Author archives

You Can Now Get Your Free Credit Report Every Week, Forever

Lifehacker: “Monitoring your credit history regularly reduces the likelihood that reporting errors (best case) or identity theft (worst case) will derail your financial health—and you can now do this at no cost every single week, indefinitely, through Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, each credit bureau offered one free credit report per …

Subjects: E-Records, Economy, Financial System, Legal Research

I Was Wrong About the Death of the Book And Umberto Eco was right.

The Atlantic [read free]: “Fifteen years ago, in What Would Google Do?, I called for the book to be rethought and renovated, digital and connected, so that it could be updated and made searchable, conversational, collaborative, linkable, less expensive to produce, and cheaper to buy. The problem, I said, was that we so revered the …

Subjects: Education, Internet, Libraries, Search Engines

New phone call etiquette: Text first and never leave a voice mail

Washington Post: “Phone calls have been around for 147 years, the iPhone 16 years and FaceTime video voice mails about a week. Not surprisingly, how we make calls has changed drastically alongside advances in technology. Now people can have conversations in public on their smartwatches, see voice mails transcribed in real time and dial internationally …

Subjects: E-Mail, E-Records

The Cambridge Law Corpus: A Corpus for Legal AI Research

The Cambridge Law Corpus: A Corpus for Legal AI Research Andreas Östling, Holli Sargeant, Huiyuan Xie, Ludwig Bull, Alexander Terenin, Leif Jonsson, Måns Magnusson, Felix Steffek. arXiv:2309.12269 [cs.CL] [v1] Thu, 21 Sep 2023 17:24:40 UTC “We introduce the Cambridge Law Corpus (CLC), a corpus for legal AI research. It consists of over 250 000 court …

Subjects: AI, Education, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

Project Gutenberg turned ebooks in its digital library into audiobooks without any need for human voices

Quartz: “The oldest digital library in the world, Project Gutenberg, has transformed thousands of ebooks into audiobooks using AI—bypassing the longer (and more expensive) process of hiring a human reader to do the job. It’s exactly the kind of AI application that actors, who are currently on strike in the US for the first time …

Subjects: AI, Freedom of Information, Internet, Libraries

Wikipedia search-by-vibes through millions of pages offline

“What is This? This is a browser-based search engine for Wikipedia, where you can search for “the reddish tall trees on the san francisco coast” and find results like “Sequoia sempervirens” (a name of a redwood tree). The browser downloads the database, and search happens offline. To download two million Wikipedia pages with their titles …

Subjects: Internet, Knowledge Management, Search Engines

SEC obtains Wall Street firms’ private chats in probe of WhatsApp, Signal use

Ars Technica: “The US Securities and Exchange Commission has “collected thousands of staff messages from more than a dozen major investment companies” as it expands a probe into how employees and executives at Wall Street firms use private messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal, Reuters reported today, citing “four people with direct knowledge of …

Subjects: Economy, Financial System, Legal Research, Securities Law

Gliding, not searching: Here’s how to reset your view of ChatGPT to steer it to better results

Via LLRX – Gliding, not searching: Here’s how to reset your view of ChatGPT to steer it to better results – Human factors engineer James Intriligator makes a clear and important distinction for researchers: that unlike a search engine, with static and stored results, ChatGPT never copies, retrieves or looks up information from anywhere. Rather, …

Subjects: AI, Internet, Knowledge Management, Search Engines

Delegitimizing the Supreme Court: The Lessons of Dred Scott

Booth, Jonathon, Delegitimizing the Supreme Court: The Lessons of Dred Scott (August 28, 2023). 51 UC Law Constitutional Quarterly, Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4554642 “This Article examines how anti-slavery Republicans delegitimized the Supreme Court in the aftermath of Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857) and compares this history to contemporary attempts to reform …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Courts, Financial System, Health Care, Legal Research

Behind the Scenes at ‘Have I Been Pwned’

Via Slashdot and contributor slincolne [the link is behind a paywall]: “The founder of the data-breach notification site Have I Been Pwned manages “the largest known repository of stolen data on the planet,” reports Australia’s public broadcaster ABC, including over 6 billion email address. Yet with no employees, Troy Hunt manages all of the technical …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Mail, E-Records, Economy, Financial System, Legal Research, Privacy