“When people ask for a blessing, an exhaustive moral analysis should not be placed as a precondition for conferring it. For those seeking a blessing should not be required to have prior moral perfection.”
“A little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just.”
“Right now we don’t have a very good relation with Creation.”
I am sad today, though heartened by this man’s words and example. RIP.
Amtrak’s X/Twitter feeds have been less witty the last couple of days, as 70 train cars have been taken out of service “for vehicle corrosion.” These include all but one of the cars on the Amtrak Cascades line, and no trains will be leaving Vancouver at all anytime soon. No wit can burnish this calamity. These trains take me to see my dear ones in Washington State.
My favourite way to travel is by train, so I follow all of Amtrak’s accounts. They are very witty:
When Southwest Airlines announced they were charging for bags, Amtrak posted on X, “Guess we’re the only ones doing free baggage now.” …
The post, followed by more info on Amtrak’s baggage policy, is an example of what Amtrak senior manager of social media Nicolle Lopez calls its infotainment strategy, designed to educate and entertain at the same time.
“The minute [you] feel something is a little bit too polished, a little bit too scripted, or the minute you feel like it’s an ad, your thumb just [swipes] immediately,” said Lopez. [NPR, “How Amtrak keeps its social media strategy on track for Gen Z”]
Mastering that type of tone is harder than you’d think.
In his article “Enshittification, artificial intelligence, and the privatization of public education,” Dr. Chris Samuel warns that artificial intelligent’s infiltration into education (AIED) will likely mimic the same depressing “enshittification” users saw in platforms like Facebook, Google, and X/Twitter.
First, a platform provides a novel experience and value with big promises of making that experience better and better as more people join and the platform grows. Think of Facebook for example, with its initial promise to show you content generated by your friends (and only content generated by your friends) without spying on you or harvesting your data. As more people joined, Facebook enjoyed a “network effect,” meaning both that the user experience improved (you have more friends to follow, more groups to like!) and that the cost of remaining outside or leaving got higher (you’ll miss out on all those friends and groups!). In effect, friend groups got locked into Facebook. It was time for stage two.
In the second stage of enshittification, platforms sell their user base to advertisers and publishers. Facebook broke its promise to only show you the content you asked for (by following friends and subscribing to groups) and instead began to show you ad content. They also broke their promise not to spy on their users and began harvesting data to sell to advertisers. In doing so, Facebook re-allocated the value of their product away from the user base and toward advertisers and publishers. Soon enough, advertisers and publishers also become hostage to the platforms. Practically the only way to get eyeballs on their ads, videos, and stories is to have the platforms force their content into users’ feeds. At this point, the time is right to re-allocate value again; this time it goes to the platforms’ shareholders.
In third-stage enshittification, advertisers, who had been getting cut-rate deals to show their products to users, start having to compete against each other to be at the top of feeds. Publishers, who used to be able to get users over to their own websites by showing some teaser text with a link, start getting punished (by being sent further down the feed) unless they include full-text articles with no way of redirecting readers off platform.
At this point, enshittification is complete. Platforms no longer function to provide either an optimal user experience or an optimal business experience. They only provide an optimal profit experience for their shareholders.
I can certainly see this happening with AIED. That said, platforms like ChatGPT never thrilled me the way early iterations of Facebook and Twitter did. These made my life better, by bringing me closer to other people.
From The Public Domain Review:
Another year dawns… and another bevy of works dust off their copyright and emerge fresh-faced, full of hope, into the elysian plains of the public domain! On this year’s Public Domain Day (which falls each January 1st) we welcome, in lots of countries around the world, the works of two titans of 20th-century art, Frida Kahlo and Henri Matisse, and in the US a handful of seminal books including William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
Due to differing copyright laws around the world, there is no one single public domain, but there are three main types of copyright term for historical works which cover most cases. For these three systems, newly entering the public domain today are:
- works by people who died in 1954, for countries with a copyright term of “life plus 70 years” (relevant in UK, most of the EU, and South America);
- works by people who died in 1974, for countries with a term of “life plus 50 years” (relevant to most of Africa and Asia);
I added The Public Domain Review’s blog to my Feedly feed earlier this year. As someone who has spent so much of his life in publishing, and still thinks of himself as a publisher, I find this publication utterly edifying and wholly charming.
Scholarly journals hide everything from people who can’t afford to read them. Large language models steal everything from people who can’t afford to lose anything.
Reposted from basil.CA:
2025
Next year, at summer’s end, I will be retiring from Kwantlen Polytechnic University. I will remain open to other contract opportunities elsewhere after that, but this will be it for me as a full-time prof. The decision conveys my acceptance that I am just not the marvellous teacher I used to be: The oil in my olive is no longer extra-virgin, and my students and I share fewer and fewer references in culture and in history.
A friend wrote me earlier: “Give a special mindfulness to every day in the classroom. These years that defined you will no longer be your lifescape. You are a teacher and took that as a trade and an obligation quite seriously and you got a lot of joy from it. Just savour all the days between now and when you’re over the wall.” I will.
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Addendum: I expect that NoContest.CA will go on well after my retirement. Indeed, I hope to expand its reach once I have more time to spend here.
When interviewing candidates for teaching positions at my university, I often ask them how they provide and receive feedback in the workplace, to get a quick, vivid picture of their character and initiative. When you give clear and useful feedback to your colleagues, you make them better. When you receive feedback gratefully and attentively, you make *you* better.
One applicant told my Search Committee that when she got criticism at work she would run down to a nearby park and throw rocks at the geese. We wished her well.
“The Inukshuk is my friend.”
The Invictus Games are coming to Vancouver and Whistler in February. It will be the first time winter sports events will be featured “in addition to the core Invictus Games sports of indoor rowing, sitting volleyball, swimming, wheelchair rugby and wheelchair basketball. Vancouver and Whistler were selected as the host cities by the Invictus Games Foundation following a competitive bid process.”
Prince Harry, Founder and Patron of the Invictus Games Foundation, writes:
The Invictus Games Vancouver Whistler 2025 will offer a global platform to expand the range and profile of winter adaptive sports. With deep respect, I’m also pleased to share that the Games in Canada will be held in partnership with the First Nations, in the spirit of truth and reconciliation with Indigenous communities.
Universal Design for Learning Education and AI Social Media Policy Kwantlen