137 Harv. L. Rev. 1138 – “Voter turnout was higher in the 2020 U.S. presidential election than it had been in 120 years. Nearly sixty-seven percent of citizens over eighteen voted that November, exceeding rates that hovered around sixty percent in the twenty-first century and never broke sixty percent from 1972 to 2000. Some pundits… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Education
A gigantic chart that explains absolutely everything
This chart is an overview of Meaningness and Time: the past, present, and future of culture, society, and our selves. It shows how the modes of meaningness manifest in many aspects of life. Some people find this sort of systematic presentation helpful; others do not. Skip it if you are one of those who don’t.… Continue Reading
World’s largest gravesite collection
Find A Grave: Find the graves of ancestors, create virtual memorials or add photos, virtual flowers and a note to a loved one’s memorial. Search or browse cemeteries and grave records for every-day and famous people from around the world. Slate – My Weekends With the Dead – “In 2017, I decided to solve a… Continue Reading
New website tracks government’s many digital services teams
StateScoop: “Last week, the Digital Service Network at the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University published a new online tracker that documents details about government digital service teams across the country. The new Government Digital Service Team Tracker, which was published on the Digital Service Network’s new Digital Government Hub reference… Continue Reading
Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind
The New York Times unlocked article Robert Paxton thought the label was overused. But now he’s alarmed by what he sees in global politics — including Trumpism…Paxton, who is 92, is one of the foremost American experts on fascism and perhaps the greatest living American scholar of mid-20th-century European history. His 1972 book, “Vichy France:… Continue Reading
The National Security Case for Public AI
Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator: In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posed a simple but striking question: “Who will control the future of AI?” Altman frames the choice as between two futures: “Will it be one in which the United States and allied nations advance a global AI that spreads the… Continue Reading
Google Scholar is not broken (yet) but there are alternatives
London School of Economics: “…Google Scholar has advantages over traditional academic databases like Scopus and Web of Science: it’s free to use, requires no log in for searching, and has more comprehensive coverage, especially of non-journal sources such as books and theses. These benefits are particularly important for unaffiliated scholars without institutional access to resources,… Continue Reading
Towards Your “Tombstone Site”
The Wind Down: “As part of my work developing The Wind Down, I have been bookmarking the websites of sunset nonprofits for the past few years. As my list grew, someone suggested that maybe we needed a “museum of closed nonprofits“, (hat tip, Kyle Soo) so I went ahead and created one. And then a… Continue Reading
People think they already know everything they need to make decisions
Ars Technica: The world is full of people who have excessive confidence in their own abilities. This is famously described as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who lack expertise in something will necessarily lack the knowledge needed to recognize their own limits. Now, a different set of researchers has come out with what… Continue Reading
AI Audiobook Narrators in OverDrive and the Issue of Library AI Circulation Policy
STBT: “OverDrive is the company that provides a lot of digital content to libraries. If you’ve borrowed an ebook or an audiobook in Libby, or read a magazine in Kanopy, that’s OverDrive. It seems there is some AI weirdness with audiobook narration on OverDrive, and the narrator is only part of the story. On Monday,… Continue Reading
Google’s AI Fails At 43% Of Finance Queries, Study Finds
Search Engine Journal: A study by The College Investor finds significant inaccuracies in Google’s AI-generated summaries for finance queries. Out of 100 personal finance searches, 43% had misleading or incorrect information. Key Findings -The study evaluated AI overviews across various financial topics, including banking, credit, investing, taxes, and student loans. The results showed: 57% of… Continue Reading
We’re about to enter the Digital Dark Ages
Business Insider via MSN: “The long-promised digital apocalypse has finally arrived, and it was heralded by a blog post. Published on July 18, the post’s headline sounded pretty arcane. “Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available,” it declared. I know, I know — not exactly an attack of alien zombies from the death… Continue Reading
