MakeUseOf: “You can only call in the United States, and conversations are limited to 15 minutes per month tied to a specific phone number. Anyone with WhatsApp globally can message 1-800-242-8478 to access the AI assistant…” Continue Reading
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Author Archives: Sabrina I. Pacifici
Even laypeople use legalese
MIT News – “MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style. Legal documents are notoriously difficult to understand, even for lawyers. This raises the question: Why are these documents written in a style that makes them so impenetrable? MIT cognitive scientists believe they have uncovered the answer to that question. Just as… Continue Reading
Introducing DiscoverGov: GPO’s New Discovery Search Tool
GPO is pleased to introduce DiscoverGov, our new, web-based search tool. DiscoverGov provides simple, one-stop searching across multiple U.S. Federal Government databases, including GPO’s Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) and GovInfo. It will retrieve reports, articles, and citations while providing direct links to selected resources and publications available online. Come meet DiscoverGov as we release… Continue Reading
Uber for Nursing: How an AI-Powered Gig Model Is Threatening Health Care
Roosevelt Institute: “The gig economy’s labor model and its algorithmic management technologies now have a foothold in one of the largest labor sectors in the country: health care. On-demand nursing companies such as CareRev, Clipboard Health, ShiftKey, and ShiftMed have promised hospitals more control and nurses more flexibility. Through original interviews with 29 “gig” nurses… Continue Reading
If You’re Pregnant, Here’s What You Should Know About the Medical Procedures That Could Save Your Life
ProPublica: “We heard the same story again and again this year: The women were having miscarriages. They were bleeding and in pain. They needed a medical procedure to clear their uterus, but their doctors delayed it or didn’t even counsel them about it. Our yearlong investigation found that abortion laws are affecting how physicians treat… Continue Reading
Insurers Are Deserting Homeowners as Climate Shocks Worsen
The New York Times – Without insurance, it’s impossible to get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home…Without insurance, you can’t get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home. Communities that are deemed too dangerous to insure face the risk of falling property values, which means less… Continue Reading
Your Smart TV is Watching What You Watch
UC Davis – “If you’re thinking of buying a “smart” TV for the holidays, you ought to know that your new device is constantly capturing snapshots of what’s on screen and sending them back to the manufacturer — even if you are using the device as a computer monitor and not watching TV at all.… Continue Reading
Logging Off: The Tech That Died in 2024
PC Mag – “Out with the old, and in with the new. From the Ring Car Cam and Fossil smartwatches to ICQ and Twitter’s ‘like’ tab, this is the tech that bowed out this year. The tech graveyard is ending 2024 with a few new inhabitants. Throughout the year, companies put aging products out to… Continue Reading
BirdVoxDetect: Large-Scale Detection and Classification of Flight Calls for Bird Migration Monitoring
V. Lostanlen et al., “BirdVoxDetect: Large-Scale Detection and Classification of Flight Calls for Bird Migration Monitoring,” in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol. 32, pp. 4134-4145, 2024, doi: 10.1109/TASLP.2024.3444486. “Sound event classification has the potential to advance our understanding of bird migration. Although it is long known that migratory species have a… Continue Reading
Federal government discloses more than 1,700 AI use cases
FedScoop: “A consolidated list of federal artificial intelligence use cases released by the White House on Wednesday shows agencies more than doubled the amount of uses reported last year.Per the 2024 consolidated inventory, which is available on the Office of Management and Budget’s GitHub, 37 federal agencies have reported 1,757 public AI uses. A consolidated… Continue Reading
American Autocracy Threat Tracker
State Democracy Defenders Action: “President-elect Donald Trump has said he will be a “dictator on day one.” Our American Autocracy Threat Tracker comprehensively catalogs all of Trump’s and his allies’ Project 2025 and other specific plans and promises. We also catalog potential bipartisan solutions to address the threat both now and should it come to… Continue Reading
New research shows how many important links on the web get lost to time
The Verge [unpaywalled]: “A quarter of the deep links in The New York Times’ articles are now rotten, leading to completely inaccessible pages, according to a team of researchers from Harvard Law School, who worked with the Times’ digital team. They found that this problem affected over half of the articles containing links in the… Continue Reading
