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ReactorMag – “One price of free speech is eternal humility, recognizing that none of us is immune to becoming a tool of censorship if we fail to recognize its manipulative tactics. Was it a government action, or did they do it themselves because of pressure?” This is inevitably among our first questions when news breaks …
Via LLRX – Plagiarism Detection Tools Offer a False Sense of Accuracy – Investigative Reporter Tara García Mathewson discusses how the the tools that likely brought down Harvard president Claudine Gay are improperly used on students all the time.
The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism by Adrienne LaFrance [The Atlantic; read free] “Silicon Valley still attracts many immensely talented people who strive to do good, and who are working to realize the best possible version of a more connected, data-rich global society. Even the most deleterious companies have built some wonderful tools. But these tools, at scale, …
Kyle Hull, Clarisse Warren, Kevin Smith. Politics makes bastards of us all: Why moral judgment is politically situational [full text free to read]. Political Psychology, 2024; DOI: 10.1111/pops.12954 – “Moral judgment is politically situational—people are more forgiving of transgressive copartisans and more likely to behave punitively and unethically toward political opponents. Such differences are widely observed, …
Consumer Reports – “When it comes to filling your grocery cart with the healthiest foods, careful label reading is critical. Yet even the savviest shoppers can be fooled by some of the claims found on the front of food packages. And that is intentional. “If the marketing is done well, it slips through the radar …
PopSci: “You might think there’s nothing interesting where you live. You’re probably wrong. Every place on Earth has an interesting story to tell—the hard part is finding them. There are all kinds of apps and websites that recommend activities to tourists, and there’s a good chance that your town hosts at least some tourists. Why …
IFixIt: “Charging your phone’s battery to 100% is drastically shortening its useful life. But the fix is easy, and while auto companies have known about this and mitigated its consequences for some time, now most major smartphone brands—including Apple, Samsung, and Google—are finally jumping on board. When we think about battery longevity, we think about …
The Guardian – It looks more like five years than 50’: meet the neo-luddites warning of an AI apocalypse: “It’s January. I have set out to meet and talk to a small but growing band of luddites, doomsayers, disruptors and other AI-era sceptics who see only the bad in the way our spyware-steeped, infinitely doomscrolling …
The Atlantic [read free] “By now, December’s congressional hearing about anti-Semitism at universities, during which the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT all claimed that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their university’s policies only “depending on the context,” is already a well-worn meme. Surely there is nothing left to …
“One of the best things about the internet is that we can access content worldwide. Whether it’s news articles, blogs, or even a review of your latest tech gadget, you can find it all on the seemingly never-ending web. With Firefox’s latest translation feature, this tool will continuously translate a webpage in real-time. While other …
Films for Action: “Documentaries have an incredible power to raise awareness and create transformative changes in consciousness both at the personal and global levels. Over the last [16] years, we’ve watched hundreds of social change documentaries and cataloged the best of them in this library. There are now so many that we realized we needed to …
Brookings – Valerie Wirtschafter: “The influence of the online ecosystem in shaping democratic discourse is well-documented, with the expanded reach of generative artificial intelligence (AI) representing a novel challenge in a historic election year. Generative AI enables the creation of realistic images, videos, audio, or text based on user-provided prompts. Given the potential exploitation of …
