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 Ask me anything about reforming the Insurrection Act, an outdated law that gives the president near limitless power to use the U.S. military as a domestic police force.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
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Monthly Archives: July 2024
News homepages, archived
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
Google’s Exclusive Reddit Access
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
Woefully Insufficient Publisher Policies on Author AI Use Put Research Integrity at Risk
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 world’s most, and least, walkable cities
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
FCC Mobile Speed Test App
“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
Human rights scores
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
Political Violence and the 2024 Presidential Election
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
AI trained on AI garbage spits out AI garbage
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
Data Privacy Law as a New Field of Law
Papakonstantinou, Vagelis, Data Privacy Law as a New Field of Law (January 06, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4865297 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4865297 “The turn of the 1980s was a milestone period in the development of data privacy laws, that was only paralleled by the turn of the 2020s. The former saw the introduction of Convention 108 by… Continue Reading
Commercial Zones
Data is Plural: “Byeonghwa Jeong et al. have constructed a dataset estimating the geographic boundaries of 23,000+ commercial zones in 69 metro areas in the US and Canada. To build it, they used data on retail and office locations from OpenStreetMap, and on job density from the US Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program (DIP… Continue Reading
webXray
Wired [unpaywalled]- This Machine Exposes Privacy Violations. A former Google engineer has built a search engine, WebXray, that aims to find illicit online data collection and tracking—with the goal of becoming “the Henry Ford of tech lawsuits.”…It’s a search engine for rooting out specific privacy violations anywhere on the web. By searching for a specific… Continue Reading
