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Gallup: “The percentage of U.S. adults who anticipate high-quality lives in five years declined to 59.2% in 2025, the lowest level since measurement began nearly two decades ago. Since 2020, future life ratings have fallen a total of 9.1 percentage points, projecting to an estimated 24.5 million fewer people who are optimistic about the future …
PHYS.org: “Water powers our lives. It feeds our crops, keeps factories running, generates electricity, and fills our taps. But until now, no one had a clear, national picture of how much water we’re using—and for what. Landon Marston, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, and his doctoral student Yunus Naseri are changing that. They …
Zimmer, Z. (2026). Outlier and collapse: The enron corpus and foundation model training data. Big Data & Society, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517261421474 (Original work published 2026) – “The Enron Corpus is a canonical training dataset representing one of the first scale jumps in the size of natural language data for machine learning (ML) research. That corpus was …
Vox – AI agents could change your life — if they don’t ruin it first. ChatGPT is boring compared to what comes next. The Atlantic [no paywall] – “The first signs of the apocalypse might look a little like Moltbook: a new social-media platform, launched last week, that is supposed to be populated exclusively by …
“WoAtlas.com is a free, interactive atlas providing key statistics and data for countries around the world. The goal is to create a modern, modular resource that anyone can use to explore and understand our world. Why This Project? Traditional atlases and geography resources can feel static and disconnected from how we learn today. WoAtlas aims …
Cato Institute: “Recent increases in immigration have rekindled concerns about their effects on government budgets. This paper updates a model of these effects first developed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to shed light on how immigrants, both legal and illegal, and their children affect government budgets. This analysis is the …
Data is Beautiful: “Power sources are historically tied to local resources. With so much variation in climate and geology across the US and Canada, there are several key energy regions. Coal Country spans much of the US northeast, historically powering the country with its abundant coal reserves. While coal’s decline has reshaped the region, natural gas …
“The Cambridge Online Trust & Safety Index (COTSI) tracks the dynamics of the fake SMS-verifications market across different platforms and countries. The Index aims to answer the following questions: How easy (and cheap) is it to engage in online manipulation? Is the situation with fake accounts improving or worsening over time? Which online platforms are …
Exponential View: “One number still keeps turning up in speeches, board meetings, my conversations and inbox: “95 percent.” Do I need to say more than that? OK, here’s another clue: this number traveled on borrowed authority in 2025, rarely with a footnote and it started to shape decisions. The claim is this: “95 percent” of …
Via LLRX – Attacks against the International Criminal Court: Who cares about victims of atrocity crimes? The attacks against the ICC are part of a wholesale U.S. assault on international legal norms and institutions since the 20 January 2025 inauguration of President Donald J. Trump. Exactly a year later, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney made …
Via Data is Beautiful: “Get The Facts data team published a chart that visualizes the increase in ICE’s funding under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And if you want to see some other interesting charts related to ICE’s funding, you can find them here” Sources: Congress.gov. Visualizations made with Datawrapper.
“Federal troop deployments to U.S. cities cost a total of $496 million in 2025, CBO estimates. Continuing current deployments will cost $93 million a month; 1,000 Guard personnel deployed to a city will cost at least $18 million a month. This letter responds to a request that the Congressional Budget Office estimate the costs associated …
