🕷️Creepy AI crawlers are haunting the internet🕷️

This Halloween, Tanu I and @ccs.bsky.social ocial explain how AI crawlers are ruining the internet for all of us.

Read this season’s real horror story in @techpolicypress.bsky.social

www.techpolicy.press/creepy-ai-cr...

There's a cost to breaking out of the dominant platforms, but if we don't then we're complicit in, and perpetuating, their vile behaviour. www.404media.co/meta-is-bloc...

Qualitative coding requires a deep engagement with the data that leads to novel insights, new research questions, and more nuanced understandings of the phenomenon of interest. Quantitative methods are good for verifying hypotheses about the phenomenon at scale. A healthy field needs both.

For years, we ran a large project involving (manual) qualitative coding. We had a few technical students who negotiated their way out and opted for a more tech-centric role (eg topic modeling). 100% of our papers (and novel research questions) were led by the students doing the qualitative coding.

The OII's second annual Halloween Lecture, delving into the statistical horrors of the untranslated Voynich Manuscript. Now online: www.weirddatascience.net/2024/01/28/r...

I'm really not emotionally prepared for going to buy a book on Amazon and seeing "You last purchased this item on 22 Nov 1999".

U Toronto is hiring for an infosec professor to be affiliated with Citizen Lab: citizenlab.ca/2023/12/assi...

The Internet has improved the world in countless ways, but it is not a given constant that we can take for granted. Learn how we’re continuing our work at @internetsociety.bsky.social to protect the Internet in the 2024 Action Plan: isoc.pub/2024-AP

The UCL InfoSec group has an open faculty position (all grades) in 2024. Full advert to appear in due course, but in the meantime key information can be found at sec.cs.ucl.ac.uk/hiring-2024/. To find out more, join our information session at 2pm UK time on Tuesday 12 December.

Every once in a while I'm reminded of Blue Zones - areas of the world where people supposedly live for extremely long times - the billions people have spent researching this idea, and the quite convincing evidence that the entire thingis just based on pension fraud www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My OII Halloween lecture, applying NLP and Bayesian statistics to the occult mysteries of the undeciphered 15th century Voynich Manuscript, now online: youtu.be/nl7QRWIRcSk?...

JOIN US, in Oxford, or online, on the 30th October for my Halloween Lecture! www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/...

I have an ironfast rule that I will not comment on things that I don't understand well enough, but wanted to share this interview by @reutersinstitute.bsky.social's Eduardo Suarez with @shayan86.bsky.social is very good.

reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/bbc-exp...

"We need negative criticisms from others, since they lead us to understand weaknesses in our arguments that we are incapable of coming at ourselves"

Every few months I reread this @himself.bsky.social post to remind myself of sth that's hard to stomach but needed

crookedtimber.org/2020/07/24/i...

No, wait. Hear me out.