The New York Times – These married architects are democratizing the 3-D printing process, using materials destined for the trash heap — like curry powder and coffee grounds — in place of drywall and foam. “On a bone-chilling day here with the winter rains pelting down, the architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello retreated… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: March 2019
Lawsuit Could Change How We Prosecute Mass Shootings
Politico “…the Connecticut Supreme Court allowed a claim brought by surviving family members of the Sandy Hook massacre against the manufacturers, distributors and direct sellers of the weapon to move forward toward trial. Soto v. Bushmaster Firearms International, LLC, has monumental implications not only for the surviving families, but potentially for the entire gun industry.… Continue Reading
Education and Science Giant Elsevier Left Users’ Passwords Exposed Online
Motherboard: “Elsevier, the company behind scientific journals such as The Lancet, left a server open to the public internet, exposing user email addresses and passwords. The impacted users include people from universities and educational institutions from across the world. It’s not entirely clear how long the server was exposed or how many accounts were impacted,… Continue Reading
Prosecutors, Transportation Department Scrutinize Development of Boeing’s 737 MAX
[Dow Jones/WSJ paywall] via Morningstar: “Federal prosecutors and Department of Transportation officials are scrutinizing the development of Boeing Co.’s 737 MAX jetliners, according to people familiar with the matter, unusual inquiries that come amid probes of regulators’ safety approvals of the new plane. A grand jury in Washington, D.C., issued a broad subpoena dated March… Continue Reading
How Podcasts Learned to Speak The once useless-seeming medium that became essential.
Vulture: “There are now an estimated 660,000 podcasts in production (that’s a real number, not some comically inflated figure I invented to communicate “a lot”), offering up roughly 28 million individual episodes for your listening enjoyment (again, a real number; yes, someone counted). The first two seasons of the most popular podcast of all time, Serial,… Continue Reading
Government Is Using Most Vulnerable People to Test Facial Recognition Software
Slate – Our research shows that any one of us might end up helping the facial recognition industry, perhaps during moments of extraordinary vulnerability. “If you thought IBM using “quietly scraped” Flickr images to train facial recognition systems was bad, it gets worse. Our research, which will be reviewed for publication this summer, indicates that… Continue Reading
To End Poverty, Think Like a Spy
Paul M. Bisca, To End Poverty, Think Like a Spy, Brookings (March 11, 2019) – “To better manage the unknown, development professionals might want to take a leaf from the intelligence community book and draw inspiration from how spies try to predict the future. Reduced to its simplest terms, the CIA defines intelligence as “knowledge and… Continue Reading
Paper – Rethinking the Efficiency of the Common Law
Sokol, D. Daniel, Rethinking the Efficiency of the Common Law (February 3, 2019). Notre Dame Law Review, forthcoming 2020; University of Florida Levin College of Law Research Paper No. 19-14. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3328025 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3328025 “This Article shows how Posner and other scholars who claimed that common law was efficient misunderstood the structure of… Continue Reading
How to Block Violent Videos on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube
Lifehacker: “Because it’s 2019, and livestreaming has had five years or so to really build up into a mainstream activity that people actually do, this means that horrific acts of violence and terror around the world have a greater-than-zero chance of having some video component attached to them. After all, now that plenty of people… Continue Reading
Coming Soon to a Courtroom Near You? What Lawyers Should Know About Deepfake Videos
The Recorder (Law.com / paywall] via free access on Yahoo} “Are rules that guard against forged or tampered evidence enough to prevent deepfake videos from making their way into court cases? …If you follow technology, it’s likely you’re in a panic over deepfakes—altered videos that employ artificial intelligence and are nearly impossible to detect. Or else you’re over… Continue Reading
The Medieval Masterpiece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Digitized & Put Online
openculture.com – “If you know nothing else about medieval European illuminated manuscripts, you surely know the Book of Kells. “One of Ireland’s greatest cultural treasures” comments Medievalists.net, “it is set apart from other manuscripts of the same period by the quality of its artwork and the sheer number of illustrations that run throughout the 680 pages… Continue Reading
FINRA National Financial Capability Study
FINRA Investor Education Foundation: – “A significant part of financial capability is the ability to make ends meet through adequate savings. Having resources for immediate medical needs is also an important component. In the U.S., 18% of individuals reported that over the past year, their household spent more than their income (not including the purchase… Continue Reading
