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Hey did you know that you can’t escape fatphobia even after death? The article talks about how these donated bodies are used for first year anatomy students to study the body, and how the 'perfect' body for that should be 170-180 pounds.

The Chronicle of Higher Education

AI Assistants Keep Joining Meetings. Administrators Say It’s Out of Control.

The trend marks the latest example of tech development outpacing governance.

At the California Institute of the Arts, it all started with a videoconference between the registrar’s office and a nonprofit.

One of the nonprofit’s representatives had enabled an AI note-taking tool from Read AI. At the end of the meeting, it emailed a summary to all attendees, said Allan Chen, the institute’s chief technology officer. They could have a copy of the notes, if they wanted — they just needed to create their own account.

Next thing Chen knew, Read AI’s bot had popped up inabout a dozen of his meetings over a one-week span. It was in one-on-one check-ins. Project meetings. “Everything.”

The spread “was very aggressive,” recalled Chen, who also serves as vice president for institute technology. And it “took us by surprise.”

The scenariounderscores a growing challenge for colleges: Tech adoption and experimentation among students, faculty, and staff — especially as it pertains to AI — are outpacing institutions’ governance of these technologies and may even violate their data-privacy and security policies.

That has been the case with note-taking tools from companies including Read AI, Otter.ai, and Fireflies.ai.They can integrate with platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teamsto provide live transcriptions, meeting summaries, audio and video recordings, and other services.

Higher-ed interest in these products isn’t surprising.For those bogged down with virtual rendezvouses, a tool that can ingest long, winding conversations and spit outkey takeaways and action items is alluring. These services can also aid people with disabilities, including those who are deaf.

But the tools can quickly propagate unchecked across a university. They can auto-join any virtual meetings on a user’s calendar — even if that person is not in attendance. And that’s a concern, administrators say, if it means third-party productsthat an institution hasn’t reviewedmay be capturing and analyzing personal information, proprietary material, or confidential communications.

“What keeps me up at night is the ability for individual users to do things that are very powerful, but they don’t realize what they’re doing,” Chen said. “You may not realize you’re opening a can of worms.“

The Chronicle documented both individual and universitywide instances of this trend. At Tidewater Community College, in Virginia, Heather Brown, an instructional designer, unwittingly gave Otter.ai’s tool access to her calendar, and it joined a Faculty Senate meeting she didn’t end up attending. “One of our [associate vice presidents] reached out to inform me,” she wrote in a message. “I was mortified!”

Ramadan for non-Muslims: An etiquette guide

During Ramadan, when your Muslim friends are fasting, is there anything you should be doing? You can follow these tips

Read this & be mindful of those partaking in Ramadan. 

Making this a separate post: It's super super important that we keep our activist work focussed on Palestine after the ceasefire. On the food aid, on the prisoner releases, on the reconstruction of essential services and the reconstruction as a whole, on the free travel of journalists and researchers to document the genocide, on the human rights and land rights of Palestinians, on the new political conditions, on BSD and on continued pressure on Israel and it's collaborators, on the West Bank, and more.

From Naomi Klein's Doppelganger about 2009:

We met Mona Al Shawa, a Palestinian women’s rights activist, who told me, “We had more hope during the attacks; at least then we believed things would change.” Now, she said, outside attention had moved on and Gazans once again felt abandoned by the world. The idea that there was more hope when they were under active air assault still haunts me.

We can not abandon Palestine. This time has to be different.

I literally am in tears at the beauty of this. So much care and skill into making this exceptionally personal one-off greeting card.

it’s crazy how absolutely blatantly luigi’s constitutional rights are being breached and people seem more concerned about his appearance than a real, scary view of the power CEOs and the healthcare industry have over the legal system. like yeah he looks good in those photos i can appreciate that too but can we focus on the fact that the media is absolutely treating him as if he has already been found guilty. this could happen to anyone. anyone could be arrested over the death of a wealthy, influential person and the precedent being set right now is essentially that the prosecution can run wild and create documentaries declaring your guilt. like that’s really serious and scary.

“WaPo: “President Donald Trump on Sunday declined to rule out seeking a third presidential term — an unconstitutional act explicitly barred under the 22nd Amendment — saying that ‘there are methods which you could do it.‘””

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As If Everything Wasn’t Bad Enough

Every election until he dies is going to be January 6. You get that, right? He’s never going to leave. He will never follow the law. He will never uphold the Constitution.

He is a criminal. He is a rapist. He is corrupt to the core. He is a fascist. He is evil and stupid and is the same sundowning old man we saw during the campaign. He’s still the liar who went on and on about people eating pets. He’s still the leader of the coup. If America truly believed in the lies they teach us about our history and our government, he would be in prison right now, for the rest of his putrescent life.

None of this was a secret. The stupid fucking idiots and the deeply evil racists who voted for this piece of shit knew it, and they voted for him, anyway. A lot of them voted specifically because they knew that.

Fuck them.

I will never forget, and I will never forgive them for what they did to us.