Not all states support recalls. California kind of goes all in on the democracy thing with the ease of introducing ballot initiatives and recalls and such. It’s mostly fine, but it can also result in pretty stupid plays like this.

It’s an abbreviated article that I refuse to pay to access, but as a (former) academic - and a student before that, obviously - this is beyond concerning.

I also do language research and know the importance of training data, but this has all the appearances of a naked cash grab from an institution who nominally justifies its existence on educating students and conducting research. I was never even fully comfortable with commercial funding for academic research (unless they fully disassociated the commercial aspect from the funding and open sourced the results), but this seems beyond the pale.

I’m not even comfortable if they got “informed consent,” because those forms are so often misunderstood and signing them feels like forced compliance. I’m absolutely against it if they didn’t even go that far.

So if they want to show good faith, all of the deans and administrators of U of M should make recordings of all of their phone calls, meetings, and schedules available for research purposes.

Yes. Yes, I do.

Edit: Bought some. Will update if any other plants or ants start glowing unexpectedly.

In our research as experts in the study of people’s employment over time

On the one hand, I think that this would be a terrible job to get fired from. On the other hand, you would be able to write a ten page paper well supported by citations to explain the gaps in your resume.

God damn it. I don’t think that reviewers and publishers are aware as to the potential long term consequences of publishing shit papers that ultimately get retracted. It’s one thing if it’s some physics paper on a new superconductor, it’s another thing if it leads to an antivax movement that’s still going to this day.

I wish we still had David Graeber around. I really appreciated his insights on this kind of dynamic.

Kara Swisher is by far my favorite writer in tech. She’s been around since the beginning, she knows everybody, and she’s smart as hell and isn’t afraid to just let fly.

Yeah, they found what it wasn’t.

It’s a bit of a cliffhanger.

TiVo was an early digital video recorder that dominated the market for a while. Broadcasters brought lawsuits against the company saying the recording of videos was violating copyright laws, and advertisers hated it because you could skip commercials. TiVo argued in court that they weren’t pirating, but just time shifting the content. Similar arguments were used for people who ripped rented dvds and so on.

You should not discontinue medication until you speak with your healthcare provider.

Neuroanatomy and neurochemistry are complex systems. A high level symptom like depression could be coming from any one of a myriad of causes. A given medication works against specific causes, but will not work if your symptoms are being caused by something not targeted by that medication.

Until our technology and understand improves to the point that we can do some kind of neuroimaging to diagnose, the only thing we can do is to listen to your symptoms and make a best guess. If it doesn’t work, it means that guess was wrong, and you either need a dosage adjustment or a medication change. If it does work but has unmanageable side effects, that’s the same. Any continuing symptoms or side effects have diagnostic relevance, and you need to work with medical staff to dial it in.