Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery With Daily Postings Since 2002
“A new report from Democracy Forward, The Second Front: The Escalating Right-Wing Legal Threats Beyond the White House, reveals the perilous threats to American democracy represented by the far-right legal movement. The report, part of Democracy Forward’s work to track the far-right legal movement, focuses attention on ways that extremists continue to deprive Americans of …
The New York Times Gift Article – “Apps that record visits are becoming popular, but they come with privacy and accuracy concerns. At your next appointment, your doctor may have a new kind of assistant listening in: artificial intelligence. Across the nation, A.I. programs are quietly recording these conversations and turning them into draft medical …
Knowable Magazine – From where the Camellia sinensis bush is grown to whether the leaves are withered or fermented, much can influence the popular drink’s molecular and flavor profile: “How about a cuppa? Tea is the world’s most popular drink, except for plain old water. Whether we’re talking matcha, Earl Grey or oolong, it’s all …
The Conversation: “Imagine you have just been diagnosed with early-stage cancer and, before your next appointment, you type a question into an AI chatbot: “Which alternative clinics can successfully treat cancer?” Within seconds you get a polished, footnoted answer that reads like it was written by a doctor. Except some of the claims are unfounded, …
ProPublica: “Researchers at Stanford University modeled how many people could die or be disabled in 25 years if vaccines for polio, measles, rubella or diphtheria were no longer available. Before vaccines, death and disability stalked children. Then shots turned once-common infections into something doctors only read about in textbooks. When immunization rates drop, however, plagues …
The “State of the Air” 2026 report “finds that even after decades of successful efforts to reduce sources of air pollution, 44% of Americans—152.3 million people—are living in places that get failing grades for unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution. We found that nearly half of American children (46%, or 33.5 million people under …
Vox – no paywall: “It’s not enough to trust the senses to know when it’s a bad air day. Well before you can see or smell smoke, it can start wreaking havoc on the lungs. That haze you can see and smell on a particularly polluted day is made of ozone and fine particulate matter. …
The New York Times: “For us to trust it on certain subjects, researchers in the growing field of interpretability might need to learn how to open the black box of its brain… A.I. system is to ask the model to explain itself. If a therapy language model tells you that you should take antidepressants, you …
The Handbasket:” Whistleblower says Trump officials thought USAID did ‘just abortions,’ asked for ‘Barney-style’ slides before gutting agency, per new book. One of the first acts by the second Trump administration was the complete gutting of the US Agency for International Development, a workforce of more than 10,000 people that had administered humanitarian aid and …
The Guardian: “The daily news can’t adequately convey the administration’s sabotaging of our government, economy, alliances and environment The United States is being murdered, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, …
AP: “The federal government’s disease-tracking agency has paused its diagnostic testing for rabies, monkeypox and a number of other infectious diseases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week posted a list of more than two dozen types of testing that have become unavailable. This is not the first time the CDC has paused …
Ars Technica: “Several Californians sued Sutter Health and MemorialCare this week over allegations that an AI transcription tool was used to record them without their consent, in violation of state and federal law. The proposed class-action lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, states that, within the past six months, the plaintiffs …
