Vice: “Over the past 450 million years, life on Earth has been devastated by at least five mass extinctions, which are typically defined as catastrophes that wipe out more than 75 percent of species in a short amount of time. Many scientists have proposed that we are entering a Sixth Mass Extinction, this time driven… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: January 2022
Something in Your Eyes May Reveal if You’re at Risk of Early Death
ScienceAlert: “A quick and pain-free scan of the human eyeball could one day help doctors identify ‘fast agers’, who are at greater risk of early mortality. Getting older obviously has an impact on everybody’s body, but just because two people have the same number of years under their belt doesn’t mean they are physically declining… Continue Reading
What the Kids Are Reading
Paul Musgrave – Engaging with the new generation and its media consumption: “…The idea that today’s college students are digital natives who can seamlessly navigate the online world is, well, doubtful. But even more dubious is the unthinking presumption a lot of faculty and institutions fall into of assuming that they were familiar with the… Continue Reading
Legal Simplification and AI
Eliot, Lance, Legal Simplification and AI (November 3, 2021). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3955411 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3955411 “Many advocates are urging that our existing laws are overly complex and need to be simplified. Interestingly, the advent of AI in the law can readily enter into this same discourse. It might be easier to intertwine AI and the… Continue Reading
Need help recycling? Search for a recycling solution
“WELCOME TO THE EARTH911 RECYCLING SEARCH! With over 350 materials and 100,000+ listings, we maintain one of North America’s most extensive recycling databases. Simply dial 1(800)CLEANUP, or simply enter in the material you are trying to recycle along with your zip code and click search.” Quick Search Terms: Automotive; Batteries; Construction; Electronics; Garden; Glass; Hazardous;… Continue Reading
1942 meeting document on organization and execution of “final solution”
Auschwitz Memorial: “20 January 1942 | A meeting was held in a villa in Berlin-Wannsee to discuss logistics and legal aspects of the operation of the extermination of Jews. This is a 29 page document from the #Wannsee conference protocol. Find documents here: https://ghwk.de/fileadmin/Reda” #NeverForget #AlwaysRemember #Holocaust Continue Reading
How to search Twitter with R
YouTube – “See how to search, filter, and sort tweets using R and the rtweet package. It’s a great way to follow conference hashtags. If you want to follow along with the optional code for creating clickable URL links, make sure to install the purrr package if it’s not already on your system.“ Continue Reading
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has refused to wear a mask
NPR: “It was pretty jarring earlier this month when the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court took the bench for the first time since the omicron surge over the holidays. All were now wearing masks. All, that is, except Justice Neil Gorsuch. What’s more, Justice Sonia Sotomayor was not there at all, choosing instead to… Continue Reading
A new use for AI: summarizing scientific research for seven-year-olds
The Verge: “Academic writing often has a reputation for being hard to follow, but what if you could use machine learning to summarize arguments in scientific papers so that even a seven-year-old could understand them? That’s the idea behind tl;dr papers — a project that leverages recent advances in AI language processing to simplify science.… Continue Reading
Secret Ways to Reach an Actual Person in Customer Service
Likehacker: “In a world that seems increasingly determined to keep us apart, we’re all bound together by at least one universal experience: the frustration of talking to a real person on the phone at a customer service call center. Whether we want to complain, resolve a problem, or simply get information, call center interactions can… Continue Reading
Oxfam: Tax billionaires to fund vaccines for poor hit by pandemic
Inequality Kills: The unparalleled action needed to combat unprecedented inequality in the wake of COVID-19: “The wealth of the world’s 10 richest men [Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer, and Warren Buffet] has doubled since the pandemic began. The incomes of 99% of… Continue Reading
The ‘Brussels Effect’ of the EU’s ‘AI Act’ on Data Privacy Outside Europe
Greenleaf, Graham, The ‘Brussels Effect’ of the EU’s ‘AI Act’ on Data Privacy Outside Europe (June 7, 2021). (2021) 171 Privacy Laws & Business International Report 1, 3-7, UNSW Law Research, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3898904 “The European Commission’s publication of a proposal for a Regulation on Artificial Intelligence (also described as an ‘AI Act’) is… Continue Reading
