Petition gegen Dauerbefristung in der Wissenschaft. Again. It's worth signing every single time. Might work at some point.

https://weact.campact.de/petitions/stoppt-die-dauerbefristung-in-der-wissenschaft-1?source=rawlink&utm_medium=recommendation&utm_source=rawlink&share=3815f0b1-0149-4d97-971e-109c04c1b340

Oh no. Even my mastodon feed has AI slop now. I would really like to understand why people do it. Why give away the power over language and style? Why smoothen so much to similar tone and cadence and words and grammatical structures? I mean, I really want to understand. What is behind it? I suspect feelings of being not-good-enough. But maybe time pressure. And probably many other reasons.

Games night coming up: “billionaires & guillotines”:

2-5 players take on the roles of rival plutocrats, competing tooth and nail to accumulate the wealth of the world before their actions trigger a revolution.

Will you play the media baron or the property speculator? The aristocrat or the tech overlord? Whoever you play, your goal is to acquire five extravagant assets prized by the super-rich (a mega yacht, a celebrity spouse, art masterpieces and more!) and prevent your opponents from achieving their dreams.

But watch out! As you gobble up ever more resources, crises cascade out of control: wildfires and floods, pandemics and doomsday cults… Will you collaborate to put down the rebellions, or escape into your luxury bunker?

https://www.plutobooks.com/product/billionaires-guillotines/

“Microsoft, which provides a range of cloud services to Israel’s military and public sector, bid for the Nimbus contract but was beaten by its rivals. According to sources familiar with negotiations, Microsoft’s bid suffered as it refused to accept some of Israel’s demands.”

Who would have thought. Microsoft acting more ethically (or: simply more legally) than Google and Amazon #nimbus

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/29/google-amazon-israel-contract-secret-code?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

PIK researchers announce that we’ve broken 7 of 9 planetary boundaries. And at the same time the European Petrochemical Association is holding their annual meeting in Berlin under the title ‘Thrive through Turbulence’. The irony.

#sustainability #planetaryboundaries

https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/seven-of-nine-planetary-boundaries-now-breached-2013-ocean-acidification-joins-the-danger-zone

And it still failed. “Amsterdam followed every piece of advice in the Responsible AI playbook. It debiased its system when early tests showed ethnic bias and brought on academics and consultants to shape its approach, ultimately choosing an explainable algorithm over more opaque alternatives. The city even consulted a participatory council of welfare recipient”

https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/the-limits-of-ethical-ai/

#ethicalAI #responsibleAI #techphilosophy

“The real antidote to exclusion isn’t inclusion, it’s commoning.”

Said Dan McQuillan. (Because: “Adjusting the boundaries between the included and the excluded does nothing to challenge the fundamental premise on which exclusionary solutions are based.”)

Am just re-reading the end of Resisting AI for a talk tmrw.

#commons #civictech

@juliane Anja Roß just showed me this note to "uncertainty" on the final page ofJulia Stoyanovich and Falaah Arif Khan's “Learning from Data”.
We are AI Comics, Vol 2 (2021)
https://dataresponsibly.github.io/we-are-ai/comics/vol2_en.pdf #criticalAI

Well, I never thought I'd write an article about defence, or with "military" in the title.

Who said only military officers can deal with uncertainty? On the importance of uncertainty in edtech data visualisations. With @juliane

Not #openaccess (they wanted over 4000 EUR, "scandalous", said my library), but some copies here and a preprint is on its way.

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/RGATIGJRXCMIUBCJAT8I/full?target=10.1080/01596306.2025.2467365

"Es ist daher demokratische Pflicht von Lehrkräften, Demokratie- und Menschenfeindlichkeit ebenso wie Geschichtsrevisionismus entschieden entgegenzutreten und einzuordnen, auch wenn es sich um Positionen politischer Parteien handelt."

(same source, Lower Saxony)

"Denn Schule ist kein wertneutraler Ort, auch politische Bildung ist nicht neutral, denn sie beruht auf Werten: Grundlegende demokratische Werte wie die Würde des Menschen, Freiheit und Gleichheit und Solidarität, Pluralismus und Gleichberechtigung sind verbindlich für die Demokratiebildung an Schulen."

It's nice to be supported by the ministry: "Verfassungsfeindlichen Aussagen zu widersprechen, ist eine Beamtenpflicht und darf nicht durch falsch verstandene Neutralität unterlassen werden.“ (MK Niedersachsen 2024, Hervorhebungen AG)
https://www.mk.niedersachsen.de/startseite/ministerin/reden_und_beitrage_von_julia_willie_hamburg/statement_zum_start_des_afd_infoportals_neutrale_lehrkraft_am_21_05_2024/statement-zum-start-des-afd-infoportals-neutrale-lehrkraft-232271.html #neutralelehrkraft

Bavaria reckons using the word “Profitmaximierung” is against the German constitution.

https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/bildung/bayern-lehramtsstudentin-wegen-klimaschutz-aktivitaeten-vom-schuldienst-ausgeschlossen-a-1c65a78b-0b90-43aa-86bc-566902eed84e?sara_ref=re-so-app-sh

"Vom Mythos, KI sei gut in der Schule", Diesen Freitag in Berlin.
Mit Nina Galla von @algorithmwatch und kara von @zerforschung

https://pretalx.com/netzpolitik-org-2024/talk/GCBTYD/

#netzpolitik @netzpolitik_feed

Commonty. What a good word for common land, owned by noone, usable for everyone. #scotland

“Bewusstes Denken ist meist das, was passiert, wenn man nicht weiterkommt.“ Wenn es also nicht #automatisiert weiterläuft.

Dietmar Dath zu „#KI“

https://youtu.be/NhZ2fPe1-vc?feature=shared

#jacobin

Provocative:
The West is suffering from ‘pessimism paralysis’ (Arora, 2024) – a despair towards the #digital. This stands against the contagion of #hope towards digital transformations among young people, most of whom live in the #GlobalSouth and have fast come online due to increasingly cheap mobile phones and #data plans."

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/29768640241252103
#academic #edtech #openaccess #research

@tante Eine Studentin hat mir dies gerade gezeigt, und ich musste an deinem rp24 Vortrag denken: Sie landen -- selbstverständlich -- bei quantum computing https://www.tiktok.com/@rohitmen01/video/7371660505481481518?_r=1&_t=8mcMR2bXM00

...gruselig auf so vielen Ebenen

How cool is this! It's like a sentence with all my favourite concepts in it:
"The article proposes a design agenda for educational technology that integrates utopian imagination and solarpunk practices with planetary educational technology to catalyse the development of more preferable futures in a more-than-human world."

https://educationaltechnologyjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41239-024-00456-3

#solarpunk #hopepunk #openaccess #research #academic #sciencefiction #edtech #planetary #utopia #design

@FractalEcho And this is so important: “What would it mean to turn our math around? Rather than looking to #bigdata for solutions to hegemonically defined problems, what if we used it to find the catalysts of #inequality themselves? Some reflection on what constitutes a “problem” is necessary.”