Preparing ourselves for November

Posted on August 25, 2024 by Robert Basil

Dr. Kate Starbird and her colleagues at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP) have launched a Substack newsletter devoted to tracking rumours and misinformation concerning the upcoming United States Presidential election. This newsletter is part of the group’s “rapid research” initiative.

We will write our rapid research analyses in “posts” here, while also cross posting to our website, where you can see the rest of the 2024 U.S. Election Rumor Research.  The “notes” function of Substack will allow us to quickly share and send observations about election rumors that may not merit a full article. …   

This first post covers the background of the CIP, our approach to election rumor research, and some of the anticipated outputs for this cycle. It is an updated version of an earlier article and reflects some changes due to evolving data access, methods of analysis and communication, and personnel.

I first got to know about Kate Starbird when she was a basketball star for Stanford University in the mid-nineties. After a stint in the WNBA, she returned to university (University of Colorado) to earn a PhD in Technology, Media, and Society. Now she’s teaching and doing research at the University of Washington. Earlier posts her described her work on Crisis Informatics and Election Delegitimization.

Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged , | Leave a comment

“If you have any tips and tricks for evading censors, please contact us.”

Posted on August 18, 2024 by Robert Basil

This sentiment, published in The Economist by Gabriel Crossley, has made my Sunday. Crossley notes that in China VPNs (“software which makes it appear as if a computer or mobile phone is located in another country”) have been “getting slower” and “less reliable” this summer.

Foreigners who live here are complaining. So are many Chinese. On Weibo, a social-media site, netizens said their “ladders” over the great firewall (as VPNs are known) seemed to have broken. … It is probably the Chinese government disrupting the networks.

Technically it is illegal to use a VPN in China without official permission. But things are usually less strict in practice because the government finds VPNs useful too. Without them foreigners would be less likely to visit and local businesses would struggle to find overseas customers. So in the past officials struck a balance. They only throttled VPNs during important events, such as the meeting of China’s legislature every spring.

Language Log writer Victor Mair points out:

This is a significant phenomenon. It reminds me of the years after the Tiananmen Massacre before the internet was widely used and people relied on fax machines to spread urgent news, all the fax machines were required to be turned off in the weeks before and after 6/4 [the anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square].

Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Counter

Posted on August 11, 2024 by Robert Basil

I have had truly unpleasant interactions with people I’ve known for years – including with those in academia – during these Olympics. Their loathsome disdain for transgenderism made them attack a non-transgendered woman, a boxer from Algeria, in giddy displays of ignorance and hatred. I will be interested in how this complaint against X (formerly Twitter) develops. From Aljazeera:

Imane Khelif … Algeria’s flag bearer in the closing ceremony, won gold Friday in the women’s welterweight division, becoming a new hero in her native Algeria and bringing global attention to women’s boxing. …

Khalif was unwittingly thrust into a worldwide clash over gender identity and regulation in sports after her first fight, when Italian opponent Angela Carini pulled out just seconds into the match, citing pain from opening punches. False claims that Khelif was transgender or a man erupted online, and the International Olympic Committee defended her and denounced those peddling misinformation. Khelif said that the spread of misconceptions about her “harms human dignity.” …

—

The complaint was filed Friday with a special unit in the Paris prosecutor’s office for combating online hate speech, alleging “aggravated cyber-harassment” targeting Khelif, lawyer Nabil Boudi said. In a statement, he described it as a “misogynist, racist and sexist campaign” against the boxer.

It is now up to prosecutors to decide whether to open an investigation. As is common in French law, the complaint doesn’t name an alleged perpetrator but leaves it to investigators to determine who could be at fault.

Additional context here. And more of Khelif’s own, honestly powerful words here.

One cannot even point to misinformation as the cause for the attacks I witnessed first-hand. People were chomping at the bit. I was dismayed.

Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The speaking body

Posted on July 3, 2024 by Robert Basil

There has always been an oral-communication component in my upper-level business communications classes. I used to justify this to my students this way: In my own professional life, no matter how beautifully clear and researched the documents my clients pay me for are, they still want me to come into their office and explain my work to them. There is no way around it.

Now that AI platforms have made it very easy to generate text for student work, I have another rationale for the oral-communication requirement. It is not only a handy way for students to demonstrate that they know and really understand what they wrote, it might also be the best way.

Knowledge exists in the body and in the pulse of time, three things that come together in the human voice speaking to others. This knowledge blooms through conversation.

Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged , | Leave a comment

“Time is of the essence.”

Posted on June 3, 2024 by Robert Basil

This story is from the online news publication “Jolt: The Journal of Olympia, Lacey, and Tumwater” [in Washington State]:

Starting Monday, June 17, Intercity Transit will cease posting rider alerts on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter).  This decision comes in response to changes in the algorithms of these platforms, which prioritize content based on user interest rather than chronological order.  As a result, real-time updates have become ineffective and often cause confusion when delivered late. 

A decade or so ago, both Twitter and Facebook were praised for their utility in disseminating important information regarding urgent situations in real time. Indeed, back then their success in this was matchless when compared to traditional news organizations and municipal and other governmental public-communications arms. These platforms relinquished their salutary roles, though; in other words, they stopped giving a shit about helping people.

—

Addendum: Into this online-media environment “Jolt News” arrived in 2020. It is a vibrant and intelligent citizen-journalism platform that makes me smile in my heart. Anti-information behemoths are swallowing the old local journalism outlets. Long live the new alternatives. Olympia, Washington is my second hometown. This platform is how I keep up to date when I’m away.

Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Balance and scale

Posted on May 10, 2024 by Robert Basil
Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged , | Leave a comment

ChatGPT and email

Posted on May 6, 2024 by Robert Basil

As a university prof, I both teach and, to some extent, accommodate AI platforms in the classroom. This has been a daunting, trying, and humbling experience that requires continual adjustment and correction. But there is no way around it.

The hardest thing for me to adjust to: receiving AI-generated emails from students. The tone of these emails is usually “off”: too solicitous, or formal, or expansive. Sometimes they just seem bizarre. What really startles me, though, is this: I cannot hear a human being saying the words.

I estimate that since puberty I have spent approximately a third of my waking hours reading. I have a very fine ear for reading. And for me, the ground zero of reading is reading correspondence addressed to me. This is more fundamental to me, in terms of human interaction, than conversation.

When I receive an AI-generated email, even when it has been carefully fine-tuned, I see only a disguise, not the person – and I cannot hear a thing. This is profoundly unnerving to me. I need to get over this painful reaction.

Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Posted on April 4, 2024 by Robert Basil

West End murder of crows (2010).

Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged | Leave a comment

An old-fashioned take-down

Posted on March 19, 2024 by Robert Basil

Becca Rothfeld’s book review “Lauren Oyler thinks she is better than you” is a thorough evisceration of Oyler’s book No Judgment. You don’t see many reviews like this these days. Critics that attack books typically go after the author’s political or cultural stance – indeed, often use the occasion of their reviews to promote their own contrasting positions.

Critics of old of course did the same thing, but they supplemented this approach by also writing reviews of the author’s quality of mind – say, of that author’s poor cerebral and compositional hygiene. Rothfeld’s amusing Washington Post piece is of that latter sort.

—

Addendum: The New York Times review tries to be nicer but damns with faint praise. Both pieces therefore make me relieved I am not Lauren Oyler this week, though they don’t make me think I am better than her.

Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged | Leave a comment

Learning but slowly

Posted on March 7, 2024 by Robert Basil

Apropos the use of AI in academia, a student asked me, “We want to work more quickly in the workplace, but do we really want to LEARN more quickly? Is that even possible?”

To the latter question, I would say yes, it’s possible. I know there are concepts that one can learn in a flash. Not all fields of learning are like this, though. Think of cooking, or learning how to play the saxophone; these activities exist within the flow of time, having their own pace that demands your accommodation. Real understanding here happens by accretion and duration; it doesn’t come to you in a flash (though some insights will).

I’ve quoted this story by Anne Lamott to Psychology students in my technical writing class struggling with literature reviews for their Honours projects:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

Posted in Robert's posts | Tagged , | Leave a comment