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The Conversation: “Obituaries preserve what families most want remembered about the people they cherish most. Across time, they also reveal the values each era chose to honor. In a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we analyzed 38 million obituaries of Americans published from 1998 to 2024. We identified …
Shanaka Anslem Perera – The Cognitive Extraction Economy: How Humanity Became the Training Data for Its Own Replacement. “A forensic investigation into the largest uncompensated transfer of intellectual labor in history—and what it reveals about the true architecture of artificial general intelligence. “In October 2025, Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI released a study that …
Data Rescue Project: “This week’s guest post is from Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, and Kyle Deeds, Assistant Professor at Boston University. Learn more about their recent collaboration to create GovScape, a fantastic resource for searching publicly-available government documents…. We are excited to share GovScape: https://govscape.net, a public search …
Bloomberg’s Jealousy List for 2025 – token access [no paywall], a collection of journalism admired by the magazine’s writers and editors. “For an industry that’s perpetually facing the parallel challenges of diminishing reader trust and declining advertising revenue, the media business sure delivered in 2025. There were way too many podcasts, documentaries, in-depth investigations and …
Follow up to DOGE ‘doesn’t exist’ – with eight months left on its charter, via Wired, see DOGE Isn’t Dead. Here’s What Its Operatives Are Doing Now [no paywall] -“…On Instagram, Yat Choi described his work as ongoing, announcing that he was returning to the underground Pennsylvania mine where federal retirement claims are processed. “Like …
PCMag: “AI-generated images aren’t going away anytime soon. In fact, they continue to look increasingly realistic thanks to the likes of Gemini’s advanced Nano Banana Pro image model, among others. You might not be able to immediately tell what’s fake in every instance, but it’s still worth checking for a few telltale signs. Below are …
Literary Hub: Ed Simon Considers the Many Different Ways an Obsession Can Manifest. “Desiderius Erasmus lived his happiest months from late 1507 into 1508 at the Venetian print-shop of Aldus Manutius. A peripatetic scholar, the Dutch scholar had lived in Rotterdam and London, Basel and Paris, true to the dictum that where the humanist goes …
NBC News: “Artificial intelligence chatbots are very good at changing peoples’ political opinions, according to a study published Thursday, and are particularly persuasive when they use inaccurate information. The researchers used a crowd-sourcing website to find nearly 77,000 people to participate in the study and paid them to interact with various AI chatbots, including some …
How to Geek: “Are you using a VPN and wondering why your internet connection feels slower than it used to? I wondered the same thing, so I set out to measure just how much a VPN affected my internet speed at home. The results somewhat surprised me, though it made sense once I thought through …
Civil Eats: “December 4, 2025 – The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced on Monday that it has deployed a version of artificial intelligence called “agentic AI” for “all agency employees” to assist with complex tasks, including safety reviews, inspections, and compliance. While the release did not specifically mention food safety, the agency is responsible …
WSJ – via MSN w no paywall [Note – we have heard this mantra for decades….is change arriving in 2026?]: “Rita Gunther McGrath is an academic director in executive education at Columbia Business School and author of “Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen.” Is the billable hour about to …
404 Media: “As prices for streaming subscriptions continue to soar and finding movies to watch, new and old, is becoming harder as the number of streaming services continues to grow, people are turning to the unexpected last stronghold of physical media: the public library. Some libraries are now intentionally using iconic Blockbuster branding to recall …
