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Center for Data Innovation: “Researchers from Columbia University, the University of California Irvine, and Virginia Tech have created a series of maps using satellite-based observations to show land subsidence—the gradual sinking of land—across the 28 most populous U.S. cities.This sinking is caused by both natural and human-driven factors, including groundwater extraction, heavy infrastructure, and sea-level …
Cory Doctorow: “Who Broke the Internet, Part IV (permalink) “Kick ‘Em In the Dongle” is the fourth and final episode of “Understood: Who Broke the Internet?”, a podcast series I hosted and co-wrote for the CBC. It’s quite a finale! https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16148346-kick-em-in-the-dongle – The thesis of the series is the same as the thesis of enshittification: that …
The Tracking Gov Info Project is a crowdsourcing effort to track removed and modified government information and resources. Although the news media have widely reported the current U.S. administration’s removal and modification of federal websites and information, it can be challenging to understand and analyze the scope of the problem without a central list tracking …
Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades [New York Times, no paywall] – The reporters analyzed 35 years of grants funded by the National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation, which funds much of the fundamental scientific research at American universities, is awarding new grants at the slowest pace in at …
SciLit: “How a little-noticed tax and a bureaucratic cap could reshape U.S. innovation. The U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 1 today, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a sweeping reconciliation bill intended to implement key components of the Trump administration’s fiscal agenda. Among its most controversial implications are those for science. You can read …
Apple Podcast: Michael Lewis, acclaimed author of The Big Short, Moneyball and The Fifth Risk joins Lovett to discuss his most recent book, Who is Government? Lewis and his coauthors profile the civil servants whose thankless and unglamorous work prevents mines from collapsing, castaways from drowning, and rare diseases from killing people. He and Jon …
CREW sues US DOGE Service to compel transparency – includes all related legal documents. “…May 14, 2025. The DC Circuit Court ruled unanimously—with judges appointed by both Democrats and Republicans—that DOGE must submit to discovery. Read it here….US DOGE Service wields shockingly broad power over all manner of federal operations—which far exceeds its limited legal …
Via Data is Plural: “Peter Adelson and Julian Nyarko’s Material Contracts Corpus contains “over one million contracts filed by public companies with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) between 2000 and 2023,” which the authors collected from the SEC’s EDGAR filings database. In addition to the text of the contracts, the dataset provides metadata …
MIT Technology Review: “…The choice of natural gas as the go-to solution to meet the growing demand for power from AI is not unique to Louisiana. The fossil fuel is already the country’s chief source of electricity generation, and large natural-gas plants are being built around the country to feed electricity to new and planned …
First Street: “Mortgage lenders have long depended on homeowners insurance as a first line of defense against loan losses, requiring coverage as a condition of mortgage approval. Historically, this arrangement has held strong: extreme-weather damage has consistently been the costliest category of homeowners insurance claims and lenders have remained largely unscathed. But as U.S. disaster …
WSJ, Part One – Go Delete Yourself From the Internet. Seriously, Here’s How. Find your data, request removal…and repeat [no paywall] – “Google updated its “Results About You” tool, and using it has been an eye-opening experience. It uncovered my home address, phone number and email on so-called people-search websites, along with my birth date …
Wired [no paywall] – “Russell Vought, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has canceled plans to more tightly regulate the sale of Americans’ sensitive personal data. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has cancelled plans to introduce new rules designed to limit the ability of US data brokers to sell sensitive information about …
