The Verge: “A fun little AI art widget named Text-to-Pokémon lets you plug in any name or description you like and (you guessed it) generate a pokémon matching your prompt. The model’s output isn’t flawless, but it’s incredibly entertaining all the same. You can try punching in the names of celebrities or politicians (see “Boris… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Internet
How Social Media Sites Have Amplified False Claims of U.S. Election Fraud
NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights: “As the 2022 midterms approach, falsehoods about election fraud continue to spread via social media. The Big Lie that Joseph Biden did not legitimately win the presidency in 2020 has mutated into a forward-looking belief among many Republicans that American democracy more generally no longer functions fairly.… Continue Reading
Massive LinkedIn Study Reveals Who Actually Helps You Get That Job
Scientific American: “If you want a new job, don’t just rely on friends or family. According to one of the most influential theories in social science, you’re more likely to nab a new position through your “weak ties,” loose acquaintances with whom you have few mutual connections. Sociologist Mark Granovetter first laid out this idea… Continue Reading
Enhancing Transparency of Airline Ancillary Service Fees
Notice of Proposed Rulemaking – Enhancing Transparency of Airline Ancillary Service Fees: The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) is proposing a rule which would significantly strengthen protections for consumers by ensuring any fees charged to seat a young child with an accompanying adult, change or cancel a flight, or travel with a first checked bag,… Continue Reading
You can ban a book, but can you stop teens from finding it online?
Washington Post – Online resources are at the center of the national battle between limiting and expanding book access for teenagers: “Books are being banned in U.S. school libraries in record numbers, led largely by conservative lawmakers and activists. This week, libraries and anti-censorship groups are among those hosting Banned Books Week to call attention… Continue Reading
This site tells you if photos of you were used to train the AI
Tech Crunch: “Deepfakes, AI-generated porn and a thousand more innocent uses — there’s been a lot of news about neural network-generated images. It makes sense that people started getting curious; were my photos used to train the robots? Are photos of me in the image-generating training sets? A brand new site tries to give you… Continue Reading
Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door
The New York Times: “Battling far-right extremism, Germany goes further than other Western democracies in policing online behavior, testing the limits of free speech on the internet…Hate speech, extremism, misogyny and misinformation are well-known byproducts of the internet. But the people behind the most toxic online behavior typically avoid any personal major real-world consequences. Most… Continue Reading
The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools
Pen America – Banned in the USA: “Key Findings: More books banned; More districts; More states; More students losing access to literature. “More” is the operative word for this report on school book bans, which offers the first comprehensive look at bans throughout the 2021–22 school year. This report offers an update on the count… Continue Reading
U.S. Agencies Are Buying Access to Bulk Internet Records
Gizmodo – “Sen. Ron Wyden urged inspectors general at three departments to investigate the military’s purchases of large swaths of data: “Multiple military intelligence offices have paid a data broker for access to internet traffic logs, which could reveal the online browsing histories of U.S. citizens, Sen. Ron Wyden said in a letter Wednesday, citing… Continue Reading
Mozilla urges action to unpick platform browser lock-ins
Tech Crunch: “As antitrust regulators around the world dial up scrutiny of platform power, Mozilla has published a piece of research digging into the at times subtle yet always insidious ways operating systems exert influence to keep consumers locked to using their own-brand browsers rather than seeking out and switching to independent options — while… Continue Reading
Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive – How will they interpret the past?
The Atlantic: “In 2010, cursive was omitted from the new national Common Core standards for K–12 education. The students in my class, and their peers, were then somewhere in elementary school. Handwriting instruction had already been declining as laptops and tablets and lessons in “keyboarding” assumed an ever more prominent place in the classroom. Most… Continue Reading
News Platform and Social Media and News Fact Sheet
Pew Research Center: “The transition of the news industry away from print, television and radio into digital spaces has caused huge disruptions in the traditional news industry, especially the print news industry. It is also reflected in the ways individual Americans say they are getting their news. Today, an overwhelming majority of Americans get news… Continue Reading
