Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
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paulallen.ca
Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
@paulallen.ca
1.5K followers 1.9K following 1.6K posts
Clinical director of intensive mental health services for children and youth in Canada (ret.). Believer in Truth and Reconciliation. Denier of Denialism. Student of semantics and statistics. "AI" too.
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Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
drjenndowd.bsky.social
Yes, @rebeccasear.bsky.social has a great piece on this www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Demography and the rise, apparent fall, and resurgence of eugenics
Demography was heavily involved in the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century but, along with most other social science disciplines, largely rejected eugenic thinking in the decades after...
www.tandfonline.com
December 4, 2025 at 5:12 PM
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albertocairo.com
In the newsletter: 'Why Dashboards That Deliver' by @datarevelations.com @abmakulec.bsky.social and @acotgreave.bsky.social by should be your next read openvisualizationacademy.beehiiv.com/p/why-dashbo...

#dataViz #infographics #dataJournalism #dataVisualization
Why Dashboards That Deliver Should Be Your Next Read
openvisualizationacademy.beehiiv.com
December 4, 2025 at 1:24 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
naomiaklein.bsky.social
loved this conversation. Anyone need a crash course on why the intersection of AI, fascism and climate breakdown? We tried to cover it all!
ccj-ubc.bsky.social Centre for Climate Justice @ccj-ubc.bsky.social · 1d
🚨The video recording of the AI and the Politics of Extraction panel is now live! Watch this fascinating 1.5 hour discussion with @naomiaklein.bsky.social, @profwhw.bsky.social, @mysdick.bsky.social, and @profhvdv.bsky.social as they explore the risks of unfettered AI implementation.
AI and the Politics of Extraction | Centre for Climate Justice
YouTube video by Centre for Climate Justice
www.youtube.com
December 4, 2025 at 4:00 AM
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bildoperationen.bsky.social
This is a great and very valuable list that Eryk has compiled, and I am more than grateful he included my essay on «Platform Realism.» Such a great honor! Many pieces in there I've missed, so I'll be busy the next hours checking them out …
eryk.bsky.social Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 1d
It’s that time of year: what was the piece of writing about AI that stuck with you the most this year, pop press or academic? A few of mine in the thread. ⬇️
December 4, 2025 at 5:20 AM
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bildoperationen.bsky.social
Such a great and important piece!
December 4, 2025 at 5:21 AM
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cdsamii.bsky.social
A blog post giving a more thorough take on survey experiments and the credibility revolution: cyrussamii.com?p=4168
December 3, 2025 at 5:23 PM
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rsimmon.bsky.social
I just published a new installment of “A Gentle Introduction to GDAL” — Python & the Command Line.

#dataviz #cartography #python #gdal

medium.com/@robsimmon/a...
A Gentle Introduction to GDAL Part 10: Python & the Command Line
Scripting directly on the command line with Bash or Zsh is relatively straightforward: work out a sequence of commands, then wrap them in a…
medium.com
December 3, 2025 at 6:00 PM
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lawfaremedia.org
As the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China continues, Weijia Rao explores how Beijing has begun to adopt laws that mirror the national security legal tools that America has deployed against it. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/chin...
China’s Turn to National Security Lawfare
The U.S.-China rivalry is fueling a legal arms race.
www.lawfaremedia.org
December 3, 2025 at 8:03 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
ruddock.bsky.social
chaser: after local outcry against a massive proposed AWS data center near Tucson (yes, in the desert!), developers agreed to use a less water-intensive cooling system.

AWS has now backed out because "its operations aren't compatible" with the less water-intensive option.
tucson.com/news/local/s...
December 3, 2025 at 4:26 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
nicklalone.com
The Machine Stops (1909) by E. M. Forster

Here's a PDF:
www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teach...
December 3, 2025 at 1:29 PM
paulallen.ca
Pete Tuffrey (British Artist, born 1953)
"The Bolton Wanderer", 2025.
Oil on Canvas, 16" × 12".
Private Collection.
December 3, 2025 at 1:32 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
nrennie.bsky.social
The statistical performance indicators data from the World Bank for 2024 has been released today, and I've been working on a little interactive explainer 📊

Check it out here: nrennie.rbind.io/statistical-...

#DataViz #ggplot2
December 2, 2025 at 11:30 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
footypol.bsky.social
This is what we need. A way of talking about AI literacy that centres critical thinking!!!
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 2d
New preprint! @marentierra.bsky.social @irisvanrooij.bsky.social & I have been working on what CAIL means to showcase & propagate the idea of thinking very differently to tech industry norms on "artificial intelligence"

Towards Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacies doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

1/
Figure 1: The important dimensions of CAILs across research and education; clockwise from 12 o’clock: Con- ceptual Clarity is the idea that terms should refer. Critical Thinking is deep engagement with the relationships between statements about the world. Decoloniality is the process of de-centring and addressing dominant harmful views and practices. Respecting Expertise is the epistemic compact between professionals and society. Slow Science is a disposition towards preferring psychologically, techno-socially, and epistemically healthy practices. The lines between dimensions represent how they are interwoven both directly and indirectly.
December 2, 2025 at 10:23 PM
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tehabbygal99.bsky.social
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
How are still not being genocided? Y’all treat us like lab rats to this day! And want to hide it all behind racist fears and projections. Land back will happen! #Landback
Mohawk Mothers worry potential evidence at McGill University work site will be destroyed | CBC News
A spokeswoman for the group says workers could destroy evidence, but McGill says agreement is being honoured.
www.cbc.ca
December 2, 2025 at 2:32 AM
paulallen.ca
🇨🇦😠
mikamckinnon.bsky.social Mika McKinnon @mikamckinnon.bsky.social · 2d
Shopify’s former COO (left in Sept 2025 to CEO of Opendoor) Kaz Nejatian cofounded far-right propaganda outlet True North with his wife, Candice Malcolm, then promptly platformed Proud Boys, a white supremicist group.
December 2, 2025 at 3:01 AM
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isabelcorpus.bsky.social
Excited to share a new working paper!

What happened when Change.org integrated an AI writing tool into their platform? We provide causal evidence that petition text changed significantly while outcomes did not improve. 1/

arxiv.org/abs/2511.13949
Introducing AI to an Online Petition Platform Changed Outputs but not Outcomes
The rapid integration of AI writing tools into online platforms raises critical questions about their impact on content production and outcomes. We leverage a unique natural experiment on Change$.$org...
arxiv.org
December 1, 2025 at 8:32 PM
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doriantaylor.com
there was this which has a handy-dandy venn diagram: bsky.app/profile/oliv...
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
December 2, 2025 at 2:14 AM
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dsquintana.bsky.social
New preprint 🎉 Living systematic reviews ensure evidence stays current osf.io/preprints/ps...

In this brief comment (all four pages are here ⬇️), @iaiversen.bsky.social and I cover the benefits and challenges of living systematic reviews, along with two ways to increase their uptake

🧵 1/8
December 1, 2025 at 7:13 PM
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lawfaremedia.org
Nathan Sanders and Bruce Schneier highlight four choices–similar to those faced during the advent of social media–that private and public actors must reckon with that will dictate whether artificial intelligence will be used for pro-democratic or civically destructive ends.
Like Social Media, AI Requires Difficult Choices
Social media was supposed to amplify our voices, but it ended up controlling us. Will AI be the same?
www.lawfaremedia.org
December 1, 2025 at 7:40 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
erictopol.bsky.social
Remarkable story of a Georgia high school team who used CRISPR to make a rapid diagnostic test strip for Lyme disease, speeding dx from 2 weeks to days
www.cbsnews.com/news/teens-m...
Teens may have come up with a new way to detect, treat Lyme disease using CRISPR gene editing
To compete at iGEM, a sort of science Olympics, teens at a Georgia high school set their sights on finding a better way to detect and treat Lyme disease. Their approach uses CRISPR gene editing.
www.cbsnews.com
December 1, 2025 at 4:06 AM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
emilymbender.bsky.social
The promised thoughts on this topic -- too long for a thread, so as a blog post instead:

bsky.app/profile/emil...
December 1, 2025 at 2:01 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
walks30.bsky.social
Humans were travelling with dogs 10,000 years ago, a new study finds

Paper: Genomic evidence for the Holocene codispersal of dogs and humans across Eastern Eurasia doi.org/10.1126/scie...
Humans were travelling with dogs 10,000 years ago, a new study finds
www.ctvnews.ca
December 1, 2025 at 11:08 AM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
astrokatie.com
The most precious commodity you have is your attention. You don’t have to waste it on poor-faith debates or arguments with strangers if you don’t think they’ll be productive. You can prioritize the things that matter to you and make your life richer.
November 30, 2025 at 8:00 PM
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josephcox.bsky.social
Something very strange is happening to the Apple Podcasts app. Over the last few months I’ve found the Podcasts app will randomly open religion/spirituality podcasts. Sometimes app opens by itself and directs people to potentially malicious website. Apple no response

www.404media.co/someone-is-t...
Someone Is Trying to ‘Hack’ People Through Apple Podcasts
For months Apple Podcasts has been randomly opening spirituality and religion podcasts by itself, and in one case directing listeners to a potentially malicious website.
www.404media.co
December 1, 2025 at 2:16 PM
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news-flows-ir.bsky.social
The Once and Future Riot by Joe Sacco review – a masterclass in visual reportage

The author of Palestine turns his attention to the legacies of Indian partition in this brilliant portrait of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots

Joe Sacco is one of a very small number of graphic novelists who have...
The Once and Future Riot by Joe Sacco review – a masterclass in visual reportage
The author of Palestine turns his attention to the legacies of Indian partition in this brilliant portrait of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots
www.theguardian.com
November 21, 2025 at 1:01 PM