FedScoop: “Agencies will have to share custom-developed code amongst each other in an effort to prevent duplicative software development contracts under a new bill signed into law by President Joe Biden. The bipartisan Source Code Harmonization And Reuse in Information Technology (H.R. 9566), or SHARE IT Act, takes aim at reducing the roughly $12 billion… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Knowledge Management
Are we becoming a post-literate society?
FT.com: “Technology has changed the way many of us consume information, from complex pieces of writing to short video clips “Human intelligence,” the cultural critic Neil Postman once wrote, “is among the most fragile things in nature. It doesn’t take much to distract it, suppress it, or even annihilate it.” The year was 1988, a… Continue Reading
The Speed of Human Thought Lags Far Behind Your Internet Connection, Study Finds
The New York Times: “In our digital age, few things are more irritating than a slow internet connection. Your web browser starts to lag. On video calls, the faces of your friends turn to frozen masks. When the flow of information dries up, it can feel as if we are cut off from the world.… Continue Reading
Why Misinformation Must Not Be Ignored
Ecker, U. K. H., Tay, L. Q., Roozenbeek, J., van der Linden, S., Cook, J., Oreskes, N., & Lewandowsky, S. (2024). Why misinformation must not be ignored. American Psychologist. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001448 Recent academic debate has seen the emergence of the claim that misinformation is not a significant societal problem. We argue that the… Continue Reading
2024: The year AI drove everyone crazy
Ars Technica: “It’s been a wild year in tech thanks to the intersection between humans and artificial intelligence. 2024 brought a parade of AI oddities, mishaps, and wacky moments that inspired odd behavior from both machines and man. From AI-generated rat genitals to search engines telling people to eat rocks, this year proved that AI… Continue Reading
The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT
Boston Review: “Questions of AI authorship and ownership can be divided into two broad types. One concerns the vast troves of human-authored material fed into AI models as part of their “training” (the process by which their algorithms “learn” from data). The other concerns ownership of what AIs produce. Call these, respectively, the input and… Continue Reading
Even laypeople use legalese
MIT News – “MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style. Legal documents are notoriously difficult to understand, even for lawyers. This raises the question: Why are these documents written in a style that makes them so impenetrable? MIT cognitive scientists believe they have uncovered the answer to that question. Just as… Continue Reading
Introducing DiscoverGov: GPO’s New Discovery Search Tool
GPO is pleased to introduce DiscoverGov, our new, web-based search tool. DiscoverGov provides simple, one-stop searching across multiple U.S. Federal Government databases, including GPO’s Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) and GovInfo. It will retrieve reports, articles, and citations while providing direct links to selected resources and publications available online. Come meet DiscoverGov as we release… Continue Reading
Federal government discloses more than 1,700 AI use cases
FedScoop: “A consolidated list of federal artificial intelligence use cases released by the White House on Wednesday shows agencies more than doubled the amount of uses reported last year.Per the 2024 consolidated inventory, which is available on the Office of Management and Budget’s GitHub, 37 federal agencies have reported 1,757 public AI uses. A consolidated… Continue Reading
New research shows how many important links on the web get lost to time
The Verge [unpaywalled]: “A quarter of the deep links in The New York Times’ articles are now rotten, leading to completely inaccessible pages, according to a team of researchers from Harvard Law School, who worked with the Times’ digital team. They found that this problem affected over half of the articles containing links in the… Continue Reading
Literary Hub List of Lists – Best Books 2024
TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 and 10 Best Fiction Books of 2024 and 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 • Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2024 • Vanity Fair’s 21 Best Books of 2024 to Read Right Now • The Economist’s Best Books of 2024 • The New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2024 and 10… Continue Reading
Are adults forgetting how to read?
The Economist – A survey by the OECD suggests so – “Are you smarter than a ten-year-old? New data suggest that a shockingly large portion of adults in the rich world might not be. Roughly one-fifth of people aged 16 to 65 perform no better in tests of maths and reading than would be expected… Continue Reading
