“Launched by The New York Academy of Medicine Library in 2016, #ColorOurCollections is an annual coloring festival on social media during which libraries, museums, archives and other cultural institutions around the world share free coloring content featuring images from their collections. The annual #ColorOurCollections week generally occurs on the first full week of February, when… Continue Reading
Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002
Author Archives: Sabrina I. Pacifici
New discovery about carbon dioxide is challenging decades-old ventilation doctrine
StatNews: “Carbon dioxide monitors have been around for decades. But in 2020, they became, almost overnight, a hot commodity. All of a sudden, people wanted them to help assess the safety of indoor spaces — to gauge the likelihood of breathing in coronavirus-laced particles that until very recently had been in someone else’s lungs. No… Continue Reading
It Looked Like a Reliable News Site. It Was an AI Chop Shop
The New York Times [unpaywalled]: “…BNN went dormant in April, while The New York Times was reporting this article. The company and its founder did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Microsoft had no comment on MSN’s featuring the misleading story with Mr. Fanning’s photo or his defamation case, but the company said it… Continue Reading
Meth-addict fish, aggro starlings, caffeinated minnows: animals radically changed by human drugs
The Guardian: “From brown trout becoming “addicted” to methamphetamine to European perch losing their fear of predators due to depression medication, scientists warn that modern pharmaceutical and illegal drug pollution is becoming a growing threat to wildlife. Drug exposure is causing significant, unexpected changes to some animals’ behaviour and anatomy. Female starlings dosed with antidepressants… Continue Reading
Alito Piles on Reasons for Congress to Act on Supreme Court Ethics
Brennan Center: “Justice Alito’s display of flags associated with the January 6 insurrection shows that the current system isn’t working. In the summer of 2023, Justice Samuel Alito told the Wall Street Journal that Congress has no authority to regulate the Supreme Court, despite the ethical regulations Congress already imposes on the justices. Around the time he made this erroneous statement,… Continue Reading
Operation Overload
Aleksandra Atanasova (Reset.Tech), Amaury Lesplingart (CheckFirst), Francesco Poldi (CheckFirst), Guillaume Kuster (CheckFirst) Published in June 2024 under the CC BY-SA licence. “This report exposes a large-scale, cross-country, multi-platform disinformation campaign designed to spread pro-Russian propaganda in the West, with clear indicators of foreign interference and information manipulation (FIMI). The narratives promoted by the actors are… Continue Reading
How climate change is making us sick
Grist: “These climate-driven impacts are taking a serious toll on human health. Cases of disease linked to mosquitos, ticks, and fleas tripled in the U.S. between 2004 and 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The threat extends beyond commonly recognized vector-borne diseases. Research shows more than half of all the pathogens… Continue Reading
You Should Browse With Incognito More Often: Here’s Why
MakeUseOf: “Key Takeaways Incognito mode prevents your browsing history, cookies, and information entered in forms from being saved on your device, making your browsing private from others who use the same device. Incognito mode also helps you avoid targeted ads and prevents websites from storing cookies on your device, offering more privacy and a smoother… Continue Reading
Political Machines: Understanding the Role of AI in the U.S. 2024 Elections and Beyond
Martin, Z., Jackson, D., Trauthig, I., and Woolley, S. (May, 2024). Political machines: Understanding the role of generative AI in the U.S. 2024 elections and beyond. Center for Media Engagement. Propagandists are pragmatists and innovators.1 Political marketing is a game in which the cutting edge can be the margin between victory and defeat. Generative Artificial… Continue Reading
Bluesky and Mastodon users can now talk to each other with Bridgy Fed
TechCrunch: “An important step toward a more interoperable “fediverse” — the broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others — has been achieved. Now, users on decentralized apps like Mastodon, powered by the ActivityPub protocol, and those powered by Bluesky’s AT Protocol, can easily follow people on other networks, see their… Continue Reading
OpenAI Is Just Facebook Now
The Atlantic [unpaywalled] “Facing one controversy after the next, the artificial-intelligence company enters a new phase. OpenAI appears to be in the midst of a months-long revolt from within. The latest flash point came yesterday, when a group of 11 current and former employees—plus two from other firms—issued a public letter declaring that leading AI… Continue Reading
Identifying and characterizing superspreaders of low-credibility content on Twitter
DeVerna MR, Aiyappa R, Pacheco D, Bryden J, Menczer F (2024) Identifying and characterizing superspreaders of low-credibility content on Twitter. PLoS ONE 19(5): e0302201. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0302201: “The world’s digital information ecosystem continues to struggle with the spread of misinformation. Prior work has suggested that users who consistently disseminate a disproportionate amount of low-credibility content—so-called superspreaders—are at… Continue Reading
