Federal government discloses more than 1,700 AI use cases

FedScoop: “A consolidated list of federal artificial intelligence use cases released by the White House on Wednesday shows agencies more than doubled the amount of uses reported last year.Per the 2024 consolidated inventory, which is available on the Office of Management and Budget’s GitHub, 37 federal agencies have reported 1,757 public AI uses. A consolidated …

Subjects: AI, E-Government, E-Mail, Health Care, Knowledge Management

American Autocracy Threat Tracker

State Democracy Defenders Action: “President-elect Donald Trump has said he will be a “dictator on day one.” Our American Autocracy Threat Tracker comprehensively catalogs all of Trump’s and his allies’ Project 2025 and other specific plans and promises. We also catalog potential bipartisan solutions to address the threat both now and should it come to …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Congress, Economy, Financial System, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Legal Research, Legislation

New research shows how many important links on the web get lost to time

The Verge [unpaywalled]: “A quarter of the deep links in The New York Times’ articles are now rotten, leading to completely inaccessible pages, according to a team of researchers from Harvard Law School, who worked with the Times’ digital team. They found that this problem affected over half of the articles containing links in the …

Subjects: Education, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

New real estate platform lets homebuyers check their neighbors’ political affiliations

New York Post: “A new real estate platform is giving homebuyers an unprecedented peek into their potential neighborhoods — revealing everything from political leanings to local demographics — before they even commit to buying. Oyssey, a tech startup soft-launching this month in South Florida and New York City, lets buyers access neighborhood political affiliations based …

Subjects: Government Documents, Housing

Traffic Cam Photobooth

“Traffic Cam Photobooth is a website that allows anybody to locate their nearest publicly available traffic camera and use it to take pictures of themselves. While these cameras are ostensibly intended for traffic, they also serve to acclimate us to the idea that constant monitoring is an everyday part life in the city. No matter …

Subjects: Privacy, Transportation

The Year in Pictures – The New York Times

“This year was made up of such extraordinary moments. And Times photographers captured them in extraordinary images. “The Year in Pictures” brings you the most powerful, evocative and history-making of those images — and allows you to see the biggest stories of 2024 through our photographers’ eyes.”  

Subjects: Internet

Rebel Yell

Tablet – Part I: Donald Trump broke the back of the GOP establishment by driving blue-collar and lower-middle-class politics in a Southern direction. His gentry Republican critics have only themselves to blame. Donald Trump’s first and in many ways most enduring political accomplishment is not the humiliation of the Democratic Party he has toppled in …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Congress, Economy, Education, Free Speech, Freedom of Information

The Crumbling Foundation of America’s Military

The Atlantic [gift article]: “The U.S. failed to produce weapons and ammunition fast enough to supply Ukraine. Could it equip its own armed forces in the event of war?…”America itself lacks stockpiles of the necessary components. A massive rebuilding effort is now under way, the largest in almost a century, but it will not—cannot—happen fast. …

Subjects: Congress, Defense