Washington Post [link is free to read]: “Your vibrant green lawn may look lush, but it’s actually an ecological wasteland. “The idea for that ideal lawn is that nothing else can live in it,” said David Mizejewski, a naturalist with the National Wildlife Federation, a nonprofit conservation organization. “It’s like a dense, eternally green carpet.”… Continue Reading
MakeUseOf: ” Google Maps provides info on the availability & power capacity of charging stations to ease EV trip planning. Choose the right charging station with the correct plug type for your EV to avoid issues. Utilize Google Maps & EV apps to plan road trips, extending battery life & ensuring a smooth journey. With… Continue Reading
Simon Willison: “I saw this tweet yesterday from @deepfates, and I am very on board with this: Watching in real time as “slop” becomes a term of art. the way that “spam” became the term for unwanted emails, “slop” is going in the dictionary as the term for unwanted AI generated content…” I’m a big… Continue Reading
Forelle, M. (2022). The material consequences of “chipification”: The case of software-embedded cars. Big Data & Society, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517221095429 “Today’s modern car is an assemblage of mechanical and digital components, of metal panels that comprise its structure and silicon chips that run its functions. Communication and information studies scholars have interrogated the problematic aspects of… Continue Reading
404 Media: “OpenAI, a company that has indiscriminately scraped the internet and vast amounts of knowledge and creative works created by humans to build a company valued at roughly $80 billion, has made what Reddit described as a copyright complaint against the ChatGPT subreddit because it uses OpenAI’s logo. Moderators of the subreddit posted a… Continue Reading
Craig Mod – scroll down the page to this section – Digital Reading in 2024 – “A long time ago, in a universe far, far away, I used to write about / really care about digital reading. A whole chapter of my life / career pivoted around digital reading and books, what could be, and… Continue Reading
FT.com [unpaywalled]: “As chief scientist of one of the first companies to use AI in hiring, I built the system that passed you over for that job. The massive employers that were our customers didn’t need to wait for your job application; we in effect applied for you, whether you knew it or not. But… Continue Reading
Wired: “The humble tree has long protected humans from sickness and even death—and in the modern city, it’s still doing so. As global temperatures rise, so too does the “urban heat island effect”—the tendency for cities to absorb and hold on to the sun’s energy, which is a growing public-health crisis worldwide. On a small… Continue Reading
Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance: “Roughly one in 37 homes are now considered seriously underwater in the US, and that share is much higher across a swath of southern states. Nationally, 2.7% of homes carried loan balances at least 25% more than their market value in the first few months of the year. That’s up from… Continue Reading
EFF: “Axon—the makers of widely-used police body cameras and tasers (and that also keeps trying to arm drones)—has a new product: AI that will write police reports for officers. Draft One is a generative large language model machine learning system that reportedly takes audio from body-worn cameras and converts it into a narrative police report… Continue Reading
Lifehacker: “…Currently, there are two major methods of data-tracking online: The first, cookies, is on the way out, but pixel trackers are a bit more complicated. You’ve probably heard the term cookies before. These are little packets of information that allow websites to store data like your password, so you don’t need to log in… Continue Reading
NextGov/FCW:”The Library of Congress was targeted in a cyberattack that occurred in parallel with a high-profile intrusion into the United Kingdom’s British Library in late October, but the hackers failed to access the U.S. library’s systems, according to internal documents obtained by Nextgov/FCW. The attempted breach occurred around Oct. 28, the same day the U.K.’s… Continue Reading