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Monthly Archives: September 2023

Why the Global Stocktake is a Critical Moment for Climate Action

“The global stocktake is a critical turning point in our battle against the escalating climate crisis – a moment to take a long, hard look at the state of our planet and chart a better course for the future. “The global stocktake is an ambition exercise. It’s an accountability exercise. It’s an acceleration exercise,” said… Continue Reading

Political contributions, enhanced

Jeremy Singer-Vine, Data is Plural: “Political scientist Adam Bonica’s Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections (DIME) gathers “500 million itemized political contributions made by individuals and organizations to local, state, and federal elections covering from 1979 to 2020.” The project, which received a major update last month, “is intended to make data on… Continue Reading

How to Use Large Language Models for Empirical Legal Research

Choi, Jonathan H., How to Use Large Language Models for Empirical Legal Research (August 9, 2023). Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (Forthcoming), Minnesota Legal Studies Research Paper No. 23-23, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4536852 “Legal scholars have long annotated cases by hand to summarize and learn about developments in jurisprudence. Dramatic recent improvements in the… Continue Reading

Large Language Models and the Future of Law

Charlotin, Damien, Large Language Models and the Future of Law (August 22, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4548258 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4548258 “Large Language Models (LLMs) have crashed into the scene in late 2022, with ChatGPT in particular bringing to the mainstream what has before this remained within the domain of the initiates. This paper introduces the main… Continue Reading

Contextualizing Deepfake Threats to Organizations

Joint CSI – Contextualizing Deepfake Threats to Organizations – Executive summary. “Threats from synthetic media, such as deepfakes, present a growing challenge for all users of modern technology and communications, including National Security Systems (NSS), the Department of Defense (DoD), the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), and national critical infrastructure owners and operators. As with many… Continue Reading

Introducing State Court Report

“We’re excited to introduce you to State Court Report, a nonpartisan source for news, resources, and commentary focused on state courts and state constitutional development. All too often, popular commentary has treated the U.S. Supreme Court as the only word that matters on constitutional rights. But recent federal court rulings limiting or eliminating rights under… Continue Reading

A new tool to help governments with climate data

“To provide a starting point, our organisation, the Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE), has developed a new tool to help governments and their partners identify the kinds of data that may be most useful for climate action. The Climate Data for Adaptation and Resilience Typology (DART), which has just been published, describes more than… Continue Reading

Uncovering Similarities in News Organisations’ AI Guidelines

Oxford Internet Institute: “In the ever-evolving landscape of news reporting, the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently taken centre stage. A significant catalyst for this transformation was the public debut of ChatGPT, a Large Language Model (LLM) by US-based OpenAI, in November 2022. This development has prompted many news organisations to turn their attention… Continue Reading

Historical newspaper articles

Jeremy Singer-Vine, Data is Plural: Melissa Dell et al.’s American Stories dataset contains the text of ~400 million newspaper articles, extracted from ~20 million public-domain scans in the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America project (DIP 2017.08.16). To construct the dataset, the authors built “a novel deep learning pipeline that incorporates layout detection, legibility classification, custom… Continue Reading