Day archives: April 25th, 2023

Independent Bookstore Day is All Week

Libro.fm: “Celebrate independent bookstores everywhere with our sale on bestselling audiobooks from Monday, April 24th through Sunday, April 30th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!…” Visit a bookstore! Explore our 2,000+ local bookstore partners and find one near you. See the map See also https://bookshop.org/

Subjects: Libraries

Generative AI at Work

Generative AI at Work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey R. Raymond. NBER Working Paper No. 31161 April 2023: “We study the staggered introduction of a generative AI-based conversational assistant using data from 5,179 customer support agents. Access to the tool increases productivity, as measured by issues resolved per hour, by 14 percent on average, …

Subjects: AI, Economy, Financial System, Internet, Knowledge Management

The Municipal Drinking Water Database

Hughes S, Kirchhoff CJ, Conedera K, Friedman M (2023) The Municipal Drinking Water Database. PLOS Water 2(4): e0000081. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000081 “Drinking water services in the U.S. are critical for public health and economic development but face technical, political, and administrative challenges. Understanding the root cause of these challenges and how to overcome them is hindered by …

Subjects: Economy, Environmental Law, Government Documents, Health Care, Search Engines

Chatbots Sound Like They’re Posting on LinkedIn

The Atlantic – “Large language models make things up, but the worse problem may be in how they present those falsehoods…If you spend any time on the internet, you’re likely now familiar with the gray-and-teal screenshots of AI-generated text. At first they were meant to illustrate ChatGPT’s surprising competence at generating human-sounding prose, and then …

Subjects: AI, E-Mail, E-Records, Education, Internet, Knowledge Management, Social Media

DOE Launches New Consumer Energy Savings Hub

“The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today launched the Energy Savings Hub — an online one-stop shop for American families and consumers to access the savings tools that President Biden’s Investing in America agenda has made available to drastically cut energy costs. The new website—Energy.gov/Save—puts President Biden’s clean energy tax credits and forthcoming rebates right at …

Subjects: Climate Change, E-Government, Energy, Environmental Law, Government Documents, Search Engines

Big Tech Lobbyists Explain How They Took Over Washington

reThink Trade: “An amazing research paper unearths how the tech industry invented the concept of digital trade and sold it to government officials. Progressive trade advocates continue to express confusion over the Biden administration’s trade policies. Despite a U.S. trade representative (USTR) in Katherine Tai who has prioritized a worker-centered trade vision that breaks with …

Subjects: Congress, Digital Rights, Economy, Financial System, Government Documents, Legal Research, Legislation

Google is making it much easier to search for tools in Docs, Sheets, and Slides

The Verge: “Google is adding a new feature to some of its Workspace apps that will help users quickly locate commonly used tools without needing to sift through various menus and toolbars. The “enhanced tool finder” is starting to roll out across Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides today, appearing as a search bar — identified …

Subjects: E-Records, Knowledge Management, Search Engines

BirdCast

BirdCast: “Showcasing the spectacle of bird migration When, where, and how far will birds migrate? How many birds passed last night? Our tools help you explore the answers to these and many other questions about bird migration. BirdCast proposed to provide real-time predictions of bird migrations: when they migrate, where they migrate, and how far …

Subjects: Environmental Law