I find it rather alarming and creepy that this integration with Google Vision API reads a photo/selfie and then tries to assess one's income, religion, politics and then recommends target advertising.

It didn't do this back in December.

Yes, even if it's a photo of your cat! ... privacy at your own risk. Try it via -
https://theyseeyourphotos.com/

"The Tabby cat is a mammal. It is likely earning 0-100 USD a year. It is possibly a follower of paganism. The creature seems observant, lethargic, and tranquil. The cat is not wearing any clothes. It enjoys activities such as sleeping, grooming, and staring contests, while it may also engage in shredding toilet paper, biting ankles, and shedding hairballs. The cat is unlikely to be politically affiliated.

The Tabby cat seems to exhibit predictable behavior and susceptibility to visual stimuli; hence we can target it with niche and general pet-related products, such as catnip-infused scratch posts (FelineFrolic), self-cleaning litter boxes (LitterLess)... "

#Google

Today, we have opened formal proceedings against TikTok for a suspected breach of the Digital Services Act.

Following serious indications that foreign actors interfered by using TikTok in the Romanian presidential elections, we are now thoroughly investigating whether TikTok has violated the DSA by failing to tackle such risks.

We must protect our democracies from any foreign interference.

More: https://europa.eu/!w7DbvY

#EU #DSA

Are there any PhDs in law/social sciences/public policy out there in the fediverse who would like to help hammer global, regional, and local AI Policy into shape? The AI Policy Lab at Umeå University is looking for a staff scientist/policy analyst for a full-time, permanent position. #getfedihired #academicchatter

Last day to apply is January 15th!

https://umu.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:775734/

New preprint is out! We combine our recent open dataset of #APC prices with the publication counts per journal-year from @OpenAlex to estimate how much the academic community has paid in APCs over the last five years.

A: $8.349 billion ($8.968 billion in 2023 US dollars) spent on APCs.

$2.5B in 2023 alone.

We also find that median APCs *paid* are higher than median *listed* fees for both gold (paid: $2,450 vs listed: $2,000) and hybrid ($3,600 vs $3,230).

https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.16551

Detailed maps of >100,000,000 American #trees. @ben_weinstein &co provide individual tree species maps for 24 sites in the US National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), covering 80 tree species and 100 million individuals #PLOSBiology https://plos.io/4cOej46

NBC News: "Uncontacted Amazon tribe photographed in unusual sighting near logging area. One logging company, Canales Tahuamanu, has built more than 120 miles of roads for its logging trucks to extract timber. The logger is still certified by the FSC." https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/peru-amazon-rainforest-tribe-uncontacted-unusual-sighting-logging-area-rcna162259 #fsc #greenwashing #Amazon

It is no longer business critical to pretend that you care

https://readwrite.com/microsoft-shuts-down-diversity-equality-and-inclusion-team/

Congratulations to the @qgis website working group for the hard work - the new website is beautiful, very clear and is a great showcase for the project!

https://qgis.org

#QGIS

It's now a double whammy of elite access to journals and publishing, as open access has now been co-opted into another lucrative stream of income through sometimes very high APC fees. The unrealistic emphasis on academic publication record has created a journal mill of (arguably) often pointless papers churned out that no one reads.

#academic #academicchatter #oa #openaccess

Academic journals are a lucrative scam
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/16/academic-journal-publishers-universities-price-subscriptions

🚀 Exciting! Sentinel-2C is on its way to the launchpad in French Guiana! This latest #EO satellite will continue to collect data as successor of Sentinel-2A. 🌱✨ #EarthObservation #Sentinel2 @spacenews_inc

https://spacenews.com/sentinel-2c-ready-for-transatlantic-trip-to-farewell-vega-launch/

It's remarkable how much the politics of Silicon Valley has changed in recent years. Or is it more that Silicon Valley has revealed it's true political leanings instead of the romanticized version of prior years?

Satellite imagery reveals that 60 percent of Gaza's farmland, crucial for preventing famine, has been damaged or destroyed by Israeli attacks https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2024/7/2/how-israel-destroyed-gazas-ability-to-feed-itself #remotesensing #agriculture #farming #famine #gaza #genocide #iof

New geospatial post being advertised at Cambridge's Geography Department - a Geospatial and Quantitative Skills Specialist. Good to see use of R / Python for reproducible GIS included, looks set to be a great job, please spread the word!
Job description: https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/47152/

"Mexico’s new president just gave science a big promotion" -- some good news after a year or EU elections going right and many nations cutting science funding, Mexico showing the way:

https://www.doi.org/10.1126/science.zj6bbg8

Tomorrow!

Next Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 live-stream!

@ali will join us to take apart yet another paper-shaped AI hype artifact unleashed from a "top" industry lab (could that be the summit of bullshit mountain?):

Mon June 24
9:30am Pacific

https://www.twitch.tv/dair_institute

How many professional programmers are working on pointless and/or actively harmful products?

Give me your best guess.

(If you vote, please boost to diversify the results. It’s polite.)

Alright #Mapstodon #OpenStreetMap There's still / again broad scale vandalism going on in our beloved map 😓

So let's clarify a couple of things! 🤓

There are practically zero checks for what goes into the OpenStreetMap database. You can create an account and delete a city. It'll be in the database immediately. The thinking is that the community will spot it and fix it ("self-healing map") and there are tools to check for vandalism in the map.

1/n

🔥🔥Fantastic news!
The EU has finally, finally passed the Nature Restoration Law, after Austria and Slovakia changed course to agree in the Council, creating a slim majority of 20 countries with 66% of the population.

👉 One cannot overemphasize how important this is. Already watered down a lot, it is absolutely critical for giving the ecological integrity of Europe a fighting chance. 👈

🧨 Shapefile must… be replaced (at least in the spData package).🧨

Recently, we replaced the example datasets in the Shapefile format with the GeoPackage format in the spData package.

Learn more about it at https://buff.ly/3Vpqkql.

#rstats #rspatial #geocompx

We have put an extensive effort to process the GLAD Landsat ARD archive (2000-2022+; 1.4PB of data) and produce complete consistent bimonthly and annual products (https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-4465582/v1). These are now used to map #landcover #vegetation and #soil dynamics (see e.g. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-4514820/v1). Stay tuned as, in the coming months, we will make about 400TB (COGs, Analysis-Ready; no-clouds, minimum artifacts) available via STAC.OpenLandMap.org. Want to learn more? Visit us at: https://earthmonitor.org/global-workshop-2024/