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Washington Post [no paywall]: “When a large share of a city’s canopy is made up of just a few types of trees, the ecological benefits that trees offer are at greater risk of being lost. It is analogous to putting all your eggs in one basket, explained ecologist Emma Hudgins. “Places that have more [tree] …
TREASURY INSPECTOR GENERAL for Tax Administration – Snapshot Report: IRS Workforce Reductions as of May 2025, July 18, 2025. Report Number: 2025-IE-R027. Snapshot Report: IRS Workforce Reductions as of May 2025 – “According to the IRS, 25,386 employees have separated or taken a DRP incentive, while 294 employees have been sent termination notices due to …
TMP Morning Memo: “Under a memo issued by the Office of Personnel Management yesterday, federal workers are permitted to talk to their co-workers about their religion, including engaging a colleague “in polite discussion of why his faith is correct and why the non-adherent should re-think his religious beliefs.” They are also allowed to engage in …
PC Mag – How to Tell if You’re Being Tapped: “We do everything on our phones. Whether it’s scrolling Instagram, shopping online, sending emails, or communicating our deepest secrets. This can make your phone a high-valued target for malware, but what if the nefarious actors are sticking around, capturing your data, and listening in on …
The Indicator: “On Monday, The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler announced that he had accepted a buyout and would leave the publication on July 31. Kessler has been the main author of The Fact Checker column since 2011 and serves as a member of the advisory board of the International Fact-Checking Network. He wrote that his …
The New York Times [no paywall]: “Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, said the agency would rescind a 2009 declaration, which concluded that planet-warming greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and underpins the government’s legal authority to combat climate change. Speaking on a conservative podcast called “Ruthless,” Mr. Zeldin said the E.P.A. …
Gizmodo: “Mark Massaro has taught English Composition at Florida Southwestern State College for years, but his job became significantly more difficult in 2023. Not long after AI apps like ChatGPT became freely available, higher education throughout the U.S. was hit with a tsunami of automated cheating. Students have been using AI to write essays—and the …
Washington Post [no paywall] Companies are rushing to embrace artificial intelligence to cut costs, increase efficiency and better understand this new technology. IBM has replaced a couple hundred human resources workers with AI applications. At Microsoft and Google, AI writes more than one-quarter of the code. Writers can now use AI as their personal assistant …
MIT Technology Review – no paywall: “Millions of images of passports, credit cards, birth certificates, and other documents containing personally identifiable information are likely included in one of the biggest open-source AI training sets, new research has found. Thousands of images—including identifiable faces—were found in a small subset of DataComp CommonPool, a major AI training …
Washington Post – no paywall – How to turn off AI in Google and DuckDuckGo web search results — plus a no-AI nuclear option: ” Let’s say that you’re worried about artificial intelligence turning us into mushy-brained monsters, draining resources from the planet, slurping all your data and human knowledge, preying on vulnerable minds, wiping …
“The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is launching DesignVision, the first artificial intelligence (AI)-based image search tool available to design patent examiners via the Patents End-to-End (PE2E) search suite. DesignVision is the latest step in the agency’s broader efforts to streamline and modernize examination and reduce application pendency. DesignVision is an AI-powered tool that …
The Pudding: “This is possible because media artist Yufeng Zhao fed millions of publicly-available panoramas from Google Street View into a computer program that transcribes text within the images (anyone can access these Street View images; you don’t even need a Google account!). The result is a search engine of much of what’s written in …
