Author archives

‘Major Win’ in Fight Against Dictionary-Yanking School District

Newser: Federal judge allows lawsuit against Florida’s Escambia County School District to proceed – “A Florida school district is keeping students from accessing dictionaries which, in defining sex and other concepts, are considered to violate the state law prohibiting materials in schools that depict or describe sexual conduct, per the Messenger. Escambia County School District …

Subjects: Education, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Legislation, Libraries

Legal Petition to Treasury Department Aims to Limit Imports from Key Seafood Companies Tied to Forced Labor

Ian Urbina – The Outlaw Ocean Project: “Shortly after we published our investigation globally, officials from several federal agencies asked if we might consider molding our findings into a formal legal petition under the Global Magnitsky Act. We agreed and recruited help from lawyers with an NGO called the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), which has …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Economy, Environmental Law, Government Documents, Legal Research

Making the Greatest Medical Library in America

NLM: “On a quest to bring together and catalog the world’s medical knowledge, John Shaw Billings, an Army surgeon and book collector who oversaw the U.S. Surgeon General’s library (today known as NLM), acquired approximately 300 pamphlets from the private collection of the renowned French physiologist Claude Bernard in 1878. Later that year, these scientific …

Subjects: Education, Health Care, Libraries, Medicine

Why Are American Drivers So Deadly?

The New York Times [read free]: After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again. “…In the fall of 2022, Dr. Deborah Kuhls attended the annual meeting of the Governors Highway Safety Organization, in Louisville, Ky. In conversations with other researchers, she learned that the same behavioral patterns she had observed back in …

Subjects: Legal Research, Transportation

EFF Unveils Its New Street Level Surveillance Hub

“The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today unveiled its new Street Level Surveillance hub, a standalone website featuring expanded and updated content on various technologies that law enforcement agencies commonly use to invade Americans’ privacy. The hub has new or updated pages on automated license plate readers, biometric surveillance, body-worn cameras, camera networks, cell-site simulators, drones …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, E-Records, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Privacy

The New Digital Dark Age

Wired: Online trust will reach an all-time low thanks to unchecked disinformation, AI-generated content, and social platforms pulling up their data drawbridges. “For researchers, social media has always represented greater access to data, more democratic involvement in knowledge production, and great transparency about social behavior. Getting a sense of what was happening—especially during political crises, …

Subjects: AI, Economy, Education, Environmental Law, Financial System, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Social Media

An environmental and socially just climate mitigation pathway for a planet in peril

PHSY.org: An environmental and socially just climate mitigation pathway for a planet in peril, Environmental Research Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ad059e “Oregon State’s William Ripple, former OSU postdoctoral researcher Christopher Wolf and collaborators argue their scenario should be included in climate models along with the five “shared socioeconomic pathways,” or SSPs, that are used by the …

Subjects: Climate Change, Energy, Environmental Law, Government Documents

Research on Crime and Public Safety in 2023

“This research, Findings and Recommendations from Survey About Crime and Public Safety, December 2023, explores public attitudes related to crime and potential policy solutions to improve public safe. Center for American Progress staff. Over the past three years, crime and public safety have lingered as important concerns for voters. This survey by the Center for …

Subjects: Legal Research

The International Court of Justice in the Hague – South Africa v Israel

Hearing at the International Court of Justice in the case South Africa v. Israel – Oral argument of South Africa began this morning: https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k11/k11g Summary – The International Court of Justice (ICJ) holds public hearings on the request for the indication of provisional measures submitted by South Africa in the case South Africa v. Israel …

Subjects: Defense, Government Documents, Legal Research