Really grateful to hear the @citationspod.bsky.social folks tackle inevitability discourse and AI in the most recent episode. I address this a lot in my talks lately because it pairs so conveniently with the “ethics aside” rhetorical move in the university. (Mini-thread incoming.)

Plenty to reflect about re: the Arday affair, but I'm going to repeat this one thing. The playbook the right used here is effective even though it's not especially sophisticated, as it relies on the audience to do the dirty work. I've been calling it "Trojan horse propaganda", let's go with that. 1/

There are academics who falsified entire Datasets for years, their work leading to FEDERAL POLICIES that have gotten less coverage. Lucy Calkins and Columbia University's Teacher's College made it so a whole generation of kids barely learned to read and they didn't get this much attention.

Just realized I accidentally deleted from this story my entire interview with Travis Peddie, who recently tried to keep supervised consumption sites open in Alberta in a court case. 🤦‍♂️ Fortunately, he gave me another big lead so I’ll follow up with all of it soon! drugdatadecoded.ca/how-health-c...

Anatomy of a hush-up: How Health Canada buried the safe supply expert reviews

After a nearly two-year access to information process, Drug Data Decoded has obtained the correspondence detailing steps taken inside Health Canada to ensure the Expert Advisory Group reports on medic...

drugdatadecoded.ca

We've gotta start treating these companies like the pariahs they are

ICE to Pay LexisNexis Millions for Data to Feed to Palantir

LexisNexis sells a massive amount of data to law enforcement, including ICE. New records indicate ICE wants to feed that data into a Palantir system.

404media.co

EVERY STORY ABOUT BEAVERS FOR THE LAST DECADE READS LIKE: WE RELEASED A DOZEN PADDLE TAILED LITTLE FREAKS AND THEY IMMEDIATELY BEGAN A TERRAFORMING PROJECT THAT REVERSED A CENTURY OF ECOLOGICAL DAMAGE IN THREE WEEKS.

Slurms MacKenzie@slurmsmackenzie.bsky.social · 3d ago

Might post some good environment news every so often to showcase that it's not over yet and there are good things happening, we just have to fight for it First: beavers are basically magical creatures that help with drought and flooding, and we're reintroducing them more and more

Oh damn it is way worse. Turnitin was trying to make instructors *personally liable* for mistakes made by its faulty AI detector. The entire FAQ is eye-popping. If you're a journalist, download a copy and consider writing about academic surveillance software.. view-su2.highspot.com/viewer/40018...

Ian Linkletter@linkletter.org · 4d ago

Anyone have a copy of Turnitin's proposed EULA changes that reportedly allowed them to train AI models on student data?

That's a lot of data

Kate Knibbs@knibbs.bsky.social · 5d ago

we have so many good stories on wired.com today but the one that made me laugh out loud is @thiccreese.bsky.social on getting Minority Report'd by McDonalds: www.wired.com/story/mcdona...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

An overview of PROTACs: a promising drug discovery paradigm

Proteolysis targeting chimeras (PROTACs) technology has emerged as a novel therapeutic paradigm in recent years. PROTACs are heterobifunctional molecules that degrade target proteins by hijacking the ...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Me every time someone’s institution shows moral clarity and takes an ethical stand

Charlotte Lydia Riley@lottelydia.bsky.social · 5d ago

Heartened to see that my university is ending its contract with Turnitin before the next academic year, because Turnitin is going to use student submissions to train AI models. Institutions can and should resist this stuff!

"I don't know if the company actually understands how almost degrading and humiliating it is to know that you have to have a babysitter when you're in your 50s, and you've been doing your job for 30 years, and you've been doing it well." www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

'Very hard on your mental health': Canadian workers speak out over software that tracks screen time | CBC News

Workers at some of Canada's biggest companies say increased workplace surveillance is taking a toll on their mental health as their bosses ramp up the use of software that monitors their screen activi...

cbc.ca

GOOGLE DOCS USES AI THAT TRAINS ON ANYTHING YOU WRITE IN IT, EVEN IF ITS A “PRIVATE” DOCUMENT. It’s now possible for users to get Google Docs’ AI to share information that is otherwise not publicly accessible, if it was written in Google Docs at some point. You CANNOT trust it w/ confidential info

A datacentre can can use up to 5m gallons of water a day, equivalent to the consumption of up to 50,000 people. 😑 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

As AI guzzles water and energy, we are already facing a choice: datacentres or homes? | John Harris

Whitehall wants to triple their number in the UK. Yet in Slough, I saw the impact they’re having on communities, says Guardian columnist John Harris

theguardian.com

"An outstanding, patient-centered overview of breast cancer, thoughtfully explaining diagnosis, treatment options, and what to expect along the way." Jennifer Leigh, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre Pre-Order Ten Questions to Ask My Doctor about My Breast Cancer: https://bit.ly/3SqsxTv

AI-generated fake historic images are destroying our past, present, and future Morning File by @suzannerent.bsky.social

AI-generated fake historic images are destroying our past, present, and future - Halifax Examiner

"There have always been plagiarists, careless and lazy researchers, and bad actors. AI in its current incarnation and its rapid, seemingly thoughtless, dissemination just takes it to a whole new level...

halifaxexaminer.ca

*co-advised DSM-5. As Steve Silberman noted in Neurotribes, neurodiversity movement pioneer Jim Sinclair did not speak until 12. It is not always clear when meeting autistic ppl whether they have a history of speech divergence, which often comes w/ strengths: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

The Strengths of Speech Divergence in Autistic People: Implications for Assessment and Support

This narrative review analyzes the visual and auditory advantages that autistic people with speech divergence (A-SD) may have compared with autistic people without speech divergence (A-NoSD) or non-a...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

This is why we talk about prison libraries. This is why we talk about the rights of children. This is why we talk about surveillance (AI and otherwise) and criminalization. It's all connected by a worldview that emphasizes ownership and control of certain populations.

If These Books Are Banned in Prisons, Why Are They In The Schools?: Book Censorship News, August 7, 2026

Book banners asking why books banned in prisons are allowed in public schools shows their whole hand.

bookriot.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.

✨We're talking at NeuroGLAM 2026✨ on 21st August. Come and hear our co-chairs at this free online conference for #neurodivergent gallery, library, archive, and museum workers. Registration here tru-ca.zoom.us/meeting/regi... @drlibraryben.bsky.social

Libraries pay millions to rent ebooks they never own. So maybe it's no surprise Penguin Random House is sponsoring arguments against stronger library ebook rights. www.libraryjournal.com/story/news/m...

Moving Beyond the Publisher Playbook: Why State-Level Contract Law is Essential to the Future of Digital Library Rights

The era of mere “firefighting” and polite, incremental negotiation is over. The library sector is asking for relief from ebook pricing schemes that consume tremendous amounts of public dollars while p...

libraryjournal.com

Chronicle tried to charge us 15% increase this year cause they implemented AI

Prof. Nicole Holliday@mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 2w ago

This is the part that breaks my heart. "Generative AI has broken the sacred contract between professors & students: that the professors are there to teach and the students are there to learn. The understanding has been broken...That’s a very deep part of the grief” www.chronicle.com/article/thes...

Did Medieval Castles Really Have Dungeons? www.medievalists.net/2026/08/did-... #medieval #castles

Did Medieval Castles Really Have Dungeons? - Medievalists.net

Dark underground dungeons are closely associated with medieval castles, but historical evidence reveals a very different story about imprisonment in the Middle Ages.

medievalists.net

Fall is right around the corner. If you need someone to come into your LIS course to talk about scholcomm or e-resource librarianship I am available. I am currently making a zine on e-resources for librarians and students.

What developed capitalist states often deride as *rampant corruption* in the more peripheral economies is merely a historical gap; the latter have simply not yet legitimised such practices as *lobbying*. Brilliant investigation at the @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin · ‘This looks absolutely rubbish’: Palantir and the NHS

A decade ago Palantir was largely unknown in the UK. It now holds public contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds...

lrb.co.uk

Inspired by the summer film and Discourse, some freshman are going to show up to register for classes in Ancient Greek and Ancient History only to find that those courses and faculty no longer exist.

🥳 Happy to report our co-ed collection, me + @ruthdav.bsky.social & @evecolpus.bsky.social, now has 40k+ hits & is being cited a lot 🥳. Fully #OA & incl: @katebradleyhistory.bsky.social @chrismillard83.bsky.social @sarahcrook.bsky.social @jennycrane.bsky.social ++. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

What I love about this painting is how it conveys the importance of the early c18th in the Victorian imagination as the time of ghosts, irrevocably beyond living memory. There would have been people still alive born in the late c18th, after all

Mika Paananen@painmike1.bsky.social · 2w ago

Adelaide Claxton, “The Party on the Stairs”(1875). #SpookySunday

"It did not comment on how the tribunal reached the decision that the plagiarism was accidental. Documents seen by the Financial Times, including two essays submitted by the third-year student, show nearly half of the pages of O’Reilly’s published article had been plagiarised."

Charles West@pseudo-isidore.bsky.social · 2w ago

www.ft.com/content/ae7f...

I work at a public library. People who want to use AI seem to have no trouble doing so. People who don't want to use AI have a harder time. I crowdsourced and then finalized this document "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI" and then gave it a short URL: notoai.org Please pass along if it's useful