J. Emory Parker 🏳️🌈
Pulitzer prize winning editor and news developer. Bluesky elder. Now: Data Editor at @statnews.bsky.social
✉️ emory.parker@statnews.com 📸 jemoryparker 🐘 @jaspar@mastodon.online | Signal: jaspar.01
- Researchers found that a majority of English majors at two universities in 2015 could not functionally understand passages from Charles Dickens. which does validate my ever-growing concern about how a lot of people who use text-based social media appear to be unable to read
- [Not loaded yet]
- I keep having to remind myself that (for some reason) people take the time to setup LLM-powered argument bots
- [Not loaded yet]
- love that greebo dance
- It's easy to see polls and assume "independents" make up a cohesive group of moderates, but the reality is that independents are an eclectic bunch with often idiosyncratic political views. They just look centrist when you aggregate all of them together in one group.
- Andrew Witty, who led UnitedHealth after the killing of his predecessor, is stepping down for personal reasons www.statnews.com/2025/05/13/s...
- [Not loaded yet]
- Yes, I know
- I think there's a perfectly reasonable conversation to be had about the health requirements of the presidency with regard to age. But wheelchair use generally is a perfectly reasonable accommodation and there's nothing scandalous about it and today's headlines are really a shame, imho.
- The game of telephone with this story getting spun as a conspiracy is also really wild: the entire story is just that the WH was aware that if an 80-year-old suffers a bad fall the recovery is likely to be difficult. Which is obvious and self-evident.
- Obviously, critics made a compelling case that Biden's health wasn't compatible with the office. That's why he dropped out! And the story of whether his staff had been trying to coverup health issues can absolutely be told without picking on this one specific and common accommodation.
- The number of times I’ve heard of sources who are scared to say anything negative about the government in recent months is really alarming.
- This company still exists? Have they dug any tunnels other than that one in Las Vegas?
- As Elon Musk laid waste to the federal government, the Department of Transportation quietly met with and consulted his tunneling firm, the Boring Company, a $6 billion Amtrak tunnel project connecting Baltimore, DC and Virginia. Our latest: www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/t...
- Some news! Today, I launch Strength In Numbers as an independent, data-driven news website devoted to rigorous and transparent political analysis. On Wednesday we'll have our first poll, with a high-quality, non-partisan sponsor. Please share, and join us: www.gelliottmorris.com/p/building-a...
- Congrats!!
- fwiw, Qatar is more pro-Hamas than any of the US college students the Trump administration is at war with
- Wait. WHAT??!! abcnews.go.com/Politics/tru...
- the pick is in
- lol
- NEW: Judge Boasberg grilled the Trump administration over Trump’s public claim that he could bring back migrants from El Salvador with a phone call. DOJ says Trump’s view of his own influence isn’t legally salient. w/ @joshgerstein.bsky.social www.politico.com/news/2025/05...
- I know many people that folks on here would consider "offline" or idk "normal people," that aren't even just using AI for work, but using it to TEXT people. Like their friends and family.
- [Not loaded yet]
- I’ll grant you “completely useless” is hyperbolic, but I’ve spoken with many scientists about AI products that are supposed to help with scientific research (not student research) and what I have heard is these tools are not very useful for these purposes.
- There's probably more to the story, but the idea of a reporter filing a complaint because his editor yelled at him and made outlandish threats just makes me roll my eyes. In my day, that was a Tuesday. nypost.com/2025/05/07/m...
- [Not loaded yet]
- but idk, as much as I hate to admit it and think it’s generally overblown, that kind of person does actually exist in the world and you do sometimes run into them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- I feel like I’ve seen a version of this headline once a year for the past 5 years
- [Not loaded yet]
- oh I know all about Matter and Thread
- [Not loaded yet]
- lol yeah that was bad. I do wonder who the source is and what their motive is tho, there’s something about how perfect the snowflake reporter framing is here that has me a little suspicious.
- I feel like there’s gotta be more to it..
- I have bad news for her about the bathroom on the plane she rode in on
- the NYT pope smoke live blog is so funny bc obviously nothing is happening but they have to keep posting every couple of minutes so all they can do is vamp by posting color like it's news
- Google says the word crossed over from meaning you-know-what to meaning going without screens. Google says this crossover from the sexual meaning to the nonsexual has happened before. I am content to know this.
- I mean it's correct slang use, I'm just begging that reporter to choose different phrasing 🤣
- please do not say the cardinals are rawdogging
- the hole-y see
- I am begging you
- I'm skeptical that AI is rendering a generation of students illiterate. I think college is such a formative experience that a lot of folks treat it as sacred. And I think we underestimate the prevalence of casual cheating and the number of folks who were always there just to get a piece of paper.
-
View full threadthe rubber meeting the road hasn't been my experience. in my experience social reproduction is more preferential over past performance. and as we go through this process of elite cycling credentialism, scientism and belligerence are incentivized over knowledge or even capability why im so anti ai
- All of that has always been true though
- In my day, we didn't have ChatGPT and kids who wanted to cheat on papers had to go to a *different* website where you could hire someone to write it for you really cheaply
-
View full threadI do think there are reasons to be alarmed by this trend, but I do wonder if it'll be as bad as predicted in the end.
- That's pretty much where I'm at: sounds like a real problem, probably not an apocalypse for the entire concept of higher education.
- Sure, on their behalf I hope that stuff was fun to learn, but on mine, as a patient, I don’t give a shit whether as undergrads they had fun with that material. I just want to be sure they learned it. Same with engineers and stat therm. Sometimes there are no real shortcuts.
- I think this is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. If you want a job that requires technical skills and knowledge but you lack those bc you cheated your way through school, you're going to encounter problems.
- thats a fair point, but the effect is that with cheating as a service that the piece of paper becomes less valuable as a credential. like the paper is not useful for differentiating between who went to learn and who went to go. so at some point why have the paper at all.
- When I was in school there were websites were you could pay a few bucks to have someone write a paper for you. We've had cheating as a service. It's also long been true there are jobs out there were a degree is just a formality. The rubber meets the road when you take a job you're not qualified for.
- Me, in the conclave: I didn't come here to make friends
- Find out what happens when cardinals stop being polite, and start getting real.
- I'd even go a step further: If a work is that trivial that an AI can solve it, why bother a human with it? One of our profs did us allow every mean of aid during an exam. Including laptops and seat neighbours. His reasoning: When you are working, you can also ask for help at any time.
- I mean the point of trivial work is practice. I do think there's a difference between an open-book test vs letting a computer do all the work for you. You're ultimately cheating yourself out of the education you're paying for, but then again that's nothing new.
- Which is not to say that AI tools are not problems for higher education. But I think there always have been and always will be students who are there to learn and students who are there to check off a box.
- Why not mention the obvious appearance of quid pro quo here (Paramount needs the Trump admin to approve a merger deal)? Why not remind executives that a future Congress might be interested in investigating potential corruption?
- I mean to be perfectly frank I think Shari Redstone and other Paramount executives care a lot more about legal liabilities than they do about preserving freedom of the press.
- I’m sure they consider it a shame if they have to sacrifice the good name of 60 Minutes in order to make a ton of money for themselves and shareholders, but do you really think *that’s* what’s going to stop them?
- conclave conclave conclave conclave!
- Gaza will be entirely destroyed, Israeli minister says www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...
- How many other languages have the sound "skw"? That's gotta be pretty rare, right?
- When I was teaching English in Korea, "skw-" (squirrel, squall, etc) and "-lf" (wolf, gulf, alpha, etc) were I think the most difficult English sounds for people the learn.
- The Bible explicitly forbids necromancy multiple times
- NEWS: Jim Fagan was the voice of the NBA on NBC's promos during the 90s. He passed away in 2019. Using AI, he will be heard once again as the NBA on NBC returns next season. www.nytimes.com/athletic/633...
- A woman in Boston says she felt humiliated after a security guard in a fancy hotel confronted her in a bathroom and demanded she “prove her gender” www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/...
- [Not loaded yet]
- You're right, it's very confusing. The hotel is basically try to imply the couple were having sex in the bathroom, which is a pretty wild accusation to make.
- So many people forget this: even if we had wanted to keep all the schools open continuously throughout the first year or so of the pandemic, we couldn’t have bc too many staff and students were getting sick
- A highly infectious global pandemic simply is going to disrupt your life regardless of what you do!
- [Not loaded yet]
- From the article: “The couple vehemently denied being in the same stall. "If that's what he thought the issue was once he opened the stall door, obviously there was only one person in there, so it should've been case closed," said Victor.”
- [Not loaded yet]
- A lot of this is wrong. Small newsrooms win all the time. This years winners include the Baltimore Banner and ProPublica. The award for illustrations went to the illustrator for her previous body of work, not for the one illustration.
- Ann Telnaes was the winner in the illustrated reporting category. She resigned in protest from The Washington Post after they killed an illustration criticizing media executives trying to curry favor with Trump.
- The Washington Post wins two Pulitzer Prizes in breaking news reporting and illustrated reporting and commentary. Post reporters were also finalists in three categories, including national and international reporting as well as commentary. wapo.st/4mkkGkT
