OPM Memorandum to Heads and Acting Heads of All Agencies, January 21, 2025. – Pursuant to its authority under 5 U.S.C. § 1103(a)(1) and (a)(5), the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (“OPM”) is providing the following initial guidance to agencies regarding the President’s executive orders titled Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing… Continue Reading
Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002
Monthly Archives: January 2025
LinkedIn accused of using private messages to train AI
BBC: “A US lawsuit filed on behalf of LinkedIn Premium users accuses the social media platform of sharing their private messages with other companies to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. It alleges that in August last year, the world’s largest professional social networking website “quietly” introduced a privacy setting, automatically opting users in to a… Continue Reading
10 Tips for Prosperity and Pleasure in 2025
10 Tips for Prosperity and Pleasure in 2025 – Jerry Lawson suggests 10 ways to work effectively, safely and incorporate innovation and AI into your practices. Continue Reading
Choosing Seeds From 14,000 Varieties? It Just Got Easier.
The New York Times – gift article – “The Exchange, on Seed Savers’ website, pairs the people who save heirlooms with those who want them, all for the price of postage. With a diversity of crops and an impressive depth of choices within each, this year’s Exchange adds up to more than 14,000 unique plant… Continue Reading
webcurios
“This website is the home of Web Curios, a blognewslettertypething which has existed in various forms in various places online since about 2010 (it also exists as a bot on Bluesky, for anyone who, inexplicably, doesn’t want to read 10k words about ‘stuff on the internet’ in one go each week). First published on the… Continue Reading
4 Cybersecurity Misconceptions to Leave Behind in 2025
The New Stack: “Most people know that cyberthreats lurk around every corner. Be it an opportunistic lone criminal or a hacker with the power of a nation-state behind them, it can feel like the world and its dog want to access your private data. Beyond this, though, how well do people grasp the threat? According… Continue Reading
Wikipedia:Database download
Wikipedia offers free copies of all available content to interested users. These databases can be used for mirroring, personal use, informal backups, offline use or database queries (such as for Wikipedia:Maintenance). All text content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License (CC-BY-SA), and most is additionally licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License… Continue Reading
AI-Generated Junk Science Is a Big Problem on Google Scholar
Gizmodo: “AI-generated scientific research is polluting the online academic information ecosystem, according to a worrying report published in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review. A team of researchers investigated the prevalence of research articles with evidence of artificially generated text on Google Scholar, an academic search engine that makes it easy to search for research published… Continue Reading
How Will Trump’s Executive Orders Change Government?
What the New Orders Mean for a New Order – “President Trump issued a wave of executive orders in his first day in office, too many to make sense of them all in one sitting. Here, I focus on the changes that relate to the organization and delivery of public services, and how they matter… Continue Reading
Trump officials pause health agencies’ communications, citing review
Washington Post [unpaywalled]: “The Trump administration has instructed federal health agencies to pause all external communications, such as health advisories, weekly scientific reports, updates to websites and social media posts, according to nearly a dozen current and former officials and other people familiar with the matter. The instructions were delivered Tuesday to staff at agencies… Continue Reading
Trump Orders Federal D.E.I Efforts to Shut Down by Wednesday Night
The New York Times [unpaywalled]: The Trump administration on Tuesday ordered that officials overseeing diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across federal agencies be placed on leave and to take steps to close their offices by Wednesday evening. In a memo from the Office of Personnel Management, the heads of departments and agencies were ordered to… Continue Reading
Trump Admin Accused of Using AI to Draft Executive Orders
Futurism: “Mere hours after being sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Monday, returning President Donald Trump got to work signing dozens — and counting — of executive orders, which range from commands for the US to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization to ordering an… Continue Reading
