Via LLRX – Long COVID puzzle pieces are falling into place – the picture is unsettling – Long COVID is a term that describes the constellation of long-term health effects caused by infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. These range from persistent respiratory symptoms, such as shortness of breath, to debilitating fatigue or brain fog that… Continue Reading
Breaking Up the Giants of Harm. To protect democracy and have a resilient economy, we must tackle corporate power. Again. “Governments and economic regulators have, since the 1980s, turned a blind eye to a handful of giant companies steadily gaining chokeholds in global markets. Banking, agriculture, digital technology, publishing, music, pharmaceuticals and more are dominated… Continue Reading
Spreadsheet LLM – Encoding Spreadsheets for Large Language Models: “Spreadsheets are characterized by their extensive two-dimensional grids, flexible layouts, and varied formatting options, which pose significant challenges for large language models (LLMs). In response, we introduce SpreadsheetLLM, pioneering an efficient encoding method designed to unleash and optimize LLMs’ powerful understanding and reasoning capability on spreadsheets.… Continue Reading
Brennan Center – Via Reddit – “I’m Joseph Nunn, counsel in the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Ask me anything about reforming the Insurrection Act, an outdated law that gives the president near limitless power to use the U.S. military as a domestic police force. The Insurrection Act is… Continue Reading
Data is Plural: “Since launching in March 2022, homepages.news has archived millions of screenshots, performance audits, robots.txt files, accessibility trees, and hyperlink lists from the homepages of 1,100+ news sites. The open-source project, run by journalist Ben Welsh, provides bulk data for each of those assets. The screenshots themselves are stored on the Internet Archive;… Continue Reading
404 Media -“We’ve written a lot over the past year about how bad Google Search is getting, but it’s still incredibly useful for searching Reddit. Add “Reddit” to the end of any search query, and chances are you’ll find a useful thread. Due to a $60 million deal that allows Google to scrape Reddit for… Continue Reading
The Scholarly Kitchen: “There is broad consensus in scholarly publishing that AI tools will make the task of ensuring the integrity of the scientific record a Herculean task. However, it seems that many publishers are still struggling to figure out how to address the new issues and challenges that these AI tools present. Current publisher… Continue Reading
The Economist [unpaywalled]: “Cars can be a nuisance. Just ask anyone stuck on London’s M25 motorway or Houston’s Katy Freeway. More cars create more polluting traffic jams, and the amount of space needed to drive them, park them and re-fuel them could be used for more pleasant purposes, such as parks and recreational areas. It… Continue Reading
“Speed tests run using the FCC Mobile Speed Test app will help to improve the accuracy of the mobile broadband coverage shown on the FCC’s National Broadband Map. The FCC Mobile Speed Test App is a free mobile application available in the United States, designed to evaluate the performance of mobile broadband service. Tests conducted… Continue Reading
Data is Plural: “The CIRIGHTS project aims “to create numerical measures for every internationally recognized human right for all countries of the world.” The team has developed a detailed guide to scoring each government’s record on dozens of such rights, such as freedom of religion, women’s political rights, freedom from extrajudicial killings, the right to… Continue Reading
This webinar is part of the 2024 U.S. Election Webinar series sponsored by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. As the United States prepares to head to the polls in November, this series will convene scholars and practitioners to discuss down-ballot issues, election security, voter trends, and more. This event is online only,… Continue Reading
MIT Technology Review: “AI models work by training on huge swaths of data from the internet. But as AI is increasingly being used to pump out web pages filled with junk content, that process is in danger of being undermined. New research published in Nature shows that the quality of the model’s output gradually degrades… Continue Reading