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Daily Archives: January 29, 2023

New Online Tool Provides Health Snapshot of All 435 U.S. Congressional Districts

“Today, researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), unveiled the Congressional District Health Dashboard (CDHD), a new online tool that provides critical health data for all 435 congressional districts and the District of Columbia. The dashboard incorporates 36 key measures of health, such as deaths from cardiovascular disease and breast cancer, along with conditions that affect health, like housing affordability and access to nutritious foods. Until now, most of these data were not available at the congressional district level, nor were they compiled in a single location or easily available to the public. The Congressional District Health Dashboard’s data reveal stark geographic, and racial and ethnic differences in health and wellbeing across congressional districts in the United States. For example, people living in congressional districts in the 11 states that have not expanded Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act are twice as likely to be uninsured compared to those in states with expanded Medicaid coverage. In fact, residents of congressional districts in Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas on average are almost 3.5 times more likely to be uninsured than those in congressional districts in New England. On average, Hispanic residents have the highest rates of uninsurance in most congressional districts across the country.

 “Now, policymakers, advocates, and others can drill down to their specific congressional districts to identify the opportunities and challenges affecting the health and wellbeing of all the people they serve, regardless of income, race, or zip code. The Congressional District Health Dashboard enables users to: Explore rigorous, non-partisan data on health, education, poverty, and more by congressional district and compare these findings to state and national averages; Compare the rates of select metrics among different racial and ethnic groups within districts; and View any congressional district’s snapshot, with all 36 measures compared to the national average, along with district-specific population facts like age and racial/ethnic makeup.”

Books Unbanned

“Brooklyn Public Library is adding our voice to those fighting for the rights of teens nationwide to read what they like, discover themselves, and form their own opinions. Inspired by the American Library Association’s Freedom to Read Statement, BPL’s Books Unbanned initiative is a response to an increasingly coordinated and effective effort to remove books tackling… Continue Reading

OpenAI has hired an army of contractors to make basic coding obsolete

Semafor: “OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot ChatGPT, has ramped up its hiring around the world, bringing on roughly 1,000 remote contractors over the past six months in regions like Latin America and Eastern Europe, according to people familiar with the matter. About 60% of the contractors were hired to do what’s called “data labeling”… Continue Reading

DetectGPT: Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection using Probability Curvature

Neowin: Stanford introduces DetectGPT to help educators fight back against ChatGPT generated papers Source: Eric Mitchell, Yoonho Lee, Alexander (Sasha) Khazatsky, Christopher D. Manning, Chelsea Finn – Stanford University – “The fluency and factual knowledge of large language models (LLMs) heightens the need for corresponding systems to detect whether a piece of text is machine-written.… Continue Reading

Get your email privacy in order with these free must-use tools

PC World: “In the grand scheme of potential privacy concerns, email privacy is perhaps the most personal. Getting unwanted messages in your inbox can feel like a major breach of trust, and knowing senders can see a record of everything you’ve opened and clicked can feel downright creepy. That’s why it’s worth getting familiar with… Continue Reading

Shutterstock Introduces Generative AI to its All-In-One Creative Platform

Cision PRNewswire: “Shutterstock, Inc. the world’s leading creative platform for transformative brands and media companies, today announced the launch of its AI image generation platform, available to use by all Shutterstock customers globally in every language the site offers. The text-to-image technology converts prompts into larger-than-life, ethically created visuals ready for licensing. It is the… Continue Reading

Layoffs by Email Show What Employers Really Think of Their Workers

The New York Times: “…As someone who’s managed people in newsrooms and digital start-ups and has hired and fired people in various capacities for the last 21 years, I think this approach is not just cruel but unnecessary. It’s reasonable to terminate access to company systems, but delivering the news with no personal human contact… Continue Reading

Spontaneous Norms in Law and Economics: A Sketch Typology

Zdybel, Karol B. (2023) : Spontaneous Norms in Law and Economics: A Sketch Typology, ILE Working Paper Series, No. 66, University of Hamburg, Institute of Law and Economics (ILE), Hamburg. European Doctorate in Law and Economics. “This article offers a concise typology of spontaneous norms – i.e., norms that are formed or sustained through decentralized… Continue Reading