Coachella is trying to wipe all of the footage of The Strokes protest set so I’m gonna post it here. The last images on the screen made me cry.

<em>Policy Studies Journal</em> | PSO Public Policy Journal | Wiley Online Library Research on advocacy coalitions suggests that belief homophily—the tendency of actors to coordinate based on shared policy beliefs—drives coalition formation. However, coalition opportunity structure...

Examine this PSJ article how institutions and shared beliefs shape advocacy coalitions across democracies.

By: Keiichi Satoh, @anttigronow.bsky.social ronow, Tuomas Ylä-Anttila, @anadelicado.bsky.social, Luisa Schmidt, Pradip Swarnakar, Paul M. Wagner, Sun-Jin Yun.

Read here: lnk.ua/lyA7zLK5P

Couldn't agree more.

A painting detail showing a winged figure with a skull-like face, dressed in full-body feather costume and headdress, sits on a chair in front of the edge of a cauldron, a long horn in one hand, inkpot and paper by their side. Two heads of people bobbing in cauldron at bottom-right.

A painting detail showing a horned, winged demon has an animal skin wineskin over their shoulder, and is force-feeding someone at their feet.

A painting detail showing a green, winged demon with a shaved head, beard, wings, and breasts with wind instruments sticking out of them force-feeds a coin into someone’s mouth. A three-eyed demon peers over their shoulder.

Here's my Halloween Smithsonian piece about a #Renaissance painting of hell. Sign up for my free newsletter to receive the story of the making of the essay!
3/3

www.smithsonianmag.com/history/this...

We're organising a workshop on Political Geology in May. Come and join us.

Applications open for our PhD in Climate Change and Sustainable Development Policies. It's an opportunity for studying in Lisbon with some of the best researchers in the field. Taught in English.
alteracoesclimaticas.ics.ulisboa.pt/en/

Also 👂🎧👂 when you have a few mins! Oral history is a powerful means for learning from emotions & experiences, critical for building bridges and collaborating beyond disciplines. Drawing on lived memories of RELU, Valuing Nature, STEPS research & beyond #HistSTM #envhums #STS #sustainability #scipol

Microsoft Virtual Events Powered by Teams Microsoft Virtual Events Powered by Teams

Webinar 'Citizen Engagement in PilotSTRATEGY: What Communities Are Telling Us'.
Key findings from PilotSTRATEGY's citizen engagement activities across France, Spain and Portugal.

Registration events.teams.microsoft.com/event/869285...

Fascinating.

AI is not a peer, so it can’t do peer review If we still believe that science is a vocation grounded in argument, curiosity and care, we can’t delegate judgement to machines, says Akhil Bhardwaj

'to treat peer review as a throughput problem is to misunderstand what is at stake. Review is not simply a production stage in the research pipeline; it is one of the few remaining spaces where the scientific community talks to itself.' 1/3

Finally some scholarship on what we've all been watching unfold. But I would use a word other than junkification, borrowed from Doctorow.

that's me.

No EU Business with War Criminals They call this a “peace deal.” We call it a cover-up for crimes no ceasefire can erase. Call on the EU to suspend its trade deal with Israel, stop arms exports, and sanction perpetrators of human…

📣 Add your name to demand the EU suspend trade with Israel.
Because every euro traded means more weapons, more suffering, more lives lost.

👉 Sign the petition: go.wemove.eu/NoDealWithIs...

New publication (in Portuguese) with @jussararowland.bsky.social and João Estevens, the final article of the CONCISE project. It's part of a thematic issue we organised on science communication. revistas.rcaap.pt/analisesocia...

Next week we will be talking about social acceptability of a low TRL technology. Come and give us feedback: 748dd9f9.sibforms.com/serve/MUIFAL...

Science is always political.

The dawn of the post-literate society And the end of civilisation

Falamos que parecemos viver numa época de estupidez, e creio que estamos lentamente a admitir a causa. Este é um óptimo artigo sobre o fenómeno

open.substack.com/pub/jmarriot...

Whatever you do, please don’t stop reading.

Read for joy. Read for education. Read for resistance. Read banned books. Read books by marginalized authors. Read about experiences that differ from your own.

Just. Keep. Reading.

THIS is what’s happening in Gaza:
- Destroying homes
- Cutting off aid
- Taking children’s lives
- Starving an entire population

Yet in Europe, Israel is still welcomed to play football, as if nothing is happening. Italy and other countries are preparing to host them for the World Cup qualifiers.

Worth a reading: www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

o que querem é destruir os prédios que nasceram ali à volta para construir a escadaria. e desalojar os moradores

I do miss in person conferences, but there are a 1001 reasons why travelling to the US is not a good idea.

At a conference half a world away (online). Yesterday @jussararowland.bsky.social took my place in presenting about our current CCS projects very late in the evening, today it's my turn to replace her on a presentation on AI and governance.

Academics are under unrelenting pressure to accept the narrative of the inevitability of #generativeAI & to embrace it in teaching & learning. We resist - because it is ecologically destructive, ethically corrupt, & because it undermines the thinking abilities that make us both human & intelligent.

The energy I bring to social events: Ai is 💀 the planet and chat gpt is making you stupid

People love it

Heatwaves, wildfires and the hot summers that could change how we holiday With rising temperatures causing chaos worldwide, what does it mean to be a tourist in a world on fire?

Since the majority of academics don't want to limit their privilege of conference tourism to protect the planet, the warming planet will force them to do it.

"We have already entered the beginning of the age of non-tourism..."

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

📢 Call for Papers 📢

RN24 Midterm Conference call for papers: Technology in the face of global challenges

RN24/SSTNET invites submissions on the role of technology in addressing today’s global challenges, with a special focus on Europe

🗓️ Abstract deadline: 19 Sept 2025
🗓️ Conference: 26–27 Nov 2025

La plaza del Ayuntamiento de París se ha transformado por completo. Árboles, sombras y un espacio mucho sano para sus vecinas y vecinos.

Claro que es posible no tener plazas que se conviertan en una sartén durante el verano, solo hace falta querer hacerlo.