This Tiny Website Is Google’s First Line of Defense in the Patent Wars

Wired: “TDCommons is a free space for inventors to lay claim to breakthroughs without having to file a patent. Why is it so off the radar? A trio of Google engineers recently came up with a futuristic way to help anyone who stumbles through presentations on video calls. They propose that when algorithms detect a …

Subjects: AI, E-Records, Government Documents, Legal Research, Patent and Trademark, Privacy, Search Engines

Old’aVista

Remember the search engine Altavista? (I sure do). Via Wikipedia: “AltaVista was a Web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own search engine. On …

Subjects: Internet, Legal Research, Search Engines

Misleading Food Labels

Consumer Reports – “When it comes to filling your grocery cart with the healthiest foods, careful label reading is critical. Yet even the savviest shoppers can be fooled by some of the claims found on the front of food packages. And that is intentional. “If the marketing is done well, it slips through the radar …

Subjects: Education, Food and Nutrition

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, February 17, 2024

Via LLRX –  Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, February 17, 2024 -Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the …

Subjects: Courts, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Records, Economy, Financial System, Legal Research, Microsoft, Privacy, Securities Law

How to discover weird and cool places near you

PopSci: “You might think there’s nothing interesting where you live. You’re probably wrong. Every place on Earth has an interesting story to tell—the hard part is finding them.  There are all kinds of apps and websites that recommend activities to tourists, and there’s a good chance that your town hosts at least some tourists. Why …

Subjects: Education, Internet

Why Charging Your Gadgets Over 80% Is Such a Bad Idea

IFixIt: “Charging your phone’s battery to 100% is drastically shortening its useful life. But the fix is easy, and while auto companies have known about this and mitigated its consequences for some time, now most major smartphone brands—including Apple, Samsung, and Google—are finally jumping on board.  When we think about battery longevity, we think about …

Subjects: Education, Energy

Mapping Soot and Smog Pollution in the United States

Earth Justice: “Under the Clean Air Act, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must set standards that protect public health from common air pollutants, such as fine particulate matter (also known as soot) and ground-level ozone (also known as smog). On Feb. 7, the EPA strengthened the annual particulate matter standard from 12 micrograms per cubic meter …

Subjects: Climate Change, Environmental Law, Government Documents, Health Care

OpenAI shows off life-like videos made with AI

OpenAI – “Creating video from text. Sora is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions. Read the Technical Report – Video generation models as world simulators. We explore large-scale training of generative models on video data. Specifically, we train text-conditional diffusion models jointly on videos and images of variable …

Subjects: AI, Internet, Marketing, Social Media

Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies

The Atlantic [read free] “By now, December’s congressional hearing about anti-Semitism at universities, during which the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT all claimed that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their university’s policies only “depending on the context,” is already a well-worn meme. Surely there is nothing left to …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Congress, Education, Free Speech