Open Culture: “Here on Halloween of 2024, we have a greater variety of scary stories — and arguably, a much scarier variety of scarier stories — to choose from than ever before. But whatever their relevance to the specific lives we may live and the specific dreads we may feel today, how many such current… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: October 2024
All of the paywall removers in one place
Archive Buttons – Simply enter the URL of the article and click the archive buttons to remove any paywall. Continue Reading
Exploiting Meta’s Weaknesses, Deceptive Political Ads Thrived on Facebook and Instagram in Run-Up to Election
ProPublica: Reporting Highlights Deceptive Political Ads: Eight deceptive advertising networks have placed over 160,000 election and social issues ads across more than 340 Facebook pages in English and Spanish. Harmed Users: Some of the people who clicked on ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges or lost health coverage, among other consequences.… Continue Reading
Prebunking Elections Rumors: Artificial Intelligence Assisted Interventions Increase Confidence in American Elections
Mitchell Linegar, arXiv:2410.19202. 24 Oct 2024 – Large Language Models (LLMs) can assist in the prebunking of election misinformation. Using results from a preregistered two-wave experimental study of 4,293 U.S. registered voters conducted in August 2024, we show that LLM-assisted prebunking significantly reduced belief in specific election myths,with these effects persisting for at least one… Continue Reading
What is Causing Our Epidemic of Loneliness and How Can We Fix It?
Harvard Graduate School of Education – Researchers share what Americans have to say about social disconnection and potential solutions – “U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy placed a spotlight on America’s problem with loneliness when he declared the issue an epidemic last year. Murthy explained, in a letter that introduced an urgent advisory, that loneliness is… Continue Reading
U.S. energy consumption by source and sector flow diagram, 2023
EIA – https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/flow/total_energy_sankey_2023.pdf Continue Reading
LinkedIn sued for tracking user health data
ALM Benefits Pro: “Business-focused social media platform LinkedIn has been slapped with three digital privacy class actions contending that it illegally intercepted users’ sensitive health care information to use in targeted advertising. All three cases, filed by Bursor & Fisher in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and the Santa Clara County… Continue Reading
The Verge’s guide to the 2024 presidential election
The Verge: “A presidential campaign is an expression of ideology, often vocalized as a number of promises. Sometimes, those promises are made even when they’re outside the scope of what a president can enact. With Vice President Kamala Harris taking on former President Donald Trump, The Verge’s election guide attempts to cut through the noise… Continue Reading
Should You Pick Up? How to Find Out Who’s Calling You
PCMag: “The phone rings and it’s a number you don’t recognize. Or perhaps an unknown number shows up in your missed calls. You’re curious, but you don’t want to pick up or call back if it’s a telemarketer or scammer. Instead of playing robocall roulette, here are a few ways to investigate who’s calling you… Continue Reading
LinkedIn launches its first AI agent to take on the role of job recruiters
TechCrunch: “LinkedIn, the social platform used by professionals to connect with others in their field, hunt for jobs, and develop skills, is taking the wraps off its latest effort to build artificial intelligence tools for users. Hiring Assistant is a new product designed to take on a wide array of recruitment tasks, from ingesting scrappy… Continue Reading
Seismic Explorer
Kottke – The Concord Consortium: “From 1980 to the present, a timeline map of every earthquake in the world with a magnitude of 5 or above. You can play around with different parameters and data, so you can see where the different tectonic plates are, just see where the biggest earthquakes occurred, or add in… Continue Reading
Foreign Malign Election Meddling Persists but Struggles to Gain Traction
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD): “In September 2024, FDD published a report documenting Russian, Chinese, and Iranian influence operations targeting the 2024 U.S. elections. This follow-up report details the ongoing efforts of U.S. adversaries who seek to undermine voters’ confidence in the electoral process in the weeks leading up to the November election.… Continue Reading
