Monthly archives: April, 2025

Will US science survive Trump 2.0?

Nature: “President Donald Trump and his administration have gutted science agencies, terminated research programmes and cancelled billions of dollars in grants to universities. What are the long-term impacts for the United States and the world? In just the first three months of his second term, US President Donald Trump has destabilized eight decades of government …

Subjects: Education, Government Documents, Health Care, Medicine

ChatGPT goes shopping with new product-browsing feature

Ars Technica: “ChatGPT will now recommend products to be bought offsite—but no sponsored ads just yet. On Thursday, OpenAI announced the addition of shopping features to ChatGPT Search. The new feature allows users to search for products and purchase them through merchant websites after being redirected from the ChatGPT interface. Product placement is not sponsored, …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Internet, Search Engines

The World After Amazon

The World After Amazon – A project to support workers to reclaim the power of future-making Read as a PDF Read as an EPUB Order a book  Listen as a podcast  Download the audiobook In 2023, the Worker as Futurist Project supported 13 rank-and-file Amazon workers to write short, speculative fiction about The World After …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Economy

Car Subscription Features Raise Your Risk of Government Surveillance, Police Records Show

“Records reviewed by WIRED [no paywall] show law enforcement agencies are eager to take advantage of the data trails generated by a flood of new internet-connected vehicle features. Automakers are increasingly pushing consumers to accept monthly and annual fees to unlock pre-installed safety and performance features, from hands-free driving systems and heated seats to cameras …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Freedom of Information, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Privacy

American Panopticon – The Trump administration is pooling data on Americans

The Atlantic – no paywall: Experts fear what comes next. “If you were tasked with building a panopticon, your design might look a lot like the information stores of the U.S. federal government—a collection of large, complex agencies, each making use of enormous volumes of data provided by or collected from citizens. The federal government …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, E-Records, Economy, Financial System, Food and Nutrition, Government Documents, Housing, Legal Research, Privacy

New database tracks canceled N.S.F. research grants

New database tracks canceled N.S.F. research grants, The University Daily Kansan. April 25, 2025. A crowdsourced database is helping researchers at the University of Kansas and other institutions in the U.S. make sense of contradictory information put out by news agencies and the National Science Foundation after the federal government began canceling N.S.F. research grants …

Subjects: Legal Research

Elite Universities Form Private Collective to Resist Trump Administration

Separate from public dissent, group of school leaders strategize behind scenes about how to respond and push back against White House. WSJ – no paywall, April 28, 2025. Separate from public dissent, group of school leaders strategize behind scenes about how to respond and push back against White House. Leaders of some of the nation’s …

Subjects: Censorship, Education, Government Documents, Legal Research

How are US consumers and firms responding to tariffs?

New 40-page slide deck from Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok, entitled “The Voluntary Trade Reset Recession,” the probability of which he now puts at 90%. How are consumers responding to tariffs?… click to enlarge the screen shot below: Consumer confidence at record-low levels Front-loading purchases before tariffs began Tourism slowing, in particular international See also …

Subjects: Economy, Financial System

FBI Releases Annual Internet Crime Report

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has released its latest annual report. The 2024 Internet Crime Report combines information from 859,532 complaints of suspected internet crime and details reported losses exceeding $16 billion—a 33% increase in losses from 2023. The top three cyber crimes, by number of complaints reported by victims …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Government Documents, Legal Research