caitlin mcgrane

@caitlinaithne.bsky.social

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she/her
researcher at rmit & deakin. interested in gender, technology and everyday life. ultra-marathoner in my spare time 🌿

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caitlin mcgrane

Europe digesting the US presidential debate

A colleague/friend from the Uni of Southern Denmark is studying digital audio entertainment and she needs participants in a brief survey. Participate anoymously here: www.survey-xact.dk/LinkCollecto...

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Our head of policy @floreani.bsky.social in The Guardian today exploring some of the problems with proposals to ban children under 16 from social media: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

OpenAI and Wall Street Journal owner News Corp sign content dealwww.theguardian.com Deal lets ChatGPT maker use all articles from Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Times and Sunday Times for AI model development

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For #PrivacyAwarenessWeek I spoke to ABC Radio Perth yesterday about Google finally rolling out their 'Results About Me' tool which allows individuals to request Google remove specific instances of websites hosting personally identifiable information about them. www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

New tool allows more control over what appears when your name is Googled - ABC listenwww.abc.net.au What comes up when you google yourself? If there's something of concern, the search engine now offers a way for you to request that link is removed.

Call for participants! I'm helping to organise this workshop at RMIT on 23/5 as part of Melbourne Design Week with Larissa Hjorth & Jed Brubaker. It's on AI + the afterlife and will be good fun. Sign up here: events.humanitix.com/ai-the-after...

Gendered harms including online abuse and domestic violence are serious problems that require connected but divergent solutions. This approach from the govt just ain't it. Reeks of untested, panicked approaches, not drawing on expertise or evidence base. www.pm.gov.au/media/tackli...

www.pm.gov.au

With the news this morning (from NSW police commissioner: www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...) that the Bondi attacker was targeting women, it's worthwhile returning to this piece published in Macleans just a couple of weeks ago: macleans.ca/longforms/in...

The Incel Terrorist - Macleans.camacleans.ca Oguzhan Sert was 17 when he walked into a Toronto massage parlour and killed an employee with a sword. The Crown argued the attack wasn’t just murder, but an act of terror against women. The hard part...

Essential commentary & analysis from @hierobadge.bsky.social on police violence against queer people and why cops cannot ever be trusted: open.substack.com/pub/heterose...

The media exploited Beau Lamarre-Condon’s homosexuality when reporting on the murder of Luke Davies and Jesse Bairdopen.substack.com and why reporting on the murder of Luke Davies and Jesse Baird as a "crime of passion" glosses over a long history of cops and homophobia and mardi gras

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Every generation aging into crankery means you have people who grew up with Grace Jones and Prince going “wasn’t none of this gender stuff in my day”

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Apologies to everyone but I am now someone who emoji reacts to emails in Outlook instead of replying whenever possible

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Biggest ever survey of trans Americans finds 94% happier after transition

Biggest ever survey of trans Americans finds 94% happier after transitionwww.theguardian.com The 2022 US Trans Survey of 92,000 transgender adults, finds continued discrimination, harassment and even violence at work

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To most, that price tag probably sounds absurd. But "in the minds of many, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale are analogous to Louis Vuitton, Ferrari, and Hermès." That's what these parents are buying for their kids--a luxury brand. (www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...)

Elite educational consultants are charging parents upwards of $120,000 a year to coach their kids into Ivy League schools by curating their extracurriculars, helping them land internships, craft essays and more

Inventing the Perfect College Applicantnymag.com For $120,000 a year, Christopher Rim promises to turn any student into Ivy bait.

"Automation" is a piss poor excuse for this kind of sexism. It's concerning that orgs/people seem to already be falling back on the claim that rogue AI is making choices that no one is picking up. www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01...

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Sam Altman’s vision for AI proliferation will require a lot more computation and the energy to power it. He admitted it at Davos, but he said we shouldn’t worry: an energy breakthrough was coming, and in the meantime we could just use “geoengineering as a stopgap.” That should set off alarm bells.

Sam Altman's self-serving vision of the futuredisconnect.blog The OpenAI CEO expects the most marginalized to pay the price of his ambition

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my latest for the guardian: about online spirituality and magical thinking about technology ✨ with a big thanks to Dr Emma Quilty for chatting with me about tech, capitalism, wellness and witchcraft- www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

It’s possible to find spirituality in technology, but beware those who misuse it for personal gain...www.theguardian.com Mysticism has long found a home online, but the rise of generative AI through services such as ChatGPT is making it easier than ever to project a sense of magic upon technology

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The Association of Internet Researchers invites submissions for our 25th annual conference, #AoIR2024: Industry (Sheffield, UK, 30 October - 2 November, 2024), which will take place at the University of Sheffield. The deadline for submissions is 1 March 2024. Details: aoir.org/aoir2024/sub...

Beyond chuffed with myself for finishing in the top 10 of a tough ultramarathon yesterday. 56km in the blazing sun, through sand, up hills and dodging snakes 🐍

My sister is a midwife and I hear some truly HORRIFIC things whenever we catch up. The main lesson she has taught me: NEVER go private.

Every time you ask a woman about pregnancy or childbirth she’ll go “Oh it wasn’t so bad, I was actually really lucky. All that happened was—“ and then tell the most terrifying story you’ve ever heard.

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Uber: we can't make money if we have to follow the law Google: we can't make money if we're not allowed to be a monopoly Nestle: we can't make money without using slave labor OpenAI: we can't make money if we can't steal media: should shoplifters be executed?

One of my biggest pet peeves with tech discourse is the way some texts collapse all uses of smartphones down to things coded as vapid or self-isolating e.g. selfies, social media and music. I'm reading a book where the author describes people using smartphones as "zombies" and I'm like 🫠🫠🫠

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Petition to honor Michael Shannon every Jan. 6

Explaining the academic book publishing rort to my husband (not an academic) and his reactions are top notch: "So you're meant to WRITE a BOOK in your spare time????" "Surely someone thinks this is a little iffy" "How is this allowed?"

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If you are a college/university administrator, and you don't have a detailed, specific plan for dealing with online campaigns and targeted harassment, you are failing as a leader. And this means educating your Boards on how all this works, too. Lead, don't crumble. Because they'll come for you, too.

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Nearly 50 years since the Combahee River Collective wrote “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression,” and all we’ve gotten is fascists who took note and a media that didn’t.

The NY Times and other media that treated Gay's academic misconduct as a national story were an essential part of the right wing campaign to have her removed. Compare how they treated the President of Stanford, who faced much more serious accusations of academic misconduct.

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We likely already have more than a 'thousands Mozarts,' but many lack the time or financial resources to express their talent, often working for minimum wage at disgusting companies like Amazon.

Surely it is time to abolish the British monarchy? These fuckers have no shame. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023...

Revealed: King Charles secretly profiting from the assets of dead citizenswww.theguardian.com Exclusive: Assets of thousands of people in north-west England used to upgrade king’s property empire via archaic custom

Brain worms claims another

Sigh www.thefp.com/p/david-seda...

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The deepfake crisis for women and girls has grown tremendously. It isn’t mentioned in most AI discourse, even though it’s the primary use of deepfakes by far. Now, it is being used to victimize dozens of teen girls. The perpetrators include their male classmates www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

For teen girls victimized by ‘deepfake’ nudes, there is little recoursewww.nbcnews.com The FBI has warned that technology used to create pornographic deepfake photos and videos was improving and being used for harassment and sextortion.

Was fully going to put this in a presentation about AI in everyday life until I realised it said "cunt" 😂

This is the most accurate image AI has ever generated

Wow it's almost as if the panic about ultra-processed foods was premature??? "Experts said the findings showed that regarding all UPF products as bad for health is unwise and unwarranted." www.theguardian.com/society/2023...

Some ultra-processed foods are good for your health, WHO-backed study findswww.theguardian.com Bread and cereals – which are heavily processed – reduce risk of multimorbidity due to fibre content