Weeknotes: 07/04/26-07/10/26

This Week:

• Back at the Museum for one week before the next adventure. I spent time planning our upcoming Family Afternoon event, as well as a bit of future program planning, and helping our summer assistant with a new set of displays.

• I responded to a NAGPRA claim and began drafting a Notice of Intended Repatriation.

• I bought Spiritualized’ Lazer Guided Melodies and Colour Green by Sibylle Baier. Unsurprisingly, they also made up the bulk of my scrobbles this week.

• I finished reading Francine Prose’s dark and sharp social satire “Primitive People”. It’s a very funny and sad and subtly weird book about a Haitian woman who flees to the United States and becomes an au pair (and confidante) for an eccentric family in the Hudson Valley. It’s a really startling novel about race, class, and gender, and moves from hilarious to cringe-inducing on a dime.

• Good Things:

  • Dominic and I finished reading Emily Wilson’s translation of “The Odyssey.” It’s a fun, lively translation but man…that thing is long!
  • We ended our Gilbert Lake trip with some friends from France, on the beach at the 4th of July. Unfortunately, Hazel came down with a case of heat exhaustion and she and Alanna went home early.
  • Alanna and I agreed that the England v. Mexico game was one of the best football matches either of us had ever seen.

• True Things:

  • How to talk about ‘AI’ without adding to the anthropomorphization by Emily Bender and Nanna Inie

  Examples:

  artificial intelligence → probabilistic automation
  hybrid intelligence → augmented human intelligence
  image recognition → image labeling
  speech recognition → automatic transcription
  the model shows bias → the model reflects bias
  model mistakes → model errors
  chatbots are good at … → chatbots are good for …
  hallucination → undesirable output