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Category Archives: Knowledge Management

6 Ways to Use Old Hard Drives

How to Geek: ” You can buy an enclosure to convert internal hard drives into external USB drives for easy data transfer and storage. Hard drives can be used as archival storage for game consoles, USB boot drives, storage for DVRs, and more. Hard drives can be used for easy file backups with File History… Continue Reading

OpenAI Gives ChatGPT a Memory

Wired [read free]: “…The promise and peril of the internet has always been a memory greater than our own, a permanent recall of information and events that our brains can’t store. More recently, tech companies have promised that virtual assistants and chatbots could handle some of the mnemonic load, by both remembering and reminding. It’s… Continue Reading

The unsettling scourge of obituary spam

The Verge: “…“Obituary scraping” is a common practice that affects not just celebrities and public figures, but also average, private individuals. Funeral homes have been dealing with obituary aggregator sites for at least 15 years, says Courtney Gould Miller, chief strategy officer at MKJ Marketing, which specializes in marketing funeral services. The sites trawl news… Continue Reading

How AI Works

How AI Works. An entirely non-technical explanation of LLMs by Nir Zicherman, January 29, 2024. “For all the talk about AI lately—its implications, the ethical quandaries it raises, the pros and cons of its adoption—little of the discussion among my non-technical friends touches on how any of this stuff works. The concepts seem daunting from… Continue Reading

American Local Government Elections Database

“The study of urban and local politics in the United States has long been hindered by a lack of centralized sources of election data. We introduce a new dataset of about 78,000 candidates in 57,000 electoral contests that encompasses races for seven distinct local political offices in most medium and large cities and counties in… Continue Reading

Better Call GPT, Comparing Large Language Models Against Lawyers

ArXiv – Lauren Martin, Nick Whitehouse, Stephanie Yiu, Lizzie Catterson, Rivindu Perera. 2024. Better Call GPT, Comparing Large Language Models Against Lawyers. 1, 1 (January 2024), 16 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn “This paper presents a groundbreaking comparison between Large Language Models (LLMs) and traditional legal contract reviewers—Junior Lawyers and Legal Process Outsourcers (LPOs). We dissect whether LLMs… Continue Reading

Google Scholar is manipulatable

arXiv preprint :2402.04607 – Google Scholar is manipulatable: “Citations are widely considered in scientists’ evaluation. As such, scientists may be incentivized to inflate their citation counts. While previous literature has examined self-citations and citation cartels, it remains unclear whether scientists can purchase citations. Here, we compile a dataset of ~1.6 million profiles on Google Scholar… Continue Reading

Artificial Intelligence in the News

Columbia Journalism Review – Artificial Intelligence in the News: How AI Retools, Rationalizes, and Reshapes Journalism and the Public Arena – Executive Summary: “Despite growing interest, the effects of AI on the news industry and our information environment — the public arena — remain poorly understood. Insufficient attention has also been paid to the implications… Continue Reading

Bias, Skew and Search Engines Are Sufficient to Explain Online Toxicity

Association for Computing Machinery. Scholar One Manuscripts. Bias, Skew and Search Engines Are Sufficient to Explain Online Toxicity: “U.S. political discourse seems to have fissioned into discrete bubbles, each reflecting its own distorted image of the world. Many blame machine-learning algorithms that purportedly maximize “engagement” — serving up content that keeps YouTube or Facebook users… Continue Reading

Data Index Tool Offers Glimpse at School Success Boundaries

GovTech: “Federal data can be difficult to wrangle, but a new tool created by a nonprofit aims to remove some of the heavy lifting to help create a clear picture of communities socioeconomic needs — specifically within school attendance boundaries. The National Academy Foundation (NAF), an education nonprofit, collaborated with the NYU Marron Institute of… Continue Reading

FAA Aviation Maps

Kottke: “On Beautiful Public Data, Jon Keegan highlights the extremely information-rich flight maps produced by the Federal Aviation Administration that pilots use to find their way around the skies. Among all of the visual information published by the U.S. government, there may be no product with a higher information density than the Federal Aviation Administration’s… Continue Reading