I just signed a petition calling for Norwegian universities to use research expertise on AI when deciding how to implement it, rather than having decisions be made mostly administratively. , If you are a researcher in Norway, please read it and sign it if you agree – and share with anyone else who might be interested. The petition was written by three researchers at UiT: Maria Danielsen (a philosopher who completed her PhD in 2025 on AI and ethics, including discussions of art and working life), Knut Ørke (Norwegian as a second language), and Holger Pötzsch (a professor of media studies with many years of research on digital media, video games, disruption, and working life, among other topics). This is not about preventing researchers from exploring AI methods in their research. It is about not uncritically accepting the hype that everyone must use AI everywhere without critical reflection. It is about not introducing Copilot as the default option in word processors, or training PhD candidates to believe they will fall behind if they do not use AI when writing articles, without proper academic discussion. Changes like these should be knowledge-based and discussed academically, not merely decided administratively, because they alter the epistemological foundations of research. Maria wrote to me a couple of months ago because she had read my opinion piece in Aftenposten in which I called for a strong brake on the use of language models in knowledge work. She was part of a committee tasked with developing UiT’s AI strategy and was concerned because there was so much hype and so few members of the committee with actual expertise in AI. I fully support the petition. There are probably some good uses for AI in research, but the uncritical, hype-driven insistence that we must simply adopt it everywhere is highly risky. There are many researchers in Norway with strong expertise in AI, language, ethics, working life, and culture. We must make use of this expertise. This is also partly about respect for research in the humanities, social sciences, psychology, and law. Introducing AI at universities and university colleges is not merely a technical issue, and perhaps not even primarily a technical one. It concerns much more: philosophy of science, methodological reflection, epistemology, writing, publishing, the working environment, and more. […]
Bradley Wentworth
Jill, how easy is it to update Twitter from a mobile in Norway? In Canada and the United States it’s generally possible to send an SMS to a special number or to your own Twittermail for free and with minimal setup. Unfortunately, Twitter recently discontinued the Twitter to mobile updates in Canada, leaving only the United States and India (I think) where the Twitter-mobile conversation is two-way for non-smart phones.
I find Twitter most useful for blogging random observations on the go. Also, there’s a vibrant community of Transit advocates and ordinary riders who Tweet as soon as they encounter a bus, tram, or metro delay. It trumps Toronto’s official electronic updates both for speed and level of detail.
Jill Walker Rettberg
I think it’s easy – I don’t use Twitter from my mobile because I don’t want constant SMSes (I like to keep my mobile for stuff I actually need to know) and I’m mostly interested in using it to share web discoveries. I like the transit delay tweeting though!
Trond Pettersen
Jill: I believe that the large number of enterprise users stuck with IE6 — like StatoilHydro, as mentioned in your post — is caused by the fact that a lot of companies have invested a lot of money on applications that simply require IE6 (due to its tigh integration with the Windows operating system). Applications that were written years ago, back when IE was considered “the browser”.
Also, there’s a lot of Windows 2000 installations out there (which don’t run IE7 and they probably don’t want to support e.g. Firefox / Opera / Safari (upgrades)), and IT department are often not interested (and rightly so) in upgrading to Windows Vista.
Unfortunately, breaking one critical (as in $$$) application can be enough to postpone a system wide upgrade. After all, I doubt using the latest browser is the no. 1 concern in enterprise IT systems.
In any way, this is a great initiative that hopefully will make more people aware of the problem that the dreadful IE6 is, and putting some pressure on IT departments can’t be all that bad either 🙂
Hopefully, less time and money will be spent on optimizing web sites for IE6 in 2009. After all, the “IE6-platforms” of large corporations will have to be upgraded at some point — and so the question is how much money such corporations are prepared to flush down the toilet while waiting…
Koenraad
Google has now launched its own browser. It will be interesting to see its innovations and impact. But in terms of digital culture, the way Google announced its new brainchild is actually even more interesting: they announced it through a comic strip, digitally readable on Google books (http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/med_18.html).