Put your usernames and passwords in your will, advises Japan’s government

Oculi Mundi is a digital heritage destination: the home of The Sunderland Collection of world maps, celestial maps, atlases, globes and books of knowledge. The project now includes a podcast, What’s your map, which starts with William Dalrymple’s exploration of an 18th century Jain cosmological map

Amazon workers across the globe are on strike for Black Friday Endgadget 

The Renters’ Republic Charlie Dulik 

Remember Nuzzel? A similar news-aggregating tool now exists for Bluesky

How Technology Has Reshaped The Ways We Talk To One Another

The kinds of speech that strike us as authentic, satisfying, and desirable change with time, and depend on our position in the world and on the conversations happening around us. - The New Yorker

Is it Over Now (Social Media Version)?

For many years now, Twitter has been our leading social media source of referrals of readers. But over the last year, LinkedIn has started to catch up, and over the last 90 days, LinkedIn referrals surpassed those from Twitter, and are now bringing us 1.65 times as many readers. 

Bluesky remains far behind, but is catching up as well. Over the last 365 days, Twitter referred 14 times more readers to The Scholarly Kitchenthan Bluesky. But in the last 30 days, that ratio has fallen to 6:1, and in the last week, it’s down to 4:1. We wondered whether we would start to reflect any different attitudes or practices now. 

How are Chefs using social media differently, and what are they seeing as platforms of choice or opportunity? From our different perches, what can we learn about how scholarly communications organizations are using different platforms?..”

Put your usernames and passwords in your will, advises Japan’s government

The Register: “Japan’s National Consumer Affairs Center on Wednesday suggested citizens start “digital end of life planning” and offered tips on how to do it. The Center’s somewhat maudlin advice is motivated by recent incidents in which citizens struggled to cancel subscriptions their loved ones signed up for before their demise, because they didn’t know their usernames or passwords. The resulting “digital legacy” can be unpleasant to resolve, the agency warns, so suggested four steps to simplify ensure our digital legacies aren’t complicated:

• Ensuring family members can unlock your smartphone or computer in case of emergency;
• Maintain a list of your subscriptions, user IDs and passwords;
• Consider putting those details in a document intended to be made available when your life ends;
• Use a service that allows you to designate someone to have access to your smartphone and other accounts once your time on Earth ends…”

1. “As we rely on [more and more] data to get our bearings and exercise our agency, we lose definition as individuals” — Nicholas Carr on the tradeoffs of living in world of data
2. Can LLMs become better at correctly answering our questions by debating each other? — yes, but better enough? And for what kinds of questions?
3. “Reacting to the Past” provides detailed role-playing games for college courses — Greta LaFore (Gonzaga) discusses her experiences teaching with one focused on Darwin
4. “How do we drive new knowledge and science? What are their present boundaries? And how can we improve science?” – a new book by Alexander Krauss (LSE), open access at OUP, takes up the science of science
5. We should continue to read “immoral philosophers” because “sometimes you can learn valuable things from people who did bad stuff” — but “it can be interesting to think about why one might believe opposite,” says Liam Kofi Bright (LSE)
6. Are laws of nature more like a layer cake, a newspaper, or a straitjacket? — Mario Hubert (LMU) surveys these different approaches
7. New study: humans can’t distinguish poetry written by AI from that written by humans and they tend to prefer the former — Why? Brian Porter and Edouard Machery (Pitt) have some thoughts on that