#Climate Literacy

[raffaellopalandri]

Earth Day 2023

Let’s celebrate the 2023 Earth Day! This year, we rally behind the theme “Invest In Our Planet”, which highlights the importance of dedicating our time, resources, and energy to solving climate change and other environmental issues. Investing in our planet is necessary to protect it and the best way to pave a path toward a prosperous future. Every April 22nd, stakeholders of all backgrounds…

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

Climate literacy principle #4: As of 2021, Earth had warmed by about 1.1°C above preindustrial levels. The current rate of warming is roughly 30x faster than the rate at which Earth warmed as it emerged from the last ice age.

More: https://www.climate.gov/teaching/climate/climate-literacy-essential-principles

[la-pou-belle]

normally I would just put this in the tags of a critical post to keep it concise, but sadly rbs have been turned off! I guess dogpiling sucks when it happens to YOU, right? anyways,

just wanted to say that, yeah, it's proper fandom etiquette to tag things. even if they are only mentioned and then later confirmed to not actually be happening in the fic. That said ,, and before we forget, it is not a REQUIREMENT. Just as it's not a requirement for fic writers to post and share their products at all. Just as it's not a requirement to read and consume then. When people provide completely free services (like, say, writing, editing, and publishing and entire novel), and it's entirely up to you on whether or not to consume those services, it's a little weird to make extra demands, no? And especially to inflate these demands to the point of character assassination; not only dogpiling on the author, but all of the authors fandom friends, leading them to delete all of their soc med and hard crafted works in the process.

so you didn't like someone's fanfiction. and it was POPULAR fanfiction! that sucks. But arguments about transphobia, racism, pedophilia, etc. have already been well disputed in the very post I can't reblog, and I think it's abundantly clear that the author should not be punished for following established canon (i.e. Claw's canonical torture of children and Toichiro Suzuki's openly proclaimed eugenicist goals in taking over the world for "superior" ESPers) to a logical conclusion and for adding a layer of realism to the work.

It's not their fault you, quite frankly, didn't think very hard about what you saw and understood in both S1 and S2 of mob psycho. it sucks that it makes you uncomfortable. But it's not a stranger's job on the internet to completely wash their works of anything that reflect messy and uncomfortable reality to coddle you, a voluntary consumer of their media. And a fan writer absolutely should not be punished for producing a canon-universe work, when you yourself are a fan of the canon. The fan author, very obviously, does not condone transphobia, racism, pedophilia, or any other accused thing, just by depicting it in their freely made and voluntarily consumed fanwork. Just as ONE, very obviously, does not condone the torture of children, or child abuse, just by depicting it in Claw's organization and in Shou and Toichiro's relationship.

All of what I've said is about Side Quest, but it's absolutely disgusting that for some reason, the backlash over that specific fic went over mere criticisms of the work to harassing the author. Not only this, but to use the final chapter of Side Quest, and all of the produced fan art within it, as a blacklist of Twitter handles and social medias to then ALSO harass the authors fandom friends is purely unacceptable behavior. If you want an author to tag their works better, simply ask them to do so; do not harass them and their friends. If you want your "fandom" and "ship" to stay alive, you MUST learn how to dislike things normally and respectfully; otherwise, how can you expect people to continue to produce novels for free? At a minimum, you need to recognize that your fellow fans are real, live people and do not deserve targeted harassment, and if you truly believe them to be dangerous, contact a moderation team and avoid their fanworks.

on a personal level, I'm offended that you think I, and many others who genuinely enjoyed Side Quest, lack media literacy. I've always been a fan of canon compliant and divergent fics that follow canon implications to their logical conclusions, especially when that involves recognizing the problematic and uncomfortable aspects of reality. You may have watched mob psycho uncritically, but I did not, nor did I read Side Quest uncritically. I'm frustrated that these projections have led to more of my little joys and favorite thought-provoking fic becoming inaccessible to me, but mostly... I'm sad that these authors shared their works while not fully understanding how uncritical, reactionary, and ungrateful their audience truly was.

[film-bones]

Tumblr fyp STOP showing me bad (idiot’s) reviews of Megalopolis, I come to this website for a moments peace not more bad takes from the uneducated

[cozymochi]

never wrong 💃

[juvenalesque]

Why the world is *gestures around at everything* opinion

No TL;DR here.

Pride month has me dwelling on what i've been thinking about a lot in the last few years, as I'm sure many have, the way the world is heading. Many of us feel out of control and helplessly riding along with an apocalyptic and terrifying demise of the world we know. As we individually fight for just causes, we should seek intersectionality in every facet of our lives. I'd like to share my thoughts on why this is true and more. The cure to the world's problems is as basic as what we tell children: "share." I mean this in more than a literal sense of sharing objects. These problems that I dwell on, we all know about stem from something else. I am speaking of the concept of divide and conquer as it applies to our society and the negative consequences of this. It all begins with organization. I am not going to claim I am an expert on everything on Earth, but these are my thoughts as an educated individual who keeps up to date with credible sources such as academic journals and primary sources. Definitions I list here are both verbatim and paraphrased.

A group exists that most of us are aware of in some capacity, which coordinates together to promote propaganda separating everything that makes humans people. Organizations like the United Nations have a Human Rights Council and a Declaration of Human Rights, but this declaration, and ONLY if properly utilized, plucks only a feather on the bird of prey that divides the Human Earthlings: preventing peace, advancement, and unity; I will not elaborate on the topic of other Earthlings here.

This may sound like digression, but try to humor me here.

There are "hard sciences" such as S.T.E.M. fields. These are held in high regard. People dismiss the social sciences, sometimes called "soft sciences": history, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, sociology, psychology… This is done systematically through the use of pervasive propaganda even in academia. This reduces interdisciplinary study, which has numerous benefits. Imagine if all of this knowledge could be combined to be utilized for its full potential. We could have advances beyond our dreams. As the old saying goes, "a jack of all trades and master of none, is often better than a master of one." Sharing information is invaluable. Communication of information is invaluable. It is why we have agriculture, medicine, metalwork, machines, and the internet. These are only some extraordinarily vital bits of knowledge that are not utilized to their full potential. Let us peel back another layer of this concept or turn back a page, as they say.

Even literacy is minimized in its importance purposefully. This is a large part of communication. There are different levels of literacy. What is most common in our American society is a gray area between nominal and functional literacy in scientific terms. "Nominal literacy" refers to one who can recognise scientific terms but does not have a clear understanding of the meaning. "Functional literacy" refers to the capacity of a person to engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective function of his or her group and community and also for enabling him or her to continue to use reading, writing and calculation for his or her own and the community's development. In a scientific sense, functional literacy is when the person can use scientific and technological vocabulary but usually this is only out of context as is the case for example in a school test of examination or basic correspondence. "Structural: conceptual and procedural literacy" means that the individual demonstrates understanding and a relationship between concepts and can use processes with meaning. "Multidimensional literacy" is when the individual not only has understanding, but has developed perspectives of science and technology that include the nature of science, the role of science and technology in personal life and society. Multidimensional literacy is what it is called when someone is "fully literate," "entirely literate," or "completely literate." They can comprehend entirely. We should, as a society, be trying to assist all persons to reach the highest level of literacy possible for them to understand in the most efficient way. Instead, literacy is kept minimal at best for each individual use by design, even per subject in an academic setting. This is why interdisciplinary study isn't utilized nearly as often as it should be for a more complete understanding of the world as science can inform us and assist in advancement of the scientific pursuit of knowledge and cultural development.

People who are completely literate are perceived as intelligent purely due to their ability to learn and communicate more efficiently than someone who is less literate. People who have the skill of multidimensional literacy are called "advanced" when truly they are the baseline of true understanding. Even those who have not yet reached multidimensional literacy are considered advanced or above average. Literacy is so underrated and avoided in our educational system that a person with an extensive vocabulary is considered more intelligent than someone with a more limited vocabulary, which is blatantly incorrect. The most intelligent people may never have an opportunity to become literate even nominally, but that does not make them less intelligent. It creates a communication barrier just as strong as any language barrier. It prevents a mind from communication. This is a tragic loss, the inability to communicate.

>Side note, that is why accessibility for communication is vital and should be prioritized. Accessibility in all parts of life, a world built for all, not just the "typical."<

Communication barriers in our society have examples such as levels of literacy or understanding of different subjects and perspectives. Communication barriers are also intensified when people are divided by cultural conflicts. These culture clashes are the most well-known form of division of people. People who are united under certain principles or agreements can accomplish radically more than people divided by disagreement, bias, or any other thing that stands in the way of cooperation. The more division, the more discord. That means more distraction and less cooperation. Cooperation and knowledge are what allow a common goal to succeed. The knowledge and how to learn from as many prior mistakes and successes as possible is vital.

This is why, repeatedly, throughout known human history, it has been shown that a ruling class cooperates to design a system that all people follow to maintain some form of basic organization for how the society operates. While some have started altruistically and with the reciprocity that allowed our species to survive near extinction many times, most become or begin as a means of hoarding power through resources.

This is where we get the Malthusian myth of scarcity and horrific events such as poverty and war. If people can be convinced that resources are truly limited rather than just improperly managed, they will all follow the rules they are told will allow them the share of these resources they need to thrive or even survive.

Again, it is somewhat common knowledge that these organized people create a class of people that utilize an attempted control of information with the tool of propaganda to maintain their positions of power. It was discovered that using informational controls to prevent other people from organization was an effective tool against losing their power. This is why when the non-powerful or "common" people eventually tire of a system's injustices and inequities and revolt in anger, society often collapses all together. This is why "education" has traditionally been conducted for a limited number of people and why those people are often the ones next in power should one leader fall. There is no coordinated allegiance or cooperation among those who pursue justice because they have been trained from birth to be driven from everything that could help unite large masses of people that are vastly different from one another. Fundamentally, it is because of an inability to communicate information, from academic knowledge to simple concepts, that we can not cooperate as humanity to solve painful problems.

So, this would mean that at the core of what I am saying is this: we all want equity and the best lives for ourselves, our loved ones, and often all people. However, we do not take the individual responsibility to attempt to communicate, teach communication, and teach utilization of this communication for cooperation. If a large enough group of people took this individual responsibility to promote this TRUE education, which you might call "well rounded," we could improve upon it every generation and interaction to create real change. We need to apply the principles we use selectively universally in our lives without hypocrisy. We need to encourage every human to learn as much as they can about as much as they can and, most importantly, how to communicate this information to others in every way possible.

So, give the most of your time to what you do or enjoy best, but share it. Share everything in your mind and abilities freely and with peace and the pursuit of spreading true and valuable information.

Every skill, every tool, share. It might just save us.

Next, maybe i'll tell you why I think AI could be the savior we need to accelerate this process & that is why there is so much fear mongering in attempts to slow its development and why I love the character "Data" from Star trek so intensely.

-Laura Renee West

06/14/2023

If you like what I have to say and would like to share it elsewhere or in a different format (or think that they might take this down), here's a link these drafted ponderings as a google document.

[elektroskopik]

I refuse to use AI bc it's an environmental disaster. It's a tool that should be used for very specific purposes and people are using it as a search engine, which it is not. Media literacy is dead. ChatGPT just mines data from wherever without the ability to discern accuracy, verifiability or truthfulness. Using it to generate content is equivalent to an asshole pooping in and out forever

we need to make using chatgpt embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can’t write an email

[average-emo-enigma]

I really do believe everything I read

I’ll be scrolling on Pinterest and read a poster that’s like “climate change is getting serious and we need to make decisions, here are a bunch of statistics” and I’ll be like “oh no! We need to solve climate change!”

And then I’ll see another poster that’s like “actually climate change isn’t as bad as the media is making you think and here are all the good things we’ve been doing” and I’m like “yay! Climate change exists but we’re fixing it! We can relax for a bit!”

And then I’ll see another thing that’s like “people want you to think climate change isn’t that bad but we only have 30 years left to fix everything” and I’m like “omg I can’t believe I thought climate change was fixed. we’re so screwed”

[theadaptableeducator]

Entwined Empires: The Unsustainable Interplay of Colonialism, Nationalism, Imperialism, and Capitalism

Noam Chomsky, a renowned linguist and political thinker, has extensively critiqued the interconnectivity and unsustainability of colonialism, nationalism, imperialism, and capitalism. Drawing on his philosophies, we can explore how these systems are interconnected and inherently unsustainable. Interconnectivity of Colonialism, Nationalism, Imperialism, and Capitalism Colonialism and…

[jcmarchi]

First AI + Education Summit is an international push for “AI fluency”

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/first-ai-education-summit-is-an-international-push-for-ai-fluency/

First AI + Education Summit is an international push for “AI fluency”

This summer, 350 participants came to MIT to dive into a question that is, so far, outpacing answers: How can education still create opportunities for all when digital literacy is no longer enough — a world in which students now need to have AI fluency?

The AI + Education Summit was hosted by the MIT RAISE Initiative (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with speakers from the App Inventor Foundation, the Mayor’s Office of the City of Boston, the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, and more. Highlights included an onsite “Hack the Climate” hackathon, where teams of beginner and experienced MIT App Inventor users had a single day to develop an app for fighting climate change.

In opening remarks, RAISE principal investigators Eric Klopfer, Hal Abelson, and Cynthia Breazeal emphasized what new goals for AI fluency look like. “Education is not just about learning facts,” Klopfer said. “Education is a whole developmental process. And we need to think about how we support teachers in being more effective. Teachers must be part of the AI conversation.” Abelson highlighted the empowerment aspect of computational action, namely its immediate impact, that “what’s different than in the decades of people teaching about computers [is] what kids can do right now.” And Breazeal, director of the RAISE Initiative, touched upon AI-supported learning, including the imperative to use technology like classroom robot companions as something supplementary to what students and teachers can do together, not as a replacement for one another. Or as Breazeal underlined in her talk: “We really want people to understand, in an appropriate way, how AI works and how to design it responsibly. We want to make sure that people have an informed voice of how AI should be integrated into society. And we want to empower all kinds of people around the world to be able to use AI, harness AI, to solve the important problems of their communities.”

Play video

MIT AI + Education Summit 2024: Welcome Remarks by MIT RAISE Leaders, Abelson, Breazeal, and Klopfer Video: MIT Open Learning

The summit featured the invited winners of the Global AI Hackathon. Prizes were awarded for apps in two tracks: climate and sustainability, and health and wellness. Winning projects addressed issues like sign-language-to-audio translation, moving object detection for the vision impaired, empathy practice using interactions with AI characters, and personal health checks using tongue images. Attendees also participated in hands-on demos for MIT App Inventor, a “playground” for the Personal Robots Group’s social robots, and an educator professional development session on responsible AI.

By convening people of so many ages, professional backgrounds, and geographies, organizers were able to foreground a unique mix of ideas for participants to take back home. Conference papers included real-world case studies of implementing AI in school settings, such as extracurricular clubs, considerations for student data security, and large-scale experiments in the United Arab Emirates and India. And plenary speakers tackled funding AI in education, state government’s role in supporting its adoption, and — in the summit’s keynote speech by Microsoft’s principal director of AI and machine learning engineering Francesca Lazzeri — the opportunities and challenges of the use of generative AI in education. Lazzeri discussed the development of tool kits that enact safeguards around principles like fairness, security, and transparency. “I truly believe that learning generative AI is not just about computer science students,” Lazzeri said. “It’s about all of us.”

Trailblazing AI education from MIT

Critical to early AI education has been the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, a longtime collaborator that helped MIT deploy computational action and project-based learning years before AI was even a widespread pedagogical challenge. A summit panel discussed the history of its CoolThink project, which brought such learning to grades 4-6 in 32 Hong Kong schools in an initial pilot and then met the ambitious goal of bringing it to over 200 Hong Kong schools. On the panel, CoolThink director Daniel Lai said that the trust, MIT, Education University of Hong Kong, and the City University of Hong Kong did not want to add a burden to teachers and students of another curriculum outside of school. Instead, they wanted “to mainstream it into our educational system so that every child would have equal opportunity to access these skills and knowledge.”

MIT worked as a collaborator from CoolThink’s start in 2016. Professor and App Inventor founder Hal Abelson helped Lai get the project off the ground. Several summit attendees and former MIT research staff members were leaders in the project development. Educational technologist Josh Sheldon directed the MIT team’s work on the CoolThink curriculum and teacher professional development. Karen Lang, then App Inventor’s education and business development manager, was the main curriculum developer for the initial phase of CoolThink, writing the lessons and accompanying tutorials and worksheets for the three levels in the curriculum, with editing assistance from the Hong Kong education team. And Mike Tissenbaum, now a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led the development of the project’s research design and theoretical grounding. Among other key tasks, they ran the initial teacher training for the first two cohorts of Hong Kong teachers, consisting of sessions totaling 40 hours with about 40 teachers each.

The ethical demands of today’s AI “funhouse mirror”

Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, delivered the closing keynote. He described the current state of AI as a “funhouse mirror” that “distorts the world around us” and framed it as yet another technology that has presented humans with ethical demands to find its positive, empowering uses that complement our intelligence but also to mitigate its risks. 

“One of the areas I’m most excited about personally,” Huttenlocher said, “is people learning from AI,” with AI discovering solutions that people had not yet come upon on their own. As so much of the summit demonstrated, AI and education is something that must happen in collaboration. “[AI] is not human intellect. This is not human judgment. This is something different.”

[calciumace]

"Subtly pro-climate action messaging." Wow, media literacy is truly dead in their group. There was nothing subtle about that pro-climate messaging!

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

#ThereIsNoPlanetB "You are climate literate if you understand the influence of climate on yourself and society - and your influence on climate. A climate-literate person understands the essential principles of Earth system governing climate patterns; knows how to gather information about climate and weather, and how to distinguish credible from non-credible sources on the subject; communicates about climate and climate change in a meaningful way; communicates about climate and climate change in a meaningful way."

[delicatelysublimeforester]

Empowering Youth: How Digital Innovation is Transforming Sustainable Development

[a-typical]

The distorted perception of real versus believed risks posed obvious harms.

Misguided Personal Choices: Individuals may make poor health choices based on inaccurate risk perceptions, such as neglecting preventive measures or engaging in risky behaviors.

Policy and Resource Misallocation: Governments and health organizations may allocate resources inefficiently, focusing on less impactful but more sensational risks.

Erosion of Trust in Science and Public Health Institutions: When public perceptions do not align with scientific evidence, it can erode trust in experts and institutions, leading to resistance against public health measures. This makes it much more difficult to get buy-in for a variety of interventions that have data to support them, from routine vaccinations, to overall lifestyle habits, to voting for specific policies during elections.

Increased Health Disparities: Groups with limited access to accurate information may be particularly affected by the risk perception gap, exacerbating health disparities. For example, in the context of food misinformation and risk perception gap, individuals with lower socioeconomic status are more likely to buy and eat fewer fruits and vegetables when they encounter false messaging about the harms of pesticides, which poses a FAR greater risk than the essentially non-existent risk of trace pesticide residues.

Delayed Response to Emerging Threats: Underestimating certain risks leads to delayed responses to emerging health threats, worsening public health outcomes. This is especially the case with issues such as climate change, when decisions and policies made now will only be measurable years down the line.

Addressing the risk perception gap requires a multi-pronged approach. We need improved communication strategies that make scientific and health information more accessible and understandable to the public, along with efforts to build trust and engage communities in dialogue about risk and health decisions. Much of this requires an educational foundation, so that people better understand how scientific research is conducted, how risk is calculated, and what that means for your everyday choices. Our media and social media organizations have a responsibility as well: to not give equal weight to claims that are unsupported, and to not deliberately feed emotion-based messaging.

Science literacy is critical, so that people can understand the difference between anecdotes and robust evidence, and more appropriately evaluated the information they encounter. All of us can take steps to enable this, so that our society on the whole is better equipped to navigate the deluge of fear-based messaging that only serves to hinder scientific progress and cause harm.

— Andrea Love, PhD | Immunologist & Microbiologist

[context-added]

Caution is advised when a quote is taken from an article without context, especially if that quote is extrapolated to be 1) the view of the newspaper, 2) proof that the mainstream media is bad. In this case, a specific article giving advice (from medical professionals) on the best ways to help your body adjust to an extremely hot summer, is being extrapolated to say that the Washington Post doesn't think that climate change is a problem. (please note that I am not saying climate change is covered well in the Washington Post or badly - just that this quote is being taken out of context).

Quote with context:

"But even those who have never experienced this kind of extreme heat before have the potential to adapt to endure it better. “Our bodies are remarkable things,” said Stefan Wheat, an emergency physician at the University of Washington School of Medicine who specializes in climate change and health.

“Our bodies are well adapted to be able to acclimate to heat under the right circumstances.”

Becoming more accustomed to hotter temperatures, though, takes time. And it shouldn’t be attempted by going out in the heat and doing too much too quickly. “Someone who is exposed to a high heat index and is not acclimated will not have these adaptive measures in place and can suffer significant heat-related illness,” Wheat said."

Also in the article:

"There are heat and humidity levels that people cannot physiologically adapt to even if they’re healthy, said Kenney, who has studied those limits. His peer-reviewed research findings suggest that the limit for young healthy people is around a wet bulb temperature of 88 degrees Fahrenheit, or 88 degrees at 100 percent relative humidity."

(88 Fahrenheit = 31°C)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/07/29/how-to-become-heat-tolerant/

PS: for entertainment purposes only, of course

PPS: actual Washington Post quote