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Category Archives: Education

Wallace & Gromit Return

Beloved duo Wallace & Gromit returned to our screens at Christmas, 34 years after their first appearance, in their second feature-length film, Vengeance Most Fowl (Fanfare thread). Group blog (-slash-arts-magazine) It’s Nice That recently interviewed creator and director Nick Park, co-director Merlin Crossingham and supervising animator Will Becher about the plasticine pair’s legacy and creating… Continue Reading

FOIA Fellows as Freedom Fighters

Jack Wroldsen, FOIA Fellows as Freedom Fighters: An Independent and Privately Funded FOIA Commission of Rotating Professionals (Oct. 31, 2024). 108 Marquette L. Rev. (forthcoming 2025), available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5043146 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5043146. “The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a hallmark of U.S. democracy, designed as an outsider element that foists transparency on a government… Continue Reading

The Depths of Wikipedians

Asterisk Interview with Annie Rauwerda – The Depths of Wikipedians – Asterisk: You’re famous for the Depths of Wikipedia account, where you share factoids from some of the most arcane, interesting, and surprising pages on Wikipedia. But you’re also now a part of the broader Wikipedia community. How did you first get interested in the… Continue Reading

What the data says about federal workers

Pew Research Center – “President-elect Donald Trump has focused much attention on shrinking the size and scope of the federal government for his second administration. Most notably, Trump has appointed tech mogul Elon Musk and GOP-primary-rival-turned-ally Vivek Ramaswamy to lead an advisory task force dubbed the “Department of Government Efficiency.” Musk and Ramaswamy have said… Continue Reading

Is prompt engineering a ‘fad’ hindering AI progress?

ZDNet: “A principal scientist at Google DeepMind thinks prompting is the wrong user interface for generative AI, not to mention bad for AI researchers. Here’s why…Motivated by the belief that “a well-crafted prompt is essential for obtaining accurate and relevant outputs from LLMs,” aggressive AI users — such as ride-sharing service Uber — have created… Continue Reading

Suspected Undeclared Use of Artificial Intelligence in the Academic Literature

Suspected Undeclared Use of Artificial Intelligence in the Academic Literature. An Analysis of the Academ-AI Dataset. Alex Glynn, MA, Kornhauser Health Sciences Library, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY. November 26, 2024. “Since generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT became widely available, researchers have used them in the writing process. The consensus of… Continue Reading

On The Fragility of Our Knowledge Base

JSTOR Daily: “Historian Glenn D. Tieffert shows how state interests in the People’s Republic of China can be protected by editing online databases and collections. Digital databases are vulnerable to authoritarian regimes. In fact, argues historian Glenn D. Tiffert, “no corner of the knowledge economy lies beyond their reach.” “Digital platforms offer [censors] dynamic, fine-grained… Continue Reading

Science paper piracy site Sci-Hub shares lots of retracted papers

Ars Technica: “85 percent of invalid papers continue to be shared after they’ve been retracted. Keeping track of when a paper has been retracted can be a challenge. Most scientific literature is published in for-profit journals that rely on subscriptions and paywalls to turn a profit. But that trend has been shifting as various governments… Continue Reading