Monthly archives: October, 2024

How to Delete Your 23andme Data Amid the Company’s Turmoil

Lifehacker: …What happens when you delete your 23andme data? – Deleting your 23andme data doesn’t necessarily withdraw it from studies, especially since the data was “de-identified,” that is, stripped from your name and personal information. It does mean that your data will not be used in future research projects. 23andme explains their deletion policies here …

Subjects: E-Records, Health Care, Medicine, Privacy

Campaign Finance Made Easy: Announcing DataTalk

Cheryl Phillips, Founder and Co-Director, Big Local News: “DataTalk is an experimental system that makes it easier to follow the money flowing through national campaigns for the Nov. 5 U.S. election. It allows for natural-language queries of large public datasets from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and OpenSecrets.org to help journalists and other researchers tap …

Subjects: AI, Congress, Financial System, Government Documents, Legal Research, Search Engines

You might discover a conspiracy theory on social media — but you’re more likely to believe it if you hear it from a friend

NiemanLab – Want to check out some new conspiracy theories? Social media is a great place to find them. But will it make you believe them? That’s the question asked by a new working paper looking at conspiracy theories surrounding the Donald Trump assassination attempt on July 13. (Gotta love it when academia moves quickly!) …

Subjects: Education, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Social Media

LLRX Articles and Columns, September 2024

When Should Presenters Apologize? – Referencing decades of experience as a presenter and an attendee at presentations, Jerry Lawson cautions us not to begin a presentation with an apology, which can be compelled by a tech glitch or some other reason not within our control. AI in Finance and Banking, September 30, 2024 – Sabrina I. …

Subjects: AI, Climate Change, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Government, Education, Environmental Law, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Social Media

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 5, 2024

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 5, 2024 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and …

Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Internet, Legal Research, Privacy, Search Engines, Social Media

Not incentivized yet efficient: Working from home in the public sector

Alessandra Fenizia and Tom Kirchmaier. 25 September 2024. Paper Number CEPDP2036 Download PDF – Not incentivized yet efficient: Working from home in the public sector This paper studies whether working from home (WFH) affects workers’ performance in public sector jobs. Studying public sector initiatives allows us to establish baseline estimates on the impact of WFH …

Subjects: Knowledge Management

Why are Red State Citizens Poorer, Less Educated & Sicker than Blue State Citizens?

Hartmann Report – “Republicans worship cheap labor — and having a steady and reliable supply of cheap labor requires widespread poverty… We must not confuse statistical probability with some transcendental and utterly compelling force. — Unspiek, Baron Bodissey One of the enduring mysteries of America is why the citizens of Red states are generally poorer, …

Subjects: Congress, Courts, Economy, Education, Financial System, Health Care, Legal Research, Poverty

Trump would add twice as much to national debt as Harris

US Budget Watch 2024 is a project of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget – The next President will face significant fiscal challenges upon taking office, including record debt levels, large structural deficits, surging interest payments, and the looming insolvency of critical trust fund programs. Our large and growing national debt threatens to slow economic growth, …

Subjects: Economy, Financial System

‘Not one girl could be shown to her parents’: The horrors of Oct 7 – as told by the survivors

The UK Telegraph [unpaywalled] – ‘I saw the Holocaust… so many dead bodies’: To mark the anniversary of the attacks, I traveled to Israel to hear stories of Israelis forced to face an unimaginably dark ordeal….So many questions still unanswered from October 7. I put those queries to scores of Israelis – survivors, soldiers, politicians, …

Subjects: Legal Research

License Plate Readers Are Creating a US-Wide Database of More Than Just Cars

Wired [unpaywalled]: “…License-plate-recognition systems, broadly, work by first capturing an image of a vehicle; then they use optical character recognition (OCR) technology to identify and extract the text from the vehicle’s license plate within the captured image. Motorola-owned DRN sells multiple license-plate-recognition cameras: a fixed camera that can be placed near roads, identify a vehicle’s …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, E-Government, E-Records, Privacy, Search Engines, Transportation