Notices by Brian C. Keegan (bkeegan@hci.social)

Interviewed by my college media team about loss of Crowdtangle and trend of evaporating research data access more generally. https://www.colorado.edu/cmci/news/2024/08/23/research-info-crowdtangle-disinformation-keegan

At the start of the RNC last week, #PredictIt was forecasting a 69% chance that Trump would be the next President.

Those odds not only fell over the course of the RNC, their fall accelerated since Biden's withdrawal.

Current predictions stand at 59%.

https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7456/Who-will-win-the-2024-US-presidential-election

“The social ills of computing will not go away simply by integrating more ethics instruction or codes of conduct into computing curricula. A better approach to addressing these problems would be to move the academic discipline of computing away from engineering-inspired curricular models and supplement it with the methods, theories, and perspectives of the social sciences.”

#academicchatter #CSEd #academia

https://cacm.acm.org/research/why-computing-belongs-within-the-social-sciences/

No one could’ve predicted Mr. Free Speech punishing a journalist for asking anything but softball questions.

@ntnsndr @andresmh If only there were some theories about the need for constitutional-level mechanisms to sustainably govern common pool resources.

2022: Databases for JPEGs are gonna transform everything.

2024: Stolen autocompletes are gonna transform everything.

2026: Uber-for-militias are gonna transform everything.

2028: Autojammers for drones are gonna transform everything.

2030: Off-grid solar batteries are gonna transform everything.

#superbowl

Interesting and timely bill introduced in the #Colorado Legislature this session:

Candidate Election Deepfake Disclosures

"Concerning the use of a deepfake in a communication related to a candidate for elective office, and, in connection therewith, requiring disclosure, providing for enforcement, and creating a private cause of action for candidates."

https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb24-1147 #coleg

Already exhausted by the Mastodon HOA’s catastrophizing about Threads.

Federate or don’t federate, but there’s millions of normie users already here and more coming.

Most are going to write off an allegedly “open” alternative that was hostile to their existence before they even arrived.

If you’re going to impose sub-par experiences on users, don’t be surprised when users flock to alternatives.

It’s unbecoming to celebrate #Kissinger’s death…

if you don’t include alt text on your memes.

It’s easy to dunk on midlife Elon for lighting $44 billion on fire to own the libs.

But it’s hard to fathom the enormity of this destruction of value.

Harvard University has attracted significant and deserved criticism about its embarrassingly large endowment.

In 2019, Harvard’s endowment was $40 billion.

The income from this pile of money reliably pays out 5% per year, or $1.8 billion.

Just remember: “A 44 billion endowment could indefinitely pay for $2 billion of stuff per year.”

1/🧵

The budget requested for the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) in 2023 was $1.15 billion.

That’s a very large fraction of the nation’s total investment in graduate students, researcher salaries, infrastructure, and services for research about computing.

$44 billion of Elonbucks could have permanently altered the structure and dynamics of computing research in this country.

2/🧵

One of the final and most emotional moments of Obama’s tenure involved the announcement of a Cancer Moonshot.

A massive influx of funding to accelerate cancer research.

Set against the backdrop of Biden skipping the 2016 race because Beau had just died of brain cancer.

How much money are we talking? $1.8 billion per year for seven years.

$44 billion of Elonbucks could have accelerated cancer research forever.

3/🧵

Total foreign aid spending on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance?

$2.2 billion per year.

The investigations budget for the IRS?

$800 million per year.

4/🧵

If we just went full megalomaniacal narcisst:

Award 100 $20 million Musk Laureates annually?

Pay 20,000 Musk Fellows $100,000 per year?

5/🧵

But when you hear “every billionaire is a policy failure” just remember that $40 billion could profoundly transform humanistic endeavors at a national scale on a timescale of centuries.

And then reflect on how some people have multiples of that amount.

6/🧵

Congratulations to @shayshinecastle on becoming the Editor-in-Chief of Boulder Weekly.

I'm so grateful to be in a community that supports a rich ecosystem of experienced journalists and local publications.

https://boulderweekly.com/opinion/worth-a-fortune/

Our department is hiring a tenure-track assistant professor with a focus on #Accessibility and #Design!

Please share widely — job market students, junior faculty, and industry folx all encouraged to apply!

#A11Y #AcademicJobs #Fedihire @academicchatter

https://jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDetail/Assistant-Professor-Information-Science/52624

Fascinating example of politically-motivated content moderation on NextDoor.

Local anti-homelessness ballot measure is endorsed by Boulder County GOP.

I post a link about it—referencing the official GOP announcement—and predictable NextDoor conversation ensues.

Post gets then gets reported by the pearl-clutching brigade and taken down for *misinformation* even though the link to the official announcement is in my post. 🤡

Great job @ruchowdh, @yoyoel, @zoeschiffer in this #Frontline documentary! 🙌 https://www.pbs.org/video/elon-musks-twitter-takeover-x81imo/

2023 mainstream journalists sent back 1860: “South Carolina secession declaration contains passages with racial undertones.”