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Do you ever wonder what Congress is up to? Well, now a new Legislative Branch Data Map shows where you can find out info about things like staffing, legislation tracking, lobbying, financial and gift disclosures, and more – Legislative Branch Data Map, version 0.1This data map is a product of the Congressional Data Task Force …
alexwlchan: “I grew up alongside social media, as it was changing from nerd curiosity to mainstream culture. I joined Twitter and Tumblr in the early 2010s, and I stayed there for over a decade. Those spaces shaped my adult life: I met friends and partners, found a career in cultural heritage, and discovered my queer …
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 …
Datzov, Nikola, AI Jurisprudence: Toward Automated Justice (September 9, 2024 – Revised December 4, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5178780 “The U.S. judiciary’s evolving role and digitization into a “modern” court system over the past several decades has brought it to a fundamentally altering moment: the adoption of automated justice. Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) …
The Verge: “Behind every influencer is an army of the influenced, many adrift in debt and mass-produced clutter. The platforms need influencers and influencers need audiences — but what the influenced need is not so simple. The influencer economy that Goldman Sachs projects will reach nearly half a trillion dollars by 2027 depends on a …
USAFacts: “In 2024, Californians paid about $275.6 billion more to the federal government than they received. In FY 2024, the federal government collected around $5.07 trillion from states and their residents through taxes on individuals and businesses and redistributed about $4.87 trillion back to states and residents through programs like Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, food …
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 …
First Branch Forecast: “While legislative branch agencies belong to Congress, not all are entirely free of executive branch entanglements. The question of how Congress chooses, oversees, and removes legislative branch agency heads is integral to the independence of the legislative branch, especially with recent White House efforts to take over or place personnel inside the …
Recomendo: “You can add a US passport as your digital ID to your wallet app on an iPhone running iOS 26.1 or later. You still need to carry your passport overseas, but you can pull out this ID for TSA clearance at 250 airports in the U.S., including SFO, LAX, JFK and LGA. To do …