Compulsory Voting’s American History

137 Harv. L. Rev. 1138 – “Voter turnout was higher in the 2020 U.S. presidential election than it had been in 120 years. Nearly sixty-seven percent of citizens over eighteen voted that November, exceeding rates that hovered around sixty percent in the twenty-first century and never broke sixty percent from 1972 to 2000. Some pundits …

Subjects: Education, Legal Research

Questionable practices in machine learning

Academic paper: “Evaluating modern ML models is hard. The strong incentive for researchers and companies to report a state-of-the-art result on some metric often leads to questionable research practices (QRPs): bad practices which fall short of outright research fraud. We describe 43 such practices which can undermine reported results, giving examples where possible. Our list …

Subjects: AI, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

Post World War II Food

National Park Service: This article is part of the series, The American Home Front and World War II. It explores life on the home front by looking at the things people invented, created, and used and the ways that everyday life changed. They include the effects of war mobilization and of conflict and incarceration on the …

Subjects: Food and Nutrition

The Boomer Stuff Avalanche

Business Insider ungated – “Millennials are about to be crushed by all the junk their parents accumulated…In some ways, this is a timeless problem — every generation accumulates things, and younger generations rebel against older generations’ tastes. But the sheer size of the current problem is unprecedented given that baby boomers are an extra-materialistic breed. …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Economy

AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said

AP: “Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.” But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts …

Subjects: AI, Health Care

Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP)

The GHGRP requires reporting of greenhouse gas (GHG) data and other relevant information from large GHG emission sources, fuel and industrial gas suppliers, and CO2 injection sites in the United States. Approximately 8,000 facilities are required to report their emissions annually, and the reported data are made available to the public in October of each …

Subjects: Climate Change, E-Government, Economy, Energy, Environmental Law, Legal Research