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dcporter.bsky.social
Qing historian, résidant à Montréal
134 posts 674 followers 378 following
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There's a hypothetical world in which Canada could take advantage of some of the ways the US is shooting itself in the foot (or really, the gut? the head?) right now. But it's not the world we actually live in: one of increasing Canadian hostility toward immigrants, lack of support of higher ed, etc

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

We may not take sufficient action to stop climate change, but at least we can stop measuring it!

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

Out today! This report from @htheaker.bsky.social and me has been a long time in production. We hope that this can be a resource through which we can discuss the program of #Sinicization in #Hui communities comprehensively and develop a clearer picture of what its implementation has produced.

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

Available today: a report, authored by myself and my friend and colleague @davidstroup.bsky.social , exploring the aims and impacts of the sinicisation of Islam campaign in Hui communities. See here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

RFA reporting on the Uyghurs changed my entire view of the agency - I had always assumed it was little more than worthless US propaganda. But in fact, it was the only news agency in the world hiring Uyghur speakers capable of doing original and essential reporting on what was happening in Xinjiang

submitted 19 days ago • 2 comments

Don't worry: we've been assured that there will be no salary cuts for senior administrators

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

Humanities and sciences are all in the same boat. We need to act like it or we all drown.

submitted 21 days ago • 6 comments

Félicitations à Donald Trump pour avoir ressuscité le Parti libéral du Canada

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

The first review of Slaves of the Emperor has come out in JAS. Thanks to Yan Hon Michael Chung for the generous review of what he calls "a conceptual revolution of understanding the Eight Banners and the Qing rulership." read.dukeupress.edu/journal-of-a...?

submitted 22 days ago • 2 comments

Mise à jour: Le gouvernement québécois suit l’exemple de l’Ontario et ordonne de retirer dès mardi l’alcool produit aux États-Unis des tablettes de la SAQ. 👉 bit.ly/4grDs5v

submitted 26 days ago • 15 comments

I've lived in Canada for 4 and a half years. Now, for the first time, I feel more Canadian than American. Counting down the less than two months remaining until I can apply for citizenship

submitted 26 days ago • 1 comment

DeepSeek hot take: The emperor still has no clothes, but it's very distressing to the emperor that their non-clothes can be made so much more cheaply.

submitted 29 days ago • 8 comments

While many faculty try desperately to teach our students to read and write at a high level, McGill promotes the use of AI on the front page of myCourses (the learning management site that hosts all course content), and tells them about how it can help them "write texts"

submitted 30 days ago • 1 comment

"A new website for the China Studies Digital Archives Mapping Project offers a free guide to open databases for China studies research, as well as a list of leading university libraries that offer services to unaffiliated scholars." www.acls.org/news/acls-ex...

submitted 30 days ago • 1 comment

DeepSeek has definitely not solved the LLM hallucination problem - see its discussion here of the term hūwaliyasun tob, the Manchu term for the Yongzheng reign period in the Qing, which it decides is an administrative system in Inner Asia tied to the system of banners and leagues.

submitted 31 days ago • 3 comments

Feels a bit weird to be sitting in my office working on a SSHRC application while my country of origin shuts down all federal research grants.

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

Et tu, Chronicle of Higher Education? REALLY?

submitted 31 days ago • 29 comments

Though DeepSeek's censorship of some topics is really heavy handed (it refuses to mention Xi Jinping at all, for instance), it turns out that it will sometimes generate (and not later delete, as it often does) material that is unflattering to the Chinese state, as in this example:

submitted 32 days ago • 3 comments

Interestingly, DeepSeek sometimes generates real information about Chinese political repression, before deleting it all. It seems to struggle to generate this sort of information (this clip is sped up by more than 3x), but it's interesting what the right questions will produce.

submitted 33 days ago • 2 comments