Oepn Culture: An Architect Breaks Down America’s Greatest Urban Park – “New Yorkers have a variety of sayings about how they want nothing to do with nature, just as nature wants nothing to do with them. As a counterpoint, one might adduce Central Park, whose 843 acres of trees, grass, and water have occupied the… Continue Reading
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Author Archives: Sabrina I. Pacifici
Gmail’s AI-powered spam detection is its biggest security upgrade in years
Ars Technica: “The latest post on the Google Security blog details a new upgrade to Gmail’s spam filters that Google is calling “one of the largest defense upgrades in recent years.” The upgrade comes in the form of a new text classification system called RETVec (Resilient & Efficient Text Vectorizer). Google says this can help… Continue Reading
Generating Change: A global survey of what news organisations are doing with artificial intelligence
“Our media landscape is undergoing a significant transformation due to technological advancements, particularly since the proliferation of generative AI (genAI). This transformation has sparked discussions, and various media coverage- topics swing between positive breakthroughs in fields like medicine, to concerns about genAI’s potential to generate undetectable disinformation, exacerbating discrimination and societal inequalities. Our research delves… Continue Reading
What Happened to the Milky Way?
Video by The Atlantic – “Can you see the stars at night? Only a few centuries ago, the Milky Way was visible from almost anywhere in America. Today, more than 99 percent of the population in the continental U.S. live in light-polluted areas. It’s impossible to see the Milky Way in more than two-thirds of… Continue Reading
Wastewater COVID-19 National and Regional Trends
CDC – “Wastewater (sewage) can be tested to detect traces of infectious diseases circulating in a community, even if people don’t have symptoms. You can use these data as an early warning that levels of infections may be increasing or decreasing in your community. About CDC’s Wastewater Program (NWSS) How Wastewater Monitoring Work Continue Reading
Tracking people in-and-out of Mar-a-Lago was easy thanks to commercial software
Rolling Stone: “Spying on presidents used to be a tough business. One of the great unsung heroes of American history was a formerly enslaved woman named Mary Bowser, a spy who infiltrated the family of Jefferson Davis as a domestic servant, and eventually landed a full-time job in the Southern White House, the political seat… Continue Reading
The Best Inventions of 2023
TIME: “Every year for over two decades, TIME editors have highlighted the most impactful new products and ideas in TIME’s Best Inventions issue. To compile this year’s list, we solicited nominations from TIME’s editors and correspondents around the world, and through an online application process, paying special attention to growing fields—such as AI, green energy,… Continue Reading
Was it something I said? Legal protections for employee speech
Economic Policy Institute Paper: Executive summary – “At-will” employment is sometimes shorthanded as employers’ rights to fire employees (and employees’ right to quit) for a bad or arbitrary reason, or for no reason at all. Among the bad or arbitrary reasons that employers sometimes fire workers: something the worker said, or something they didn’t say.… Continue Reading
Inside America’s School Internet Censorship Machine
Wired [read free]: “…WIRED requested internet censorship records from 17 public school districts around the US, painting a picture of the widespread digital censorship taking place across the country. Our investigation focuses on Albuquerque Public Schools (APS), one of the largest school districts in the US, which provided the most complete look at its web-filtering… Continue Reading
trains.fyi
“A live, real-time map of passenger train locations in North America. This project amalgamates data from train GPS tracking and displays all trains on one map. Data is updated every minute, and the map updates automatically. This project was created by @rydercalmdown. Supported Trains – Currently the map supports the following trains: Via Rail –… Continue Reading
Automakers’ data privacy practices “are unacceptable”
Ars Technica: “US Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) is one of the more technologically engaged of our elected lawmakers. And like many technologically engaged Ars Technica readers, he does not like what he sees in terms of automakers’ approach to data privacy. On Friday, Sen. Markey wrote to 14 car companies with a variety of questions… Continue Reading
AI and Trust
Schneier on Security – “…Interpersonal trust and social trust are both essential in society today. This is how it works. We have mechanisms that induce people to behave in a trustworthy manner, both interpersonally and socially. This, in turn, allows others to be trusting. Which enables trust in society. And that keeps society functioning. The… Continue Reading
