Jen Raso
@jenraso.bsky.social
Law prof researching digital government, AI systems, and other socio-legal-technical things | www.jenraso.com
Our annual conference 2027 call for papers is out now! Latent Spaces: an interdisciplinary conference on how AI latent spaces reconfigure knowledge, society, and culture. We invite interdisciplinary contributions. Abstracts deadline 30 November. leverhulmecal.webspace.durham.ac.uk/lcal-confere...
LCAL Conference 2027 - Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life
LCAL Conference 2027 Call for Papers Latent spaces: probing, interpreting, situating The Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life Inaugural Annual Conference April 14-15, 2027 Durham University,...
leverhulmecal.webspace.durham.ac.uk
Spoilers: all 10 ended up being desk rejected. - 1 paper withdrawn - 1 author was too busy for a call - 1 author no-showed - Authors of 3 papers couldn't answer basic qs - Authors of 3 papers could, but not technical qs - 1 author answered all qs, but paper had a major flaw
TMLR has faced a deluge of submissions, necessitating stricter desk rejection policies due to limited reviewer capacity Co-EiC Nihar Shah reached out to authors of 10 papers slated for desk reject. Could they answer questions about their *own* submission? medium.com/@TmlrOrg/ask...
Asking Authors About Their Own Papers
By Nihar B. Shah
medium.com
A pleasure to revisit @shannonmattern.bsky.social's 'Maintenance & Care' w/ fresh eyes! "In many academic disciplines & professional practices ... maintenance has taken on new resonance as a theoretical framework, an ethos, a methodology, & a political cause." Next: 'Field Notes: Repair' series.
Places Journal@placesjournal.bsky.social · last wk.For an overview of the many articles Places has published about the repair, maintenance, and care of the built environment, check out our most recent email newsletter: A Reading List for International Repair Day. Like the journal, it’s free to read.
Journal editors & research funders commonly report a doubling (+) of submissions as LLMs promise to circumvent the difficulty that is writing. Now people seem to be using Copilot to automate email my daily inbox also doubled to around 200 per day. It’s now useless to me. Among the hallucinations:
No one is allowed to send anymore emails until 2027 We have enough
Same here. And the autotriaging/filing that my email provider continues to do without my intervention or request for it "to assist" is making things worse.
Shannon Vallor@shannonvallor.bsky.social · 3mo agoNot even in the top 10 of AI problems, but I'm never going to be able to read or answer your very human email from two weeks ago, thanks to the six dozen unbidden AI 'books', 'manifestoes', 'opportunities' and 'requests for assistance' that arrive daily, and which I must claw through to get to yours
“The litigation has revealed a clear pattern: Uber’s lawyers scour women’s private communications, medical records, therapy notes …They grill the women about those issues, their sex lives and their behavior on the night of the incident.” www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/b...
Uber’s Strategy for Fighting Sexual Assault Suits: ‘What Were You Wearing?’
The ride-hailing giant promised to handle legal claims “in a way that is best for the survivor.” Its lawyers are pursuing a far more aggressive strategy.
nytimes.com
Minnesota just plugged a 710-megawatt #solar farm into a coal plant that once burned 30,000 tons a day. The unique approach to connecting the panels to the grid allowed it to sidestep a typically years-long connection process.
Minnesota just plugged a 710-megawatt solar farm into a coal plant that once burned 30,000 tons a day, the two sharing wires until the last boiler dies in 2030 — and one retired coal unit will keep sp...
Retirement does not mean the old hardware stops working entirely, either. One of the retiring units is being converted into a synchronous condenser, a huge
autonocion.com
This is a very serious problem for libraries, archives, and knowledge-keepers of all kinds. If you don’t control access to your collections, *you do not have collections.* If we do not have permanent access to records, stories, & sources of knowledge then our histories and memories are not our own.
Shannon Mattern@shannonmattern.bsky.social · 3mo ago"In 2022, Wiley removed over 1,300 ebooks from academic library collections; [they said] perpetual access is not an option for subscribed content. In 2025, Clarivate,... announced they would stop offering libraries perpetual access licenses for ebooks and primary-source digital collections."
"It’s as if we launched a war against nature, and that has turned place after place into something that resembles a war zone," writes @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social. "The climate movement is a peace movement, a movement to end this war and its casualties."
We launched a war on nature. Now we are in a climate warzone | Rebecca Solnit
Summer is not what it once was. We have been robbed of one of life’s great joys
theguardian.com
More photos of the larkspur at the small flower farm near Wicken, Cambridgeshire, for a good dollop of floral dopamine 🌿:
It looks like the most critical digital ID systems in Norway - which people use to access public services, health services, financial aid etc have been under a massive DDoS attack for the past 23ish hours. Likely state backed. Something to keep an eye on. www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/Okld...
Sikkerhetsekspert om angrepet i Norge: – Står øverst på listen for dem som vil angripe
I Digitaliseringsdirektoratets egen risikovurdering for 2025, ble det pekt på manglende evne til å kunne identifisere og oppdage avanserte digitale angrep.
aftenposten.no
This feeling of overwhelm is precisely why students and I spent the first half of my Regulating AI course at McGill Law reading this book from cover to cover. We then mapped out the AI system elements Hao describes and used them as sites to ground our regulatory discussions.
the moon report 🌔@seachanger.bsky.social · 3mo agothe relentlessness of the AI headlines and data center fights starts to feel chaotic and difficult to hold cohesively in my mind UNTIL i listen to another interview with Karen Hao, and then I feel clear and get my talking points back in order www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/...
Joy is a form of resistance, too <3 This poem also makes me think of this powerful quote by Dan Savage: "We buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.”
Damn... 300% higher yields for peppers 200% for tomatoes. 65% lower water use for jalapenos. #agsky #agrivoltaics ,🌱🌞🔌..
hoergen@hoergen.bsky.social · 3mo ago*American farmers slid solar panels over 62,000 acres of farmland, and the biggest payoff had almost nothing to do with electricity* #Erneuerbare #Renewable #Solar #Photovoltaik energiesmedia.com/solar-panels…
Protest organized against 'devastating' data centre in Sturgeon County www.stalbertgazette.com/local-news/s...
Protest organized against 'devastating' data centre in Sturgeon County
Read the full story and comment on stalbertgazette.com
stalbertgazette.com
Our relationship to visual evidence is being profoundly disrupted by GenAI tools, which will impact how we know, what we can know, and what we think can be known about the world. A massive epistemological shift is upon us.
Faine Greenwood@faineg.com · 3mo agoI used to do some work on the ethical use of satellite and drone imagery for aid and disaster response, and it is genuinely hard to express in words what a dangerous, stupid thing Google is doing by making it easy to use GenAI to create faked satellite imagery:
New article on wildfire smoke in the Canadian Medical Association Journal 🍁 "Relying on people to protect themselves is not enough & top-down strategies such as building measures to ensure quality of indoor air & legislation to protect outdoor workers are needed" www.cmaj.ca/content/197/...
Wildfire smoke air pollution: new approaches needed to protect people affected
cmaj.ca
This article reiterates key points Jutta Treviranus made in a breathtaking keynote at #FAccT2026. One is how statistical marginalization affects many people. People "out of distribution," whose experiences are "noise" in population datasets, but who are collectively large in number, and growing.
Inclusive Design Research Centre@idrc-ocadu.bsky.social · 6mo agoJutta Treviranus recently wrote an opinion piece for University Affairs about how AI homogenizes humanity and devalues outliers. Read the piece: buff.ly/kSLedqU #AI #AIethics #AIequality
How do we build governance that's truly community-led? Join us Aug 19, 1 PM EDT: “Creating Participatory Architecture” with Madeline Toubiana (uOttawa) & Natalie Eng (UAlberta). Free and accessible. Register: ocadu.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
Municipal/local government law is often an afterthought in conversations about regulating AI in Canada. But it has the potential to do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to determining where the physical infrastructures underlying AI systems are located, or whether they get built at all.
Emmerson Jull@emmersonj.bsky.social · 3mo agoMississauga councillors vote 11-0 to support a one-year pause on data centres. If approved on Sept. 16, this could be the first interim control bylaw in Canada. It’s likely to face appeals. My latest for @nationalobserver.com www.nationalobserver.com/2026/07/29/n...
Many in the migrants' rights sector have been warning about exactly this. AI is absolutely not suitable for being used in asylum cases. Not only because of the risk of "hallucination", but also because it is unable to deal with the nuance and complexity. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
Home Office used ‘AI hallucinated’ information to refuse asylum claim, judge suggests
Upper tribunal unable to find document cited in case and claims it is ‘analogous to relying on bogus evidence’
theguardian.com
This pattern of politicians running against their own bureaucracies as champions of the people was tagged as "the dysfunctional dance of local governance" by Mariana Valverde when she saw it in Toronto in EVERYDAY LAW ON THE STREETS from 2012. Its biggest beneficiary? Rob Ford.
Justin McElroy 🇨🇦@jmcelroy.bsky.social · 3mo agoA funny thing about Vancouver's Villages rejection happening so close to the election is Ken Sim's office posting a statement being like "we listen to the wisdom of the people" and ABC Vancouver sending supporters an email being like "we're protecting you from city bureaucrats who are garbage"
Today’s the day! Our multimedia exhibit Undercurrents just launched - featuring Ahmed Alaqra, Brad Isaacs, Carlie Trosclair, Danielle Boudreau, James May, Manuel Axel, Matou, Pari Mokradi, & Steve Maldonado Silvestrini. freshwaterfishfutures.ca/undercurrent... Funded by @sshrc-crsh.canada.ca
UNDERCURRENTS EXHIBIT 2026
Undercurrents is an online multimedia exhibit that explores artistic responses to water, fish, and aquatic ecologies, where materiality, memory, myth, and metaphor converge.
freshwaterfishfutures.ca
Yes. Once again thinking about Kate Losse’s work: modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-m...
The Male Gazed
Surveillance, Power, and Gender
modelviewculture.com
The Spook Who Sat by the Ring Doorbell@hypervisible.blacksky.app · 3mo agoFWIW, Meta was fully aware of how these glasses would primarily be used. The glasses were designed to erase consent, and that is why they exist. Anything that they do that suggests they want to ameliorate this use is an attempt to win the PR battle and manipulate public opinion.