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Daily Archives: June 4, 2023

Former Gun Company Executive Explains Roots of America’s Gun Violence Epidemic

ProPublica: “From the movie theater to the shopping mall, inside a church and a synagogue, through the grocery aisle and into the classroom, gun violence has invaded every corner of American life. It is a social epidemic no vaccine can stem, a crisis with no apparent end. Visual evidence of the carnage spills with numbing frequency onto TV shows and floods the internet. Each new shooting brings the lists of loved ones lost, the galleries of their smiling photos and the videos of the police response. And each mass shooting brings another surge of national outrage.According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, guns became the leading killer of children in 2020, overtaking car crashes, drug overdoses and disease for the first time in the nation’s history. Yet as the one-year anniversary of the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, passes, nagging questions loom. Why haven’t lawmakers acted with forceful correctives? What will it take to regain a sense of safety? When will change happen? And how, exactly, did America end up here? Ryan Busse, former executive at Kimber America, a major gun manufacturer, recently shared his thoughts on these questions with ProPublica. He was vice president of sales at Kimber America from 1995 to 2020 but broke with the industry and has become a gun safety advocate. He testified about mass shootings and irresponsible marketing last July in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and authored the book “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America.” In June 2021, he became a senior adviser for Giffords, a gun violence prevention group led by Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman gravely injured in 2011 during a mass shooting. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity…”

Every self-help book ever, boiled down to 11 simple rules

Mashable: “The first self-described self-help book was published in 1859. The author’s name, improbably, was Samuel Smiles; the title, even more improbably, was Self-Help(opens in a new tab). A distillation of lessons from the lives of famous people who had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, it sold millions of copies and was a mainstay… Continue Reading

AI Initiatives from Biden Administration

Via Tech Policy Press: “A little more than a week ago, the White House released its national research and development strategy for artificial intelligence. The document joins the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, a phalanx of AI initiatives from the Biden administration, including: The White House Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights;… Continue Reading

Is That Climate Change? The Science of Extreme Event Attribution

CRS, Is That Climate Change? The Science of Extreme Event Attribution. June 1, 2023: “Climate change attribution is the study of whether, or to what degree, human influence may have contributed to extreme climate or weather events. Scientists can now estimate whether human activities have influenced extreme weather or climate events and changed how likely… Continue Reading

Royal Collection Trust

“Explore the Royal Collection, one of the largest and most important art collections in the world, and one of the last great European royal collections to remain intact. The Collection Online – Just under 270,000 records about objects in the Collection can now be found online. These records form a working database that we are… Continue Reading

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, June 3, 2023

Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, June 3, 2023 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex… Continue Reading

Perplexity search engine

“The next iteration of Perplexity has arrived: Copilot, your interactive AI search companion. Perplexity Copilot guides your search experience with interactive inputs, leading you to a rich, personalized answer, powered by GPT-4. Try it for free at http://perplexity.ai“ Continue Reading

Regulating AI

Gizmodo: “What Would AI Regulation Look Like? How could Congress corral artificial intelligence? Erect guardrails, ensure accountability, and address monopolistic power. A new federal agency to regulate AI sounds helpful but could become unduly influenced by the tech industry. Instead, Congress can legislate accountability. Instead of licensing companies to release advanced AI technologies, the government… Continue Reading

It’s the End of Computer Programming as We Know It. (And I Feel Fine.)

The New York Times Opinion, Farhad Manjoo: “…A.I. tools based on large language models — like OpenAI Codex, from the company that brought you ChatGPT, or AlphaCode, from Google’s DeepMind division — have already begun to change the way many professional coders do their jobs. At the moment, these tools work mainly as assistants —… Continue Reading