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TechCrunch: “Former vice president Al Gore’s latest project gives polluters nowhere to hide. The nonprofit Climate Trace, which Gore co-founded, on Wednesday launched a tool that uses AI to track fine particulate pollution from more than 660 million sources worldwide. Many people are aware that burning fossil fuels warms the planet, but fewer know that …
Wired – no paywall – “In August, months after Elon Musk left the federal government, the director of the Office of Personnel Management offered the first hard estimate of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s impact on the civil service. The government would likely end 2025 with about 300,000 fewer employees than it had at …
PsyPost: “A new large-scale analysis has found that the artificial intelligence systems used by technology companies to filter online hate speech are profoundly inconsistent. The research demonstrates that the same piece of content can be flagged as hateful by one system while being considered acceptable by another, with these disagreements being particularly pronounced for speech …
BoingBoing: “A controversial new Medicare pilot program will introduce AI-driven prior authorization, with contractors paid to deny claims. Starting January 2026, the Wasteful and Inappropriate Services Reduction (WISeR) model will require providers in six states to obtain pre-approval for certain services, using AI to screen requests. Critics warn that this combination of financial incentives and …
Law Dork: “A 90-year-old precedent meant nothing to the majority allowing Trump to fire an FTC commissioner during litigation. This is no way to run a court, let alone a country. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican appointees on Monday issued an order allowing President Donald Trump’s purported firing of Rebecca Slaughter as a Democratic commissioner …
Rockefeller Institute, Brent R. Klein: “Protecting children from gun violence in K-12 schools means facing two realities: the roots of violent intent and the destructive capacity of firearms. In a recent study published in Criminology, my colleagues (Cory Schnell, Steve Chermak, and Josh Freilich) and I revisited a decades-old question: do firearms or motivations to …
MakeUseOf: “Call me lazy, but after over a decade of using smart televisions, I’ve never once tried using a VPN. Yes, I’ve seen the VPN ads pop up on videos, but I never really bothered exploring the technology. However, given the massive streaming library already available in our country, it never occurred to me that …
Strength in Numbers: “Trump is unpopular Compare Trump’s topline job approval (-11) to that of other recent presidents, and he stands out quite clearly (not in a good way): The president’s entire domestic policy agenda is underwater, too — especially on the economy and inflation, the two issues that won him the 2024 election: But …
Politico: “The White House budget office is instructing federal agencies to prepare reduction-in-force plans for mass firings during a possible government shutdown, specifically targeting employees who work for programs that are not legally required to continue. The Office of Management and Budget move to permanently reduce the government workforce if there is a shutdown, outlined …
Jennifer Chase: “Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, recently pushed back against the idea that AI would trigger a “white-collar apocalypse.” He argued that increased productivity allows us to build more of the things we need. The legal profession is a perfect case study. There are plenty of lawyers, and plenty of demand for them. …
Wired [no paywall] – subscription access: “Donald Trump’s second term has ushered in a new era in American politics. It’s brasher, crueler, more direct, more super online, and certainly more dystopian. Democrats and sometimes even Republicans have struggled to compete with Trump’s monopoly on the attention market. But the leaders of both parties are only …
Ars Technica: “Welcome to the final article in our three-part series on the history of the Internet. If you haven’t already, catch up with part one and part two. As a refresher, here’s the story so far: The ARPANET was a project started by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Project Agency in 1969 to network …