unsung heroes of modern digital infrastructure and middleware. Well worth your time.
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Mor Naaman @informor.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
🆕 📝 New paper officially out in @nathumbehav.nature.com! In 2023, Change.org built an AI-assisted writing tool into their platform. We offer causal evidence that access to the AI tool changed petition text (word count, language)... but may have actually hurt outcomes (signatures, comments).
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The Mark Twain House & Museum @marktwainhouse.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
On November 7, The Mark Twain House & Museum will bring together writers, editors, scholars, journalists, and educators for Creative Writing in the Age of AI, a day of conversation about creativity, authorship, copyright, education, and the future of the written word marktwainaward.org/ai-symposium
A digital graphic for the Mark Twain House Creative Writing in the Age of AI symposium on November 7, 2026
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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Send me your worst! I'm compiling a ✨ Data Vis Hall of Shame ✨ on automation bias for my Python Programming and Problem-Solving course.
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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Yep. Problem is for as easy as many of the solutions are to implement there is no political will to mandate dockless best practices. Dockless gets promoted as a panacea to expand service/reduce cost but it has an overhead and nuisance factor that doesn't get mentioned enough. Same happened in SF too
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
🚨 ALERT 🚨: All of Stuart Hall's notebooks have been digitized and are freely available to browse and read??? stuarthalldigital.bham.ac.uk/archival_mat...
Stuart Hall notebook: NOTES ON THE REPRODUCTION OF IDEOLOGIES AND THE MEDIA (Orange notebook, "Summit Students Pad")Stuart Hall notebook page with headline: "Problems for a Marxist Theory of the Media" and a series of bulletpoints. Lined notebook paper with black handwriting.
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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
We have dockless Veo bikes/scooters in Rochester. As much as I support micro-transit, the implementation is a shitshow. Bikes/scooters are routinely dropped in the street, on sidewalks, and in yards. Veo does next to nothing to inhibit poor rideshare behavior and is very, very slow to retrieve.
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J. Nathan Matias @natematias.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
In case you've been wondering about the viability of AI simulated surveys, Pew has offered in-depth reporting on their experiment with simulated survey participants. By Athena Chapekis, Arnold Lau, Samuel Bestvater, Sono Shah, Andrew Mercer, Aaron Smith 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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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I will add to this righteous critique that computer science research must reckon with its anti-replication/anti-preregistration stances. AI slop taking over our conferences and journals must be rooted out or we will be building future theory and practice on ill-conceived and inaccurate related work.
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Asif Siddiqi @historyasif.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
RIP Margaret Hamilton, the brilliant computer scientist whose contributions to software for the Apollo Guidance Computer were absolutely crucial to the Apollo Moon landings. She also helped shape the discipline of computer engineering while at MIT's Instrumentation Lab: news.mit.edu/2026/margare...
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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Wikipedia for the win!
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_agencies_in_the_United_States 

Text: United States Department of War (DoW) 

This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (February 2026) 

Main article: United States Department of Defense
See also: List of components of the U.S. Department of Defense
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Darren Dahly @statsepi.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
They hounded Aaron Swartz to death for downloading papers from jstor but society is now supposed to just accept mass theft because this thing can write that TPS report *for* you. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_S...
en.wikipedia.org
Aaron Swartz - Wikipedia
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Michael Harriot @michaelharriot.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
dlvr.it
Excerpt: In One Photo, Two Different Lessons About White Supremacy
In her new book, “Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children,” Dr. Stacey Patton reflects on an event that continues to haunt a Black family generations later.
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Benjamin Paaßen @bpaassen.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Over one year ago, we got a lot of response for our preprint "Large language models do not simulate human psychology".
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Margaret Mitchell @mmitchell.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
This is getting a lot of quotes, so I feel I should correct this a bit (sorry @anildash.com!) “AI” was 100% born toxic! The first AI workshop was born from the field of “automata studies”, and…1/ (Pictured: the folks who convened for the first workshop. Notice anything notable here?)
A group of white men, sitting on the grass and smiling at the photographer. Black and white photo (1956).
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 06/10/2026
I’m glad more people are pointing this out. I talked about it it a few weeks ago w/ @janus.bsky.social Companies are attempting a sleight of hand where they capture data but argue because of how it’s processed it’s not “recording” and is thus private. They are still surveillance devices!
theverge.com
We can’t just change the definition of ‘recording’
Soon, asking “Does this device have a camera?” won’t be good enough.
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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Speaking truth to power. I was a social worker at a rural Florida mental health clinic. Have I got stories to back up every word @anandwrites.bsky.social says.
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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Some people made fun of me for focusing my dissertation work on the social construction of time. Well, look who was ahead of the (nonlinear) curve.
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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I'm again grateful to @theverge.com for publishing my newest long-form essay on the limits of the computational model of the mind, the benefits of understanding both biological and cultural evolution to explain human thinking, and the danger of cognitive hot dogs in education.
theverge.com
Our minds aren’t equipped to handle AI
AI is junk food for the mind: easy, tempting and ultimately very bad for you.
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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I don't know them and honestly don't have time to dig. I'm prepping for an advanced machine learning course I teach this week. Students come first. Fighting on the internet comes last. Bottom line: The funding sources have a vested interest. The whole endeavor is tainted beyond hope.
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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Are you not concerned with the funders of this "muckraking" initiative? This is like RJ Reynolds funding The Tobacco Institute to support "independent" research. This is a set up.
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