Tootfinder

“What is political agency?” is an interesting text about how to approach political activism that has impact. I also learned something about garlic preserved with honey. https://write.as/conjure-utopia/what-is-political-agency

What is political agency?
What is political agency? Agency is the faith that your actions will have an impact on the world. Ideally, the impact you want to have. T...

Dame Stella Rimington, the first woman to head MI5,
has passed away.
The Daily Express obituary highlights her trailblazing career.
Appointed director general in 1992, she was globally recognized as the first female head of an intelligence agency.
Rimington joined MI5 in 1967 as a part-time typist at the British High Commission in New Delhi,
transitioning from what she described as a “bored housewife”.
Throughout her career, she confronted Russian spie…

Press Review - Serious mood and fewer perks: Silicon Valley enters its 'hard tech' era
PRESS REVIEW – Tuesday, August 5: As the plastic pollution summit begins in Geneva, Libération highlights the little-known but devastating scourge of plastic pellets ravaging the planet. Also, Silicon Valley’s shift into a new “hard tech” era reflects a changing political climate; former CNN journalist Jim Acosta sparks controversy after interviewing an AI avatar of a school massacre victim. And, the press pays tribute to Stella Rimington, the first woman chief of MI5.

On Thursday, the Trump administration issued an executive order
🆘 asserting political control over grant funding,
-- including all federally supported research.
The order requires that any announcement of funding opportunities be reviewed by the head of the agency or someone they designate,
💥which means a political appointee will have the ultimate say over what areas of science the US funds.
Individual grants will also require clearance from a political appo…

New executive order puts all grants under political control
All new funding on hold until Trump administration can cancel any previously funded grants.

Participatory AI: A Scandinavian Approach to Human-Centered AI
Niklas Elmqvist, Eve Hoggan, Hans-J\"org Schulz, Marianne Graves Petersen, Peter Dalsgaard, Ira Assent, Olav W. Bertelsen, Akhil Arora, Kaj Gr{\o}nb{\ae}k, Susanne B{\o}dker, Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose, Rachel Charlotte Smith, Sebastian Hubenschmid, Christoph A. Johns, Gabriela Molina Le\'on, Anton Wolter, Johannes Ellemose, Vaishali Dhanoa, Simon Aagaard Enni, Mille Skovhus Lunding, Karl-Emil Kj{\ae}r Bilstrup, J…

Participatory AI: A Scandinavian Approach to Human-Centered AI
AI's transformative impact on work, education, and everyday life makes it as much a political artifact as a technological one. Current AI models are opaque, centralized, and overly generic. The algorithmic automation they provide threatens human agency and democratic values in both workplaces and daily life. To confront such challenges, we turn to Scandinavian Participatory Design (PD), which was devised in the 1970s to face a similar threat from mechanical automation. In the PD tradition, tech…