Martin Ruskov @mapto@social.cleverlibre.org

🇧🇬 Bulgaria and 🇷🇴 Romania must join the Schengen area!

We urge the EU Council and EU countries to accelerate the accession process, emphasising fulfillment of all conditions for both countries.
Imposing additional conditions for their Schengen accession will:
🔹 create confusion between the area of free movement and irregular migration;
🔹 complicate political decisions;
🔹 dangerously disrupt the proper functioning of the EU.

Read our resolution: https://europa.eu/!brgNGJ

#Schengen

The New York Times once published a news story about Hitler in which the reporter wrote -- and editors approved -- the following: "But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers..." (see screenshot).

That should have been an indelible lesson. It wasn't.

The Times repeats its worst failures. It's institutional.

“Users in several European countries have been subjected to false claims that senior Ukrainian officials and their relatives bought luxury cars or villas abroad after Russia's invasion in February 2022.

The fake TikTok videos played a part in the dismissal last September of Ukrainian Defence Minister”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67687449

An update on a loop made 2 years ago

New patterns of partnership are emerging among scientific powerhouses. https://t.co/JQqQMe9bB5

📊 The DataWrapper people put together their favorite #dataviz #ddj pieces of the year (by all kinds of media orgs) in this post:

https://blog.datawrapper.de/data-vis-dispatch-december-19-2023/

Really cool stuff, I could spend hours checking out the details.

My latest article for Forbes is on a fascinating new study from US-based researchers. It suggests that at lower speeds in urban areas, narrow traffic lanes are safer (for everyone) than wide ones....and that by repurposing these excessively wide lanes, US cities could accommodate better and cheaper cycling and pedestrian infrastructure #urbandesign #walkability #bikelanes
https://www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.forbes.com/sites/lauriewinkless/2023/12/20/want-safer-city-streets-make-traffic-lanes-narrower/amp/

Very interesting long read on “value capture” — when measurements like grades, citation counts, or step counts take over the true values (learning, writing, health) you actually care about. Also related to “stop the numbers game” by David Parnas (“Counting papers slows the rate of scientific progress”).

https://philarchive.org/rec/NGUVCH
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=a185c913482fc0d0e42291bec4748e24438c130b

Via @smallcircles, @aredridel
#ErkennenWaarderen #RecognitionRewards

Green AI research is advancing, but practitioners still struggle to find actionable techniques to make ML-enabled systems environmentally sustainable. In our #ICSE2024 SEIS paper, we synthesized a catalog of 30 green architectural tactics.

Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09610

The tactics can improve the energy efficiency of ML-enabled systems along the full life cycle, ranging from data-centric to deployment-related tactics.
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It’s a shame that the DLF podcast “Dark Avenger” https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/dark-avenger-100.html isn’t also available in English, as it’s not bad (even if slightly more dramatic than necessary). @bontchev and I were interviewed for it.

This is what Stable Diffusion thinks the Dark Avenger looks like 🙂

Important PSA:

NEW: LAION, the gigantic dataset powering Stable Diffusion, several Google products, and other prominent AI tools has been taken down from the internet because it contains thousands of images of child sexual abuse material

https://www.404media.co/laion-datasets-removed-stanford-csam-child-abuse/

A year ago, Motherboard published a story about nonconsensual porn and terrorist beheadings sitting in this dataset. The issue was being openly talked about in the development team's Discord. We asked about the issue and the team started deleting messages and said this:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/93ad75/isis-executions-and-non-consensual-porn-are-powering-ai-art