szescstopni @szescstopni@social.cleverlibre.org

Little bit of background on experts in the news:

Back when I was still in university, sometimes my professors appeared in news articles. More often than not, they didn't appear, but the same 2-5 others experts of the country appeared (again and again and again).

As students we asked some professors how this all came to be. Who appeared where and how? We got the following explanation:

A news outlet decides they want to create an article or video. The tone and conclusion of the piece have already been decided. Then they contact many experts in that field. For example, a query they would send out is: "Hello, we're looking for experts to talk to about X."

Not many experts respond, but some do. The query they will get in response will be something like: "Thanks for your interest, we are looking for someone to confirm that X leads to Y and Z."

My professors told me that in their naive days, they would still keep interacting and correcting and suggesting other takes. "Actually, Y and Z aren't like that, it's too simplistic, but I could talk about A and B and how it leads to maybe Y in your article."

What would happen? They were ghosted of course. 😂

Among many experts, news outlets would eventually always find one or two people willing to confirm their shitty clickbait shit. And once these experts work along, they get contacted more frequently than others. Experts who keep correcting and being difficult, aren't contacted again.

I studied in a very niche field and I know all experts in that field in my country. I started to recognize who would work along and what they would gain from it. I now know who's blacklisted and who is being kept out of the news and why.

This has been in the back of my mind during the #pandemic. I assume things work the same way among virologists, epidemiologists, and other related experts. It's frustrating because they carry the title of expert, they come across as knowledgeable and the media spreads their words everywhere. It's made to appear as if these experts represent their whole field and all others in it.

But how many experts have these news outlets had to contact before finding someone who was willing to collaborate with their minimizing?

#covid #covid19 #CovidIsNotOver #COVIDisAirborne

Hey social science research geeks with a niche interest in obscure human computer interface studies, help me out here.

Has there every been research done on whether the avatar a person is using for an online account influences their online personality and posting style?

#research #SocialSciences #ComputerStudies #HCI

Anyone after #retroComputing fonts?

Just found this GitHub repository full of fonts for quite a few systems

https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of-bitfonts/tree/master

A deer at the farm, she was lying down in tall grass when I spotted her. And then she ran off into the soybeans, leaping through them.
Nikon z6ii, 700mm, f/9, 1/800s, ISO 640.
#DeerOfMastodon #FarmPhotography

From Tumblr. I might as well post it myself...

Jako osoba z wykształceniem energetycznym, traktuję wszystko poniżej 1 kV jako "niskie napięcie". Należy wziąć to pod uwagę, jeżeli przyjdzie wam mnie kiedyś zapytać, czy coś jest pod "wysokim napięciem".

To powiedziawszy, krzywię się, ilekroć widzę tabliczkę z ostrzeżeniem o "wysokim napięciu", i myślę sobie "nie ma opcji, żeby tam wcisnęli 110 kV".

This is real. I just took this screenshot.

#Google #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #LLMs #LLM

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/14/wisconsin-pushing-bill-that-requires-websites-to-treat-all-users-as-if-theyre-children/
Did you know that on a mobile network, many many people might share the same IP Address? Pretty mundane thing.

There are other ways in which IPs are unreliable and don't mean a specific person. Again, lawmakers making very shallow assumptions here...

This is the same mistake Elon made and it bit him too.

Now, this might sound radical, but usually parenting prevents minors just fooling around all night (although gotta sleep too). Nanny state much?

How do you measure "accuracy"? Is it exaggerated marketing materials? Is it artificial tests in the lab?

Also, at scale, that is still a nightmare, and can effectively lock a lot of people out (who might quite vulnerable and / or disproportionately affected).

I've seen these systems going wrong in practice. Often, that is it, you are out.

#Portland #Oregon temps are cresting toward 105 degrees today, while the governor wants to allow developers to cut down shade trees and drain wetlands.

We don't need more land for affordable housing. We need better mass transit so we can infill and build over the blacktop that exacerbates the urban heat island effect.

👻

#Zandvoort #Streetart #Sticker

Update:

It crashed. For a snake woman, I am surprisingly bad at Python.

Bjarki the #corgi #puppy is something of a menace. But he makes up for it by being pretty darn cute.

New article in the journal, *Wetlands*: Phosphorus Fluxes in a Restored Carolina Bay Wetland Following Eight Years of Restoration #Wetlands #Restoration #Phosphorus https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-023-01725-z

Wszyscy mówią że teraz sprzęt jest kijowy i psuje się od razu, a dawniej to był sprzęt który w ogóle się nie psuł.

Właśnie skapłem się (szukając instrukcji) że pralkę zakupiliśmy równą dekadę temu :) do dziś nie było ani jednego serwisu, ani jednego czyszczenia etc... nawet się dowiedziałem dziś z instrukcji że posiada taki program xD

IMHO kupować dobry sprzęt nie szajs z chin i wtedy będzie działać... Warto też o niego dbać (sprawdzać kieszenie przed praniem etc.).

#polishish