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Daily Archives: July 5, 2023

Lobbyist Database

FMinus: “Companies and organizations that are supposed to be on the right side of the environmental movement too often hire compromised lobbyists. Search our database to find out who’s hiring who—and whether or not their track record is consistent with their values. [Search by State or Search by Client]

Launched in July 2023, F Minus is using its revolutionary database of state-level lobbyists for upstream and midstream oil, gas, and coal interests to demonstrate the extent to which these lobbyists are also representing people, schools, communities, and businesses being harmed by the climate crisis. The fossil fuel industry is rapidly losing the social license needed to build new projects as the severity of the climate crisis becomes increasingly clear and the public embraces the energy transition. Nevertheless, the fossil fuel industry remains firmly embedded in state capitols because of positive or merely neutral public opinion about its lobbyists, more than 1,500 of whom also represent non-fossil fuel companies, schools, nonprofits, and other organizations whose activities are perceived as beneficial. F Minus is disrupting this dynamic and calling on people to fire their fossil fuel lobbyists.”

Climate Capital Global Economy Financial models on climate risk ‘implausible’, say actuaries

Financial Times [alt free link]: “Financial institutions often did not understand the models they were using to predict the economic cost of climate change and were underestimating the risks of temperature rises, research led by a professional body of actuaries shows. Many of the results emerging from the models were “implausible,” with a serious “disconnect”… Continue Reading

Open Science on Mastodon

Follow the Open Science Community on Mastodon. “Get in touch with the Open Science Community from around the world on Mastodon! This page lists accounts of people interested in Open Science, Metaresearch, Replication, Reproducibility, Open Educational Resources, Open Access, Open Data, Open Source, Open Hardware, Open Software, Open EVERYTHING. It also offers an easy method… Continue Reading

UK’s top universities reached an agreement on how to deal with generative AI

Quartz: “An association of the UK’s leading universities has signed a raft of guiding principles on the ethical use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) among its students and staff, addressing the increasingly common use of the technology in academia. Vice-chancellors of all 24 Russell Group universities that include the University of Oxford, the London School… Continue Reading

New Webinars via GPO

Webinar – Data Librarianship; Richard Huffine (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation); Friday, July 7. 2023; 2:00-3:00p.m. (EDT): Register to attend the live training webinar, “Data Librarianship.” Webinar: GovInfo API Overview and Search Service Preview – Register to attend the live training webinar, Date: Wednesday, July 12, 2023. Time: 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. (EDT) Recording and… Continue Reading

Core principles for effective banking supervision

“The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has issued a public consultation on revisions to the Core principles for effective banking supervision (“Core Principles”). The Core Principles are the de facto minimum standards for the sound prudential regulation and supervision of banks and banking systems. They are universally applicable and accommodate a range of banking systems… Continue Reading

Don’t believe the data: This is the most conservative Supreme Court we’ve known

MSNBC: “Hot takes summarizing the justices’ work can try to spin the data, but the reality is simple. By Steve Vladeck, professor at the University of Texas School of Law The effective end of the Supreme Court’s term on Friday touched off what has become an annual tradition: hot takes summarizing the justices’ work over… Continue Reading

The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con

Out of the Software Crisis – Baldur Bjarnason: “For the past year or so I’ve been spending most of my time researching the use of language and diffusion models in software businesses. One of the issues in during this research—one that has perplexed me—has been that many people are convinced that language models, or specifically… Continue Reading