The New York Times – Without insurance, it’s impossible to get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home…Without insurance, you can’t get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home. Communities that are deemed too dangerous to insure face the risk of falling property values, which means less… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: December 2024
Your Smart TV is Watching What You Watch
UC Davis – “If you’re thinking of buying a “smart” TV for the holidays, you ought to know that your new device is constantly capturing snapshots of what’s on screen and sending them back to the manufacturer — even if you are using the device as a computer monitor and not watching TV at all.… Continue Reading
Logging Off: The Tech That Died in 2024
PC Mag – “Out with the old, and in with the new. From the Ring Car Cam and Fossil smartwatches to ICQ and Twitter’s ‘like’ tab, this is the tech that bowed out this year. The tech graveyard is ending 2024 with a few new inhabitants. Throughout the year, companies put aging products out to… Continue Reading
BirdVoxDetect: Large-Scale Detection and Classification of Flight Calls for Bird Migration Monitoring
V. Lostanlen et al., “BirdVoxDetect: Large-Scale Detection and Classification of Flight Calls for Bird Migration Monitoring,” in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol. 32, pp. 4134-4145, 2024, doi: 10.1109/TASLP.2024.3444486. “Sound event classification has the potential to advance our understanding of bird migration. Although it is long known that migratory species have a… Continue Reading
Federal government discloses more than 1,700 AI use cases
FedScoop: “A consolidated list of federal artificial intelligence use cases released by the White House on Wednesday shows agencies more than doubled the amount of uses reported last year.Per the 2024 consolidated inventory, which is available on the Office of Management and Budget’s GitHub, 37 federal agencies have reported 1,757 public AI uses. A consolidated… Continue Reading
American Autocracy Threat Tracker
State Democracy Defenders Action: “President-elect Donald Trump has said he will be a “dictator on day one.” Our American Autocracy Threat Tracker comprehensively catalogs all of Trump’s and his allies’ Project 2025 and other specific plans and promises. We also catalog potential bipartisan solutions to address the threat both now and should it come to… Continue Reading
New research shows how many important links on the web get lost to time
The Verge [unpaywalled]: “A quarter of the deep links in The New York Times’ articles are now rotten, leading to completely inaccessible pages, according to a team of researchers from Harvard Law School, who worked with the Times’ digital team. They found that this problem affected over half of the articles containing links in the… Continue Reading
Study – Companies issuing RTO mandates “lose their best talent”
Ars Technica: “Despite the risks, firms and Trump are eager to get people back into offices. Return-to-Office (RTO) mandates have caused companies to lose some of their best workers, a study tracking over 3 million workers at 54 “high-tech and financial” firms at the S&P 500 index has found. These companies also have greater challenges… Continue Reading
New real estate platform lets homebuyers check their neighbors’ political affiliations
New York Post: “A new real estate platform is giving homebuyers an unprecedented peek into their potential neighborhoods — revealing everything from political leanings to local demographics — before they even commit to buying. Oyssey, a tech startup soft-launching this month in South Florida and New York City, lets buyers access neighborhood political affiliations based… Continue Reading
Amazon Privacy Hacks: How I Keep My Shopping History to Myself
Make Use Of Quick Links Make Your Profile and Wish Lists Private Disable Interest-Based Ads Disable Amazon Search History Use a Private Browser Shopping on Amazon is awesome until you realize third parties can pry into your shopping habits. Thankfully, there are a few ways to protect your privacy on the world’s largest e-commerce platform. Continue Reading
Literary Hub List of Lists – Best Books 2024
TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 and 10 Best Fiction Books of 2024 and 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 • Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2024 • Vanity Fair’s 21 Best Books of 2024 to Read Right Now • The Economist’s Best Books of 2024 • The New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2024 and 10… Continue Reading
Traffic Cam Photobooth
“Traffic Cam Photobooth is a website that allows anybody to locate their nearest publicly available traffic camera and use it to take pictures of themselves. While these cameras are ostensibly intended for traffic, they also serve to acclimate us to the idea that constant monitoring is an everyday part life in the city. No matter… Continue Reading
