Update – Washington Post – By early morning April 7, 2019, ” more than 720 former federal prosecutors who worked in Democratic and Republican administrations had signed a letter asserting that President Trump would have been charged with obstructing justice based on special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings — if Trump were not the… Continue Reading
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Author Archives: Sabrina I. Pacifici
Report – Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’ – Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’
Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) – Current global response insufficient; – ‘Transformative changes’ needed to restore and protect nature; Opposition from vested interests can be overcome for public good – Most comprehensive assessment of its kind; 1,000,000 species threatened with extinction: “Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history… Continue Reading
Study: Major media outlets’ Twitter accounts amplify false Trump claims on average 19 times a day
Media Matters: “Major media outlets failed to rebut President Donald Trump’s misinformation 65% of the time in their tweets about his false or misleading comments, according to a Media Matters review. That means the outlets amplified Trump’s misinformation more than 400 times over the three-week period of the study — a rate of 19 per… Continue Reading
Deloitte, MIT, and Datawheel Launch New ‘Viz Builder’ in Data USA 3.0
Deloitte – Data USA’s 3.0 includes additional data sets, now capable of generating more than 2.5 million data visualizations. ” Today Deloitte, MIT, and Datawheel released the third major update to Data USA, a data visualization platform with more than 400,000 monthly visits. This third update includes a “Viz Builder” tool, which allows users to… Continue Reading
Map identifies companies around the world most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions
The Decolonial Atlas – Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet – “Just 100 companies are responsible for more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. The guys who run those companies – and they are mostly guys – have gotten rich on the backs of literally all life… Continue Reading
‘Climate denial’ just made it into the dictionary. Wait, what?
Grist: “The world is on fire, and so is our vocabulary. Merriam-Webster added 640 new words to its online dictionary last week. The additions include swole (“extremely muscular”), new meanings for snowflake (someone who is “treated as unique or special” or “overly sensitive”) and, you guessed it, a whole batch of neologisms tied to the… Continue Reading
The Voluntariness of Voluntary Consent: Consent Searches and the Psychology of Compliance
Sommers, Roseanna and Bohns, Vanessa K., The Voluntariness of Voluntary Consent: Consent Searches and the Psychology of Compliance (April 10, 2019). Yale Law Journal, Vol. 128, No. 7, 2019. Available at SSRN “Consent-based searches are by far the most ubiquitous form of search undertaken by police. A key legal inquiry in these cases is whether… Continue Reading
Google Express – an alternative to Amazon?
Google Express – “Get your shopping done fast Hundreds of stores, one fast checkout. Shop Target, Best Buy, Petsmart, and more—all in one place. Enter your info once, whether you’re checking out from one store or five. Need it again? A few quick taps is all it takes to reorder things you buy regularly. [h/t… Continue Reading
Who Owns the Law? Why We Must Restore Public Ownership of Legal Publishing
LawAr Xiv – Who Owns the Law? Why We Must Restore Public Ownership of Legal Publishing, 26 J. Intell. Prop. L. 205 (2019). Authors – Leslie Street and David Hansen. Created on April 29, 2019. Last edited. April 30, 2019. Supplemental Materials osf.io/9enzr/ “Each state has its own method for officially publishing the law. This… Continue Reading
Using punctuation to pace and communicate effectively
Oxford University Blog – “…Punctuation-wise, most of us fall between these two extremes. We are neither staccato nor breathless. Instead, we use punctuation to establish a comfortable pace for readers by grouping and emphasizing certain chunks of information. And as we edit our own work, from first to final draft, we see how small differences… Continue Reading
History of commercial audiobook is one small window on evolution of ethic of efficiency
The Baffler: “…Audible is an arm of this effort. Audiobooks are the fastest growing part of publishing, “a tiny bright spot” for the industry, according to Bloomberg : revenue from downloads has roughly tripled in the last five years and reached $2.5 billion in 2017. But Amazon dominates the audiobook market, mostly through Audible. As… Continue Reading
From Clay Tablets to Smartphones: 5,000 Years of Writing
The New York Times – London – “The writing’s on the wall, we’re told. Whether it was Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in the 15th century, the invention of the typewriter 300 years later, or the emoji of today’s smartphones, the act of writing seems to be forever on the precipice of extinction, without quite falling… Continue Reading
