With the conflict in Ukraine now in its third year, Republicans and Democrats continue to differ over U.S. policy toward the war-torn country. A 62% majority of Republicans say the United States does not have a responsibility to help Ukraine defend itself from Russia’s invasion. Americans overall are evenly divided on whether the U.S. has… Continue Reading
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Author Archives: Sabrina I. Pacifici
10 settings to tweak to increase iPhone battery life
ZDNET: “With the way we use our iPhones these days, it can be hard making it through a single day on a full charge. A few FaceTime calls, some text messaging, opening Maps a few times, and you could already be 25% down. If you’ve experienced this, you’re not alone. These phones can be very… Continue Reading
X is training Grok AI on your data—here’s how to stop it
Ars Technica: “Elon Musk-led social media platform X is training Grok, its AI chatbot, on users’ data, and that’s opt-out, not opt-in. If you’re an X user, that means Grok is already being trained on your posts if you haven’t explicitly told it not to. Over the past day or so, users of the platform… Continue Reading
Supreme Connections
ProPublica: “Every year, the Supreme Court’s nine justices fill out a form that discloses their financial connections to companies and people. Using our new database, you can now search for organizations and people that have paid the justices, reimbursed them for travel, given them gifts and more.” Data is also searchable using specific data: Most… Continue Reading
NIST releases a tool for testing AI model risk
TechCrunch: “The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. Commerce Department agency that develops and tests tech for the U.S. government, companies and the broader public, has re-released a testbed designed to measure how malicious attacks — particularly attacks that “poison” AI model training data — might degrade the performance of an AI… Continue Reading
CancerDB: Datasets about Cancer
“CancerDB is a public domain blog assembling searchable key datasets on cancer for dependable models. The focus is on cancer, cancer preventions and treatments, but the database also includes datasets on closely connected things–from cancer types to organizations and more. CancerDB is for two groups of people: Cancer researchers. CancerDB is organized big data to… Continue Reading
Fake images are getting harder to spot. Here’s a field guide.
Washington Post [unpaywalled]: “Photographs have a profound power to shape our understanding of the world. And it’s never been more important to be able to discern which ones are genuine and which are doctored to push an agenda, especially in the wake of dramatic or contentious moments. But advances in technology mean that spotting manipulated… Continue Reading
Our World in Data
Research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems – “Poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality: The world faces many great and terrifying problems. It is these large problems that our work at Our World in Data focuses on. Thanks to the work of thousands of researchers around the… Continue Reading
What is The Scale of Life?
Everyday Life in Real Time – “Our site is a “real-time” visualization of the relative scale of different life events and natural phenomena (details on what real-time means below). You can select from various categories, time periods, and some unique units of measure that we created in the dropdowns to modify the counter lists. Each… Continue Reading
Bing’s AI redesign shoves the usual list of search results to the side
The Verge: “Bing’s new search experience puts AI-generated answers front and center while pushing traditional search results to the side. The new layout, which is rolling out for a small number of queries, fills your search results page with AI-generated summaries addressing various aspects of your question. Microsoft has shared an early look at what… Continue Reading
Congressional District Geography Workbook
CRS Insight: Congressional District Geography Workbook: An Interactive Tool for Congressional Users July 23, 2024. This Insight accompanies the Congressional District Geography Workbook, a Microsoft Excel file that congressional users can download from CRS.gov. The workbook provides information about U.S. House districts as configured in the 118th Congress (2023-2024)….The workbook, when downloaded and opened in… Continue Reading
Button Stealer
“A Chrome extension that “steals” a button from every website you open. Button Stealer works automatically. Do your usual everyday online stuff and watch the collection of your stolen buttons grow. It’s fun, useless, and free!” Continue Reading
