Jed Brown
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Jed Brown
@jedbrown.org
560 followers 620 following 370 posts
Prof developing fast algorithms, reliable software, and healthy communities for computational science. https://hachyderm.io/@jedbrown

https://PhyPID.org | aspiring killjoy | against epistemicide | he/him
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Jed Brown
mattseybold.bsky.social
Synthetic Risk Transfer is a financial innovation you probably haven’t heard of, the specific variety of securitization which is beginning to look like the Credit Default Swap of the next financial crisis.
November 9, 2025 at 4:53 PM
jedbrown.org
@lucecaroline.bsky.social 💯:
Conceding to these demands would be sacrificing the sanctity of public higher ed in this country. [..] It would demand access to [data on] undergrad students under the guise of trying to stomp out DEI, which we know is just a veiled excuse to resegregate our universities
annakornbluh.bsky.social Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 1d
How is the university situated in the larger struggle against unconstitutional operations of ICE? convo with Chenjerai Kumanyika, AAUP National Council Member, Caroline Luce Communications Chair for UC-AFT, and Aaron Krall, President of UIC United Faculty. m.youtube.com/watch?v=62uj...
ICE AND HIGHER ED: DEFENDING OUR COMMUNITIES
YouTube video by TheAAUP
m.youtube.com
November 9, 2025 at 6:23 PM
jedbrown.org
Never forget that the greatest damage to higher education by the House Unamerican Activities Committee was voluntarily self-inflicted by universities against their own faculty.
www.lawfaremedia.org/article/proc...
November 9, 2025 at 6:13 PM
Reposted by Jed Brown
cornellaaup.bsky.social
The Cornell AAUP chapter has consistently stated that any deal with the Trump administration would be strategically unwise and a betrayal of Cornell’s principles. This remains the case. At best, we can say that this deal could have been worse.

Read our full statement here:
Statement on Cornell’s agreement with federal government
The Cornell AAUP chapter has consistently stated that any deal with the Trump administration would be strategically unwise and a betrayal of Cornell’s principles. This remains the case. We ar…
aaup-cornell.org
November 7, 2025 at 11:24 PM
jedbrown.org
"One of the things about counterfeiting in the 19th century was that the vast majority of counterfeit detectors were created by counterfeiters, and that's precisely what we're seeing with ed-tech/AI [..] the same companies are selling us plagiarism detection that are selling students guaranteed As."
mattseybold.bsky.social Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 10d
The 100th episode of American Vandal. Launching the 12th season. Live at UPenn English Faculty Lounge with @cnewf.bsky.social, @whitneytrettien.bsky.social, & an incredible assembly of faculty, students, visiting scholars, & friends of the pod.
Criticism & The Chatbot Bubble (Vandal Live at UPenn English)
with Christopher Newfield & Whitney Trettien
theamericanvandal.substack.com
November 9, 2025 at 12:46 AM
jedbrown.org
You know what doesn't wear an "I read banned books" shirt to work?

A censorious computer program labeled "librarian".

And that denial of agency is why fascists are so eager to displace librarians with a machine that does not do the same job and thereby poses no threat to power.
November 7, 2025 at 5:46 AM
jedbrown.org
Oklo, the planned recipient of this weapons-grade plutonium, is not a nuclear energy company. It is a Sam Altman speculative financial vessel with a $20B valuation, no revenue, and no licensed reactor design.

www.forbes.com/sites/greats...
November 6, 2025 at 12:11 AM
Reposted by Jed Brown
utaustinaaup.bsky.social
“we will have strong grounds to sue any university potentially that signs on to this compact for undermining the First Amendment rights and constitutional rights of our members on that campus…Any university that accepts the compact must be made into a pariah in the academic community.” 👀 UT Austin
aaup.org AAUP @aaup.org · 11d
“Trump’s compact is the greatest single incursion into the freedom & autonomy of higher education to ever happen in this country.” — Todd Wolfson, AAUP President

#DefendHigherEd
‘Students Are Terrified’: How Trump’s Higher Education Compact Puts Queer Students at Risk
The heavy-handed document promises federal funding in exchange for ideological compliance. So far, it's unpopular.
rewirenewsgroup.com
October 30, 2025 at 6:02 PM
Reposted by Jed Brown
hypervisible.blacksky.app
Again, this precise use case is why these systems exist-to proliferate people’s racist (transphobic, misogynistic…) imaginary at scale. This should not be seen as a “misuse” but rather the product being used exactly as intended.
Racist Influencers Using OpenAI's Sora to Make it Look Like Poor People Are Selling Food Stamps for Cash
Folks looking for evidence of SNAP recipients as welfare queens have no shortage of AI generated schlock to use as justification.
futurism.com
November 2, 2025 at 12:44 AM
Reposted by Jed Brown
brianckeegan.com
Proud to have coauthored this statement with @boulderprogressives.org expressing concern about the use of Flock cameras and encrypted radios by @boulderpolice.bsky.social blog.boulderprogressives.org/concerning-b...
Concerning Boulder Police’s Adoption of Flock Cameras and Encrypted Radios
The Boulder Police Department’s adoption of Flock Safety cameras and encryption of radio communications are incompatible with Boulder’s values of transparency, accountability, and civil rights. Rather...
blog.boulderprogressives.org
October 30, 2025 at 5:48 PM
Reposted by Jed Brown
tamaranopper.bsky.social
For advanced research methods, I'm including material on environmental impacts of data and research, such as data centers, in the section on research ethics.

I'm teaching this video that @moreperfectunion.bsky.social created about data centers and electric bills.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN6B...
We Found the Hidden Cost of Data Centers. It's in Your Electric Bill
YouTube video by More Perfect Union
www.youtube.com
October 30, 2025 at 4:42 PM
Reposted by Jed Brown
rcmeg.bsky.social
Please pay attention to what Grammarly actually is/does/tells writers before recommending it to your students.
October 29, 2025 at 4:04 PM
jedbrown.org
Facial recognition software is notorious for racial and gender bias. Using this product in this way is like deciding whether to deny constitutional rights based on vibes of the most racist person you know.

www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...
Ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee Bennie G. Thompson said in a statement “Mobile Fortify is a dangerous tool in the hands of ICE, and it puts American citizens at risk of detention and even deportation.” He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”
October 29, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Reposted by Jed Brown
schock.cc
Tl;dr RCT shows we learn more from web link search than LLM synthesis

"participants were randomly assigned to learn about a topic either from standard Google web links or LLM syntheses (e.g. ChatGPT) and were then asked to create advice on the subject based on what they learned."(n = 10,426)
We tested these ideas across a series of experiments in which participants were randomly assigned to learn about a topic either from standard Google web links or LLM syntheses (e.g. ChatGPT) and were then asked to create advice on the subject based on what they learned. Results from seven online and laboratory experiments (n = 10,426) yield robust evidence that in this task context, participants reported developing shallower knowledge when learning about a topic from LLM summaries (vs. web links), and that this occurred because those who used an LLM exerted less effort in learning from its synthesized responses compared with those who gathered and distilled information themselves through web links. As a result, when they subsequently wrote advice on the subject, those who learned through an LLM (vs. web search) were not only less invested in forming their advice, but they also created content that was objectively sparser and more generic—such that recipients found it to be less informative and were less likely to adopt it. These results were robust across different search topics and LLM tools and held even when, for example, LLM summaries were augmented by real-time web links.
October 29, 2025 at 2:45 AM
jedbrown.org
Everyone should read The Two Victims of Plagiarism from @plagiarismtoday.com in the context of LLMs.

LLMs provide plausible deniability unless we recognize what it means to choose to use the plagiarism machine: non-consensual ghost authorship in a blender.

www.plagiarismtoday.com/2019/08/01/t...
A plagiarist doesn’t hope to fool their source. They know the source will recognize their work and plagiarists will often go to great lengths to hide their falsehoods from those they lifted from. Instead, plagiarists attempt to fool the audience. They are trying to deceive whatever their target audience is whether that’s just one teacher in a classroom or the world at large. They are saying to that audience “I created this” and hoping that the audience trusts them and believes it even though it is untrue.
October 28, 2025 at 2:28 PM
jedbrown.org
Universities track into administration those with the most banal centralized and hierarchical views of power. Imagine where we could be if they actually believed in shared governance and collective action as desirable pluralism, in a theory of change rooted in solidarity.
doi.org/10.1126/scie...
All this turmoil is exactly what the Trump administration wants and is antithetical to the best possible outcome. Although the ideal solution is for universities to band together, acknowledge collectively where they have fallen short, and make a joint effort to reassure the public, they are prevented from doing so by the inherently competitive nature of higher education. As they vie for rankings, grant dollars, and tuition-paying applicants, larger concerns such as the future of higher education go unaddressed. It is past time to recognize that university administrators are not going to lead the way out of this. They will always focus more on solving problems of their own campuses, as they are tasked to do. This sets the stage for leadership to emerge from the faculty, staff, and students, which is how most if not all progress in higher education over the past 100 years has occurred. In the meantime, as long as the fighting—or at least the perceived fighting—continues, the damage will accumulate.
October 28, 2025 at 5:13 AM
jedbrown.org
Alpha School is child abuse. Profiteering on adverse selection, surveillance, eugenics.

PA's review of their charter school app is 🔥.
www.pa.gov/content/dam/...

> While a single deficiency would be grounds for denial, the Department has identified deficiencies in all five of the required criteria.
When Barrios’ husband brought their daughter to a previously scheduled checkup soon after, her doctor noted with concern that she had lost a significant amount of weight in a short time. Her dad then brought her to school with a note from the pediatrician, Barrios says, instructing her to eat snacks in between regular meals and saw her walk into school with it in her hand. She told her parents she delivered it to staff. Even though Alpha had asked parents in its handbook to “refrain” from sending in “midday snacks,” Barrios and her husband wanted to follow the pediatrician's recommendation, she says. For the first few days, Barrios says, her daughter ate her snacks. Then one afternoon she returned with them still in her backpack, uneaten. Barrios, alarmed, asked if Alpha was providing different food instead. No, the 9-year-old answered. She told her mom that staff at the school said she didn’t earn her snacks and wouldn’t get them until she met her learning metrics. The Applicant does not provide a fully articulated curriculum consistent with the requirements of 22 Pa. Code Chapter 4. Further, the Application does not meet the needs of vulnerable populations, specifically special education and English Learner students. Additionally, the Application does not provide fully developed professional development or induction plans. In all these areas, the Application is lacking in specificity. As such, the Application is denied.
October 28, 2025 at 3:01 AM
Reposted by Jed Brown
swingingstorm.bsky.social
Ok so the thing happened where I forget that I now have 4x more followers than I used to and I need to explain things more.

Tiny history lesson! Colonization of other people and exploitation of your own have always gone hand-in-hand. But usually in a way that (temporarily) looks good for your own.
swingingstorm.bsky.social Sophia Babai @swingingstorm.bsky.social · 15d
There is still part of me that has a hard time understanding how governments deliberately starve their own people. My people have been starved, many times, but always by colonizers — growing up, I naïvely assumed this benefited colonizers. But no, they take their cruelty home and do it to their own.
October 27, 2025 at 5:27 PM
jedbrown.org
The purpose of a system is what it does. "AI" surveillance is a system of stochastic racist violence.
phillewis.bsky.social Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social · 17d
Baltimore high school student Taki Allen was swarmed by police after an artificial intelligence system apparently mistook his bag of Doritos for a gun www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
a photo of Taki Allen and a bag of doritos
October 25, 2025 at 5:31 AM
Reposted by Jed Brown
olivia.science
I am close to tears; they listened and made an english version apache.be/2025/10/24/b...

@apache.be you rule 🖤
October 24, 2025 at 10:13 AM
jedbrown.org
This draft UCLA deal is full of terms no university should ever consider, negotiated in defiance of shared governance. It includes multiple pages detailing the ways UCLA would pledge to violate California state law regarding gender identity (+ many 1st Amendment issues, ...)
ucop.edu/communicatio...
October 25, 2025 at 4:26 AM
Reposted by Jed Brown
miriamposner.com
WE WON. Again. Think they’ll take it to the Supreme Court? www.latimes.com/california/s...
UC must publicly release Trump administration's $1.2-billion settlement proposal
The California Supreme Court on Friday declined a request from the University of California to block the release of a roughly $1.2-billion Trump UCLA settlement. UCLA is required to share the document...
www.latimes.com
October 24, 2025 at 10:56 PM
jedbrown.org
George Norlin was celebrated for having "the courage to make enemies" (with the KKK-run state gov and 1933 Nazis). What enemies do current administrators have the courage to make other than already-marginalized members of their own faculty, staff, and student bodies?
Duran and other DU faculty and students who spoke to The Post questioned whether the federal guidelines against DEI gave DU senior leaders cover to do away with policies and programs they already wanted chopped. Haefner did not answer whether this characterization was true when asked by The Post. “But what can you expect from a university leadership wanting to uphold the voices of bigotry and white supremacy for the sake of their funding. I’m not necessarily calling executive leadership and the board of trustees homophobic or racist — but if the converse (sic) fits,” Duran wrote in his email to DU colleagues, referring to Haefner, who is known for wearing Converse shoes around campus.
October 24, 2025 at 11:08 PM
jedbrown.org
Is this ... viewpoint diversity?
www.kut.org/education/20...
UT Austin professor dismissed from administrative duties for 'ideological differences'
Gov. Greg Abbott said Art Markman was dismissed from his role as senior vice provost for academic affairs for "ideological differences."
www.kut.org
October 20, 2025 at 9:22 PM
Reposted by Jed Brown
olivia.science
Enjoyed writing this short but sweet [altho not necessarily in message] piece for @projectsyndicate.bsky.social w @irisvanrooij.bsky.social:
> While the AI industry claims its models can “think,” “reason,” and “learn,” their supposed achievements rest on marketing hype & stolen intellectual labor

🧵
projectsyndicate.bsky.social Project Syndicate @projectsyndicate.bsky.social · 24d
Tech companies want us to outsource all cognitive labor to their models. Instead, academics must defend universities by barring toxic, addictive AI technologies from classrooms, argue @olivia.science and @irisvanrooij.bsky.social .
bit.ly/48FNcJj
AI Is Hollowing Out Higher Education
Olivia Guest & Iris van Rooij urge teachers and scholars to reject tools that commodify learning, deskill students, and promote illiteracy.
bit.ly
October 17, 2025 at 3:08 PM