Dave Palfrey

Pleased with this 2025 achievement! The countries shaded red amount to half world population, but are grievously under-represented on Wikidata. 2025 saw over 20,000 women from these countries added, up from ~34,500 to over 55,000. A year ago they were only 0.83% of Wikidata bios. Now they're 1.17%.

If the only way you get publicity is to dunk on @wikipedia.org then your project is probably whang Full rant here: vm.tiktok.com/ZGdCtryKg/

Last night I dreamt that I had been engaged to give a private lecture on the history of classification to David Bowie. Good times.

Oh dear. Pool. Pool. Poor man.

Reflections on the Ongoing High School Movement in France www.endnotes.org.uk/palabre/leav...

I gave a talk at EMF titled "Men in Tech #YesAllMen", in which I told my experience of being a woman in tech. I was afraid to publish it in case it affected my current or future employment. With all the current news I would like to add my 2¢. So here is the recording: youtu.be/WXL6K1lhvt0?...

This interview with Michael Behrent on the 100-year anniversary of Michel Foucault is really great. If you ever wanted to know what the “death of man” really meant, this is your chance! www.commonwealmagazine.org/steinmetz-je...

Incroyable! (and only a day late for his 100th birthday . . .) a forgotten video interview with Michel Foucault, now with Eng subtitles (via @feelingtheory.bsky.social and friends . . .) youtu.be/20vTp2Mem_I?...

This by Nick Cammarata is elegantly written, hopeful, & a fascinating account of someone changing their mind. He was once a pessimist about neural network interpretability, thinking that superposition led to polysemantic tangles. Now he sees neurons as mostly interpretable classificatory gates.

Do Need Evil

Norway raises billions taxing the wealthiest. Mexico slashes poverty by raising the minimum wage. The world takes a major step closer to an International Panel to tackle inequality. All in less than two minutes. Welcome back to the Public Good News

Philosophy ftw

Great thoughtful review 🧵 (I've been putting off The Price of Peace because I over-binged on Keynes biogs 25 years ago. Equally dumb!)

Under a corrupt or authoritarian leader, wealth concentration incentivises the crazy-rich, with widespread business interests, to make loss-making media acquisition. By currying political favor, they gain rents - whether with enthusiasm (Musk) or more reluctance (Bezos). Here's the economic model.

I'm finding this also. Do any librarians know what might be going on? #viaf #oclc #LibrarianSky

@oclc.org viaf.org hasn't been working for many hours, no search gives any results, all links give an error message

But all those little kidnaps in the dark. -Anne Carson, Nox revisiting this oddly arresting box of words tonight #everynightapoem

Oy. Thinking Aloud is one of the shows being culled. Because having someone talk to academics with genuine intellectual curiosity about their research is, um, so very expensive?

NEW: Keir Starmer declared last year that the “peace dividend” was over, promoting the myth that Britain’s military spending has declined since the end of the Cold War.   Our latest report shows this simply isn’t true. 🧵

About a year ago I dug into the story of James Shearer, a corporal in a field hospital in WWI who thought he'd invented a revolutionary new medical device. He hadn't. But ... things got a little out of hand. Finally wrote it up: www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2026/ja...

Getting back to adding women from the less-well-represented half of the world to #Wikidata. Spent yesterday and today on DR Congo. I haven't seen the documentary by Marie-Rose Tshite, but her research into women peacebuilders has been a fantastic resource. 🇨🇩 ♀️

I'd wondered about intellectual precursors of the American right's weird recent 'empathy is bad' talk. I didn't expect a strand going back to Murray Bowen's family systems therapy: Edwin Friedman, Bowen's student, argued anxious efforts at empathy cause dysfunctional group 'gridlock' & 'herding'

#shortpoemsunday @tomsnarsky.bsky.social

whenever I read an imaginary herman melville book in my sleep I like to follow it up by reading a real herman melville book in my awake without any delay, in order that my ideas about literature should remain as grounded in fact as may be possible. you can call this a superstition if you want

there is that in me which is rogue o imagine my dismay

Yes, this seems true to me.

You can read digitised issues of She (1970-1973), Mukti (1983-1987), and more in the South Asian Heritage collection on LSE Digital Library: digital.library.lse.ac.uk/collections/... @lsesouthasia.bsky.social #TheWomen'sLibraryat100

I'd missed that Warren Brodey died last year. Pleasingly, though, Morozov's 2018 thesis on Brodey (supervised by Peter Galison) is now out of embargo.

I'd always thought it hyperbole when people said of media content that it 'made them want to puke'. I hadn't then encountered BBC Radio 4's When It Hits the Fan. Predatory, fawning, systematic misdirection of human intelligence into complacent celebration of arbitrary privilege. Pure fucking evil.

The OpenAI hack of the Austrialian government is better described as misaligned company activity than misaligned model activity. There's been thinking about these artificial agents and how to constrain them for centuries: Hobbes on the state, law which treats companies as legal persons.

How to cite women on Wikipedia: a patriarchal catechism 1. Cite not women 2. When citing women, mention not their name 3. When mentioning their name, mention it not in main text but only in endnotes 4. When mentioning their name, link it not (Racist, &tc. variants of this catechism also available)

yay, the theologians are getting into Critical AI Studies! Call for papers for conference on 'Intelligences: Human, Artificial, Planetary – and perhaps Divine' Submission deadline: 5 October 2026

As many yawne, when they see others yawne; and make water, when they see others doe so: so many are moued to take businesses in hand not by any certaine aduised iudgement, but they imitate what they see in others. #PalladisTamia #FrancisMeres

And now abideth covid, brexit, austerity, these three; but the greatest of these is austerity.

This is lovely. Thank you, whoever put in the work to make this happen.

Now looking forward to this book launch for two reasons. First, it's a fabulous book. Second, I just received a reminder email which suggests there might be more elaborate ceremony than I had expected: "Please be there on time as we will have to sing you in."

When will the Prime Minister visit the site and show he stands shoulder to shoulder with the volunteers? I know his spokesman made a statement, but he needs to be there, showing his support and that he backs decent heroes against the far right?

📚 Book Launch: 'Vector Media' by Fabian Offert @zentralwerkstatt.org & Leonardo Impett 🗓️ 22 Sept, 16.30 📍 KCL, Macadam Building MAC 106 Panel w/ @joannazylinska.bsky.social, @dchavezheras.bsky.social, @mrsbunz.bsky.social Hosted by Creative AI Lab 📝 Register: www.tickettailor.com/events/digit...

What on earth happened to Ideologiekritik? I'm struck that - even among leftist cultural commentators - there is so little recourse to the language of ideology. Is it just that 'we tried talking like that, and the world didn't change in ways we hoped?'

Acute and funny and wise. RIP Bonnie Greer.

A new report out from @unep.org documents our collective failure to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees and makes an urgent call for action to return from overshoot before it's too late. "Overshoot is not an argument for resignation, but rather for urgency to action." www.unep.org/resources/li...

Helen Choi on 'knowledge commoning', arguing that academics should defend Wikipedia against gen AI enclosure of the knowledge commons. "The classic commons problem arises from overuse: too many actors drawing on a finite resource pool. [But w]hat diminishes Wikipedia is disuse rather than overuse."

So pleased to see @zackpolanski.bsky.social demanding the Government’s suppressed then redacted report on ecosystem collapse be published in full. People can’t prepare for what they don’t know - concealing this report is unforgivable #WildSummit

A thought on databases vs narratives. Narratives are designed to be consumed in a particular sequence. This aligns circumstances of production & consumption: the writer is 'first reader' (Lyotard). Such alignment is an edge case for DBs, where write/read queries often group elements very differently

Join us on 17 September at 6pm to explore the stories and thoughts that underpin our current art exhibition 'Attention is the Rarest and Purest Form of Generosity' Led by Beverley Carruthers with Clio Lloyd-Jacob, Idit Elia Nathan, Sara Paynter, Sarah Wood & Rachel Wooller ℹ️ https://bit.ly/4wWFAuV

Can any library folk suggest suitable organisations to take on this collection? RIBA perhaps? 📚