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Category Archives: Legal Research

Researchers publish dataset of over 6,000 agri-environmental policies from all over the world

“The database is accessible to the general public at this link…researchers from the University of Bonn and the Swiss Federal Institution of Technology (ETH) Zurich have published a database containing over 6,000 agri-environmental policies, thus enabling their peers as well as policymakers and businesses to seek answers to all manner of different questions. The researchers… Continue Reading

Here’s the U.S. Government’s Antitrust Case Against Apple

404 Media: “Thursday [March 21, 2024], the Department of Justice and 16 states filed a massive, years-long antitrust case against Apple. Ahead of the DOJ’s press conference, 404 Media has obtained the full suit from PACER, the federal legal database. As a public service, we are providing the document here: We have not yet reviewed… Continue Reading

TikTokSpreads Misinformation 20 Percent of the Time and Is Banned in China

NewsGuard Reality Check: “The debate in Washington about what to do about TikTok is not about hypothetical harms. NewsGuard research over the years has shone a harsh light on TikTok as a misinformation superspreader. In one report, NewsGuard analysts mimicked how TikTok users interact with the video platform by analyzing 540 TikTok results based on… Continue Reading

Real-world CO2 emissions of cars and vans

Data is Plural. Real-world vehicle emissions. “On Monday, the European Commission published its first report analyzing the real-world CO2 emissions of cars and vans, based on fuel consumption monitoring devices that the EU now requires. The report uses data received from 600,000+ vehicles. That sample is available to download, along with metrics aggregated by manufacturer… Continue Reading

This simple machine turns glass bottles into sand

Fast Company. Glass recycling rates in the U.S. are abysmal. Finding non-traditional solutions—like Cynthia Andela’s glass crushing machines—could help. According to The Recycling Partnership, whole swaths of the U.S. don’t have glass bottle recycling, including regions of the Southeast and the Great Plains. A new report by the NGO states that the glass recycling rate… Continue Reading

Human trafficking

Data is Plural – Human trafficking. The Counter-Trafficking Data Collaborative’s Global Synthetic Dataset uses differential privacy techniques to represent “over 206,000 victims and survivors of trafficking identified across 190 countries and territories from 2002 to 2022.” The approach, developed in partnership with Microsoft Research, converts anonymized case records into “a new dataset in which records… Continue Reading

Aviation waypoints

Data is Plural: “Aviation waypoints. For his recent exploration of the FAA’s aviation maps, Beautiful Public Data’s Jon Keegan has turned the agency’s list of 67,000+ navigation waypoints into a downloadable dataset. “Often these waypoint names will reflect the culture, food or sports teams of the city they are near,” Keegan writes. “Off the coast… Continue Reading

Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent

Ars Technica: “Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users’ consent, a Glassdoor user named Monica was shocked to discover last week. “Time to delete your Glassdoor account and data,” Monica, a Midwest-based software professional, warned other Glassdoor users in a blog.… Continue Reading

VLOGGER: Multimodal Diffusion for Embodied Avatar Synthesis

Google: “We propose VLOGGER, a method for text and audio-driven talking human video generation from a single input image of a person, which builds on the success of recent generative diffusion models. Our method consists of 1) a stochastic human-to-3d-motion diffusion model, and 2) a novel diffusion based architecture that augments text-to-image models with both… Continue Reading

Rethinking Privacy in the AI Era: Policy Provocations for a Data-Centric World

Rethinking Privacy in the AI Era: Policy Provocations for a Data-Centric World – Jennifer King, Caroline Meinhardt. “This White Paper. explores the current and future impact of privacy and data protection legislation on AI development and provides recommendations for mitigating privacy harms in an AI era. In this paper, we present a series of arguments… Continue Reading