Axios: “In 2024, a double brood of periodical cicadas will appear across the United States. Some have called the emergence a “cicadapocalypse,” but is it really? Why it matters: Axios Visuals fact-checked the insect hype and found that no matter how you crunch the numbers, 2024 will likely offer just a taste of the cicada… Continue Reading
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Author Archives: Sabrina I. Pacifici
BirdCast
USFWS Pacific “About 90-140 million birds are predicted to migrate across the U.S. each night this weekend! Lights at night can be very disorienting to birds during their long spring migration. To help prevent deadly bird collisions, turn off or dim unnecessary lights! Graphic: BirdCast The Pacific Region for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service… Continue Reading
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, April 13, 2024
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, April 13, 2024 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex… Continue Reading
Journalistic interventions matter: Understanding how Americans perceive fact-checking labels
Misinformation Review: “While algorithms and crowdsourcing have been increasingly used to debunk or label misinformation on social media, such tasks might be most effective when performed by professional fact checkers or journalists. Drawing on a national survey (N = 1,003), we found that U.S. adults evaluated fact-checking labels created by professional fact checkers as more… Continue Reading
The Global State of Social Connections
“Social needs are universal, and the degree to which they are fulfilled — or not — impacts the health, well-being and resilience of people everywhere. With increasing global interest in understanding how social connections support or hinder health, policymakers worldwide may benefit from reliable data on the current state of social connectedness. Despite the critical… Continue Reading
Report – Legal treatment of embryos created through IVF
In Custodia Legis: “In vitro fertilization (IVF) is an assisted reproductive technology (ART) procedure that involves the “joining of a woman’s egg and a man’s sperm in a laboratory dish.” The MedicinePlus website explains that “[i]n vitro means outside the body. Fertilization means the sperm has attached to and entered the egg.” The procedure can… Continue Reading
Police Shootings of Residents Across the United States, 2015–20: A Comparison of States
Rockefeller Institute: “Broader public, media, and scholarly interest in police shootings of residents in the United States has been a constant since 2014. This interest followed a number of high-profile deadly force incidents, including those leading to the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and Tamir Rice in Cleveland, OH. In the decade since,… Continue Reading
96% of US hospital websites share visitor info with Meta, Google, data brokers
The Register: “Hospitals – despite being places where people implicitly expect to have their personal details kept private – frequently use tracking technologies on their websites to share user information with Google, Meta, data brokers, and other third parties, according to research published today. Academics at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed a nationally representative sample… Continue Reading
New bill would try to make tools like Zoom and Teams work together securely
The Verge: “A new proposal from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) would require videoconferencing and messaging tools used by the federal government to be able to communicate with each other, even if made by different companies. It would also enforce high security standards for government collaboration tools, including end-to-end encryption. The Secure and Interoperable Government Collaboration… Continue Reading
80 Percent of Global CO2 Emissions Come From Just 57 Companies
Smithsonian Magazine: “A new analysis released last week by the international non-profit InfluenceMap reveals an overwhelmingly unequal share of fossil fuel pollution worldwide. From 2016 to 2022, 80 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions were produced by just 57 companies. Shared in the think tank’s Carbon Majors Database, which is authored by some of the… Continue Reading
Tracking AI-enabled Misinformation
“To date, NewsGuard’s team has identified 794 Unreliable AI-Generated News and information websites, labeled “UAINS,” spanning 16 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, and Turkish. These websites typically have generic names, such as iBusiness Day, Ireland Top News, and Daily Time Update, which to a… Continue Reading
Colleges are Failing to Fight Antisemitism on Their Campuses
Campus Antisemitism Report Card™ – ADL’s Campus Antisemitism Report Card is a tool for students, parents, alumni, college faculty, guidance counselors, admissions consultants and other stakeholders. Our goal is to serve students and their families looking for information about the current state of antisemitism on campus and how particular universities and colleges are responding. ADL… Continue Reading
