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• Post #4319100

  Today CAT Lab tested "confidence" ratings for results we share with community partners based on how much we think our findings generalize. Many thanks to @sarahgilbert & @pavunath.bsky.social for this innovation! 🟢 High Confidence 🟡 Moderate Confidence 🔴 Descriptive - not necessarily representative

• Post #4319099

  RE: https://mstdn.social/@amydiehl/117000442649447242 Looking for something witty or insightful to add, but all I have is a weary sigh and a commitment to keep working as long as it takes

• Post #4319098

  RE: https://social.coop/@SociocracyForAll/117004239680232919 "Sociocracy is a governance system, just like democracy or corporate governance methods. It’s best suited for organizations that want to self-govern based on the values of equality."

• Post #4319097

  Sometimes words just aren't enough to describe the grace of living in a world of such beauty. #outdoormoments #cycling #bicycle #biketoot

• Post #4262047

  "I’m not sure what these students should be learning... Increasingly, I find myself asking not simply whether students can do the work, but whether they should want to do the work." "So much of it is surveillance & extraction." Carl DiSalvo, Georgia Tech https://underthecircumstances.substack.com/p/fall-teaching-part-1-before

• Post #4195098

  When people seek guidance from science, they expect it to work more than once. I have TWO new articles out commercial and proprietary forces that make science less reliable, with suggestions. Many thanks to co-authors Killian McLaughlin, Cassidy Waldrip, Alexis Palmer, Molly Crockett and @dlazer@sciences.social Blog post here: https://citizensandtech.org/2026/07/commercial-determinants-science/

• Post #4115394

  RE: https://mstdn.social/@globalvoices/116984510417639646 > States are actively weaponizing their borders to track and silence activists. > In the past, state repression was largely contained within a country’s own frontiers. Today, autocrats are cooperating across borders, using digital surveillance, shared intelligence, and coordinated expulsions to reach dissenters even after they flee into exile.

• Post #4087604

  Today I sent a thank-you to the woman scientist who many years ago interrupted a senior mansplainer talking over me, who showed me it's possible to gracefully redirect the energy of people who take advantage of everyone else's adherence to politeness norms. Doing my best to pay it forward 😂

• Post #4063993

  Finally someone publishes a forecast of where the US is likely to get episodes of smoke and haze throughout August. Many thanks to Accuweather for this- I hope we'll see more of this kind of journalism going forward. https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-forecasts/canada-wildfire-smoke-to-be-a-periodic-problem-into-august-across-midwest-northeast/1913395

• Post #3957603

  Want access to expensive subscription archives of academic papers and other paywalled online material? People often ask me as an academic to share access with them, but there's a better way: active @wikimediafoundation@wikimedia.social contributors can get The Wikipedia Library for free! If you're willing to volunteer at least 10 edits a month to Wikipedia, you can get access to the Wikipedia Library. It's a really *sweet* deal, as you get to chose where to invest those edits.

• Post #3834434

  HUGE NEWS: This summer, countless scientists & technologists can now travel to hug their families again after a federal court suspended a Trump administration censorship-at-the-border scheme targeting people who work in online safety. 🎉 Many thanks to all who worked on this 🎉 cc @pluralistic@mamot.fr https://knightcolumbia.org/content/federal-court-suspends-trump-immigration-policy-targeting-technology-researchers

• Post #3558463

  “ the distance between the public defender and the private realist is the distance the institution itself could never close” https://prospect.org/2026/07/02/what-broke-monticello-thomas-jefferson-virginia-glenn-youngkin/

• Post #3519491

  My teenage self would have been thrilled to know it would be possible to have days like today: - Discussing the role of scientific evidence in civil liberties cases with Gautam Hans - Catching up on planetary gear repair with @elplatt@greatjustice.net - Testing the commuter bicycle I recently refurbished / set up #BikeNite

• Post #2030828

  How can AI systems have high accuracy rates and still get things wrong *all the time* ? Alan Dix uses arithmetic to explain how a 99.98% accurate shoplifting detection system could wrongly ban 3 customers from the grocery store for every alleged thief it detects. https://alandix.com/blog/2026/05/04/facial-recognition-what-does-accuracy-mean/

• Post #1876785

  Expect big debates over the use of "open source" datasets in AI development. On one hand, LAION published thousands of examples of illegal CSAM and got them incorporated into AI training models- which is a huge fail for them and everyone else who trained on it. On the other hand, the Stanford Internet Observatory was able to detect and alert people to this because it was an open dataset. https://www.404media.co/laion-datasets-removed-stanford-csam-child-abuse/

• Post #1726857

  Are you a leader trying to figure out how to evaluate an AI system? Are you in business, journalism, civil society, or the tech industry? I'm excited to share the publication of the (open access) book I wish I had in my first job testing AI systems seventeen years ago: "Auditing AI." Together with a dream team of scientists, policy experts, lawyers, and journalists, we distilled decades of experience in AI evaluation into a get-up-to-speed book for anyone who needs to...

• Post #1711805

  Our digital environments are as much in need of understanding, joy, wonder, & stewardship as our our planet, health, & outer space. New post from a wonderful panel on participatory science about tech + society w/ Alan Smith, Todd Whitney, Brandi Geurkink, and @sarahgilbert at the Association for Participatory Science. https://citizensandtech.org/2025/06/studying-stewarding-digital-environments-with-participatory-science/

• Post #1690225

  Trip Report! Last month, @ivansigal@octodon.social and I set out on our 550-mile #bicycle storytelling #adventure in the footsteps of the 1966 Farmworker March. Today's post shares the overall story of our trip, mixed with Ivan's BEAUTIFUL photography, with links to the 9 other stories I wrote along the way. So if you've been curious about our ride, this is the article to read! https://globalvoices.org/2023/07/06/trip-report-cycling-in-the-footsteps-of-the-1966-farmwork...

• Post #1653317

  How do concerns about AI shape people's sense of community & information trust online? CAT Lab's @sarahgilbert, Nath Santos, and @elplatt surveyed thousands of redditors in @askhistorians.bsky.social to find out. Our survey is special because we surveyed viewers, commenters, and banned accounts. (1/🧵) https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sm6lhx/askhistorians_community_survey_results/

• Post #1627312

  "Why live in a sinking city? Why own a home in a climate-impacted region? (What region isn’t at this point?) I work in environmental and scientific spaces. I am a person who values data, fact, information. I know the reality of what environmental pollution does to the sustainability of places... I also know that having all this knowledge and information doesn’t equip you to face a departure from home." Extraordinary article in Southern Culture by Shannon Dosemagen, who is a vi...

• Post #1627311

  Hauntingly beautiful and insightful essay about a fundamental question for knowledge institutions: Is knowledge an endeavor of stackable, verifiable abstractions? Or is it a creative conversation, set of relationships and human capacities? I think we're increasingly going to be forced to choose. via @Riedl https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-fall-of-the-theorem-economy

• Post #1497427

  CONGRATULATIONS to DR. @lucaswright for defending his PhD on the political economy of trust & safety, disinformation, and copyright! Lucas's talk asked: when gov regulates tech, who decides the meaning of policy and how policy affects people's lives? His answer: governance intermediaries like compliance vendors.

• Post #1497424

  Revisiting Francis Bacon's argument about empiricism that the true end of knowledge is power- and that power is evidence of knowledge. When AI researchers set aside understanding & explainability for things that "just work," they are living in Bacon's world whether they know it or not. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/francis-bacon/#KnoWorPow

• Post #1402742

  "to repair is not to fix something but many things at once: devices, systems, and infrastructures, but also people, relations, communities, even entire social orders" Beautiful opening paragraph to an article about moral orders of technology repair in Kampala Uganda by Mwesigwa & Jackson https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.10279

• Post #1160801

  Today I am choosing not to cite a year-old AI related pre-print that has not yet been peer reviewed, even though it perfectly makes a point I want to be true— and many others have cited it. The methods section seems a bit incomplete, so the longer it goes un-published the more concerned I get.

• Post #1144105

  Clarifying article by human rights expert Mathias Risse: "Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions prohibits "acts or threats of violence whose primary purpose is to terrorize civilians."" "To name an act... is to make a moral claim on the conscience of the world" https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/our-work/carr-ryan-commentary/whole-civilization-will-die-tonight-day-american

• Post #1083848

  I dare Christian leaders to follow the example of Jesus and consider spending at least equivalent time with people who have been harmed by AI as they spend with the people making these technologies. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/04/11/anthropic-christians-claude-morals/

• Post #887167

  Twitter announced today they're completely ending academic research access to the Twitter API, adding insult to injury on API restrictions for journalists and civil society. Are you affected? The Coalition for Independent Tech Research is here to help. Complete this form, share with anyone you know who uses Twitter data, & (optionally) join our public campaign. https://independenttechresearch.org/letter-twitter-api-access-threatens-public-interest-research/

• Post #747110

  Has anyone done any research on what appears to be a decline in #MeToo? It changed norms, increased reports, increased arrests, & transformed laws. So why was the online movement not sustained? Have existing orgs just absorbed the enthusiasm but not the slogan? https://news.tulane.edu/pr/rates-sexual-harassment-and-assault-nationwide-still-high-after-metoo-movement

• Post #726433

  As a PhD student, I was fascinated to see how many bright peers were developing price-fixing algorithms, under the rationale of market optimization and helping businesses. This month, the FTC reminded everyone that this is still illegal. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/03/price-fixing-algorithm-still-price-fixing?utm_campaign=landlords_and_property_ma&utm_content=1709317844&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin