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Daily Archives: January 8, 2018

Online Publication of Court Decisions in Europe

Opijnen, Marc van and Peruginelli, Ginevra and Kefali, Eleni and Palmirani, Monica, Online Publication of Court Decisions in Europe (October 16, 2017). Legal Information Management, 17 (2017), pp. 136–145; doi:10.1017/S1472669617000299. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3088448 – “Although nowadays most courts publish decisions on the internet, substantial differences exist between European countries regarding such publication. These differences not only pertain to the extent with which judgments are published and anonymised, but also to their metadata, searchability and reusability. This article contains a synthesis of a comprehensive comparative study on the publication of court decisions within all Member States of the European Union (http://ssrn.com/abstract=3088495). Specific attention is paid on the legal and policy frameworks governing case law publication, actual practices, data protection issues, Open Data policies as well as the state of play regarding the implementation of the European Case Law Identifier.”

Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Evidence from the consumption of fake news during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign

Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Evidence from the consumption of fake news during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. Andrew Guess, Department of Politics, Princeton University; Brendan Nyhan, Department of Government, Dartmouth College; Jason Reifler, Department of Politics, University of Exeter. January 8, 2018. “Though some warnings about online “echo chambers” have been hyperbolic, tendencies toward selective… Continue Reading

Crowdsourcing letters to representatives for transparency and accountability

“From-Congress is an attempt to collect letters sent by representatives to their constituents. These letters often contain statements by the rep about positions that might otherwise be difficult to discover. This project exists to increase the amount of transparency and accountability of representatives in their districts…The project is created and run by Evan Conrad, who… Continue Reading

New guide helps journalists, researchers investigate misinformation, memes and trolling

“Recent scandals about the role of social media in key political events in the US, UK and other European countries over the past couple of years have underscored the need to understand the interactions between digital platforms, misleading information and propaganda, and their influence on collective life in democracies. In response to this, the Public… Continue Reading

Ocean of Things Aims to Expand Maritime Awareness across Open Seas

DARPA envisions ocean-based “internet of things” made of small, low-cost floating sensors – “The internet of things connects an ever-growing number of smart devices for up-to-the-minute monitoring and tracking of many common events. Head out to most parts of the open ocean, however, and no such capability exists for real-time monitoring of maritime activity. DARPA… Continue Reading

AI System Sorts News Articles By Whether or Not They Contain Actual Information

Motherboard: “…In a recent paper published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, computer scientists Ani Nenkova and Yinfei Yang, of Google and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, describe a new machine learning approach to classifying written journalism according to a formalized idea of “content density.” With an average accuracy of around 80 percent, their… Continue Reading

What Can Be Done to Protect Endangered Government Data?

“The federal government has made significant strides towards making vast amounts of government data freely available to the public, and businesses, researchers, civil society groups, journalists, and many others have put open data to good use. However, recent events suggest that some open government data may be at risk. For example, in February 2017, the… Continue Reading

Fewer Americans rely on TV news – what type they watch varies by who they are

“Americans are relying less on television for their news. Just 50% of U.S. adults now get news regularly from television, down from 57% a year prior in early 2016. But that audience drain varies across the three television sectors: local, network and cable. Local TV has experienced the greatest decline but still garners the largest… Continue Reading

NOAA – 2017 was third warmest year on record for US with record number of climate disasters

Assessing the U.S. Climate in 2017 – “Based on preliminary analysis, the average annual temperature for the contiguous U.S. was 54.6°F, 2.6°F above the 20th century average. This was the third warmest year since record keeping began in 1895, behind 2012 (55.3°F) and 2016 (54.9°F), and the 21st consecutive warmer-than-average year for the U.S. (1997… Continue Reading

DOT – 46,000,000 Takata Air Bags Affected in Approximately 34,000,000 Vehicles

A reminder – “Approximately 34 million vehicles are currently under recall for approximately 46 million defective Takata air bags that can explode when the air bag deploys, causing serious injury or even death. Additional air bags are scheduled to be recalled by December 2019, bringing the total number of affected air bags to around 65-70… Continue Reading