Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery With Daily Postings Since 2002
“The Trail Status Program Report, obtained by The Washington Post, [no paywall] concludes public lands are deteriorating quickly after the Trump administration cut staff. Trails maintained by the U.S. Forest Service nationwide are being “abandoned” and deteriorating rapidly, threatening visitor safety, after the Trump administration cut staff, according to an internal report obtained by The …
ProPublica: “With every bottle of prescription medication comes an implied promise: The drugs are safe and effective and meet strict standards set by the Food and Drug Administration. But the agency known as one of the world’s toughest regulators provides only intermittent oversight of the foreign factories where generic drugs are made. And when investigators …
WSJ via MSN: “In mid-November, I agreed to an experiment. Anthropic had tested a vending machine powered by its Claude AI model in its own offices and asked whether we’d like to be the first outsiders to try a newer, supposedly smarter version. Claudius, the customized version of the model, would run the machine: ordering …
Bloomberg no paywall: People Watched 700 Million Hours of YouTube Podcasts on TV in October. ” People are spending more time tuning in to podcasts on Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube, and increasingly they’re turning to the biggest screen in their homes: the TV. In October, viewers streamed more than 700 million hours of podcasts on their …
Ars Technica: “Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued five large TV manufacturers yesterday, alleging that their smart TVs spy on viewers without consent. Paxton sued Samsung, the longtime TV market share leader, along with LG, Sony, Hisense, and TCL. These companies have been unlawfully collecting personal data through Automated Content Recognition (‘ACR’) technology,” Paxton’s office …
Follow up to Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich and Susie Wiles, JD Vance, and the “Junkyard Dogs”: The White House Chief of Staff on Trump’s Second Term Jeffrey Epstein Fallout Friendship With Trump Epstein’s Grand Jury Records Maxwell’s Grand Jury Materials How Epstein Got Rich Files to …
The New Yorker [no paywall]: Is the term a new way of calling people pretentious, or does it reflect a deprioritization of the written word? “Here’s a hypothetical: a man walks into a bar, buys a drink, and starts reading from a paperback copy of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” He could very well be …
Indicator: “Just because it’s “intelligent” doesn’t mean it’s always right. Errors are a wonderful thing. That may be a strange thing for a former fact-checker t/o write in a newsletter about digital deception, but bear with me. Errors are often funny, because – like good jokes – they subvert meaning in unexpected ways. I recently …
PHYS.Org: “A study published in the journal Ornithological Applications shows how conservation organizations are using data from birdwatchers to pinpoint opportunities to reverse population declines. The study, led by researchers from nine different Migratory Bird Joint Ventures (cooperative, regional partnerships of federal and state agencies, Tribes, and nongovernmental organizations who work together to support avian …
“The presence of evil doesn’t break people. From a young age, we learn that there are wolves in our midst. It is the absence of courage that plunges us into crisis. Great courage can help redeem a catastrophe. But abject cowardice not only magnifies our pain; it makes us doubt the strength and virtue of …
The best science images of 2025 — Nature’s picks The Sun’s fiery surface, a tattooed tardigrade, rare red lightning and more.
The Inclusive Forum on Carbon Mitigation Approaches (IFCMA) has released the first edition of its Climate Policy Database, providing unprecedented detail on how governments are tackling climate change through policy action. With validated data covering 38 out of 60 countries so far, and around 1 600 carbon mitigation policy instruments, the Database offers granular insights …
