People are using Google Maps to cut down tailpipe pollution

The Verge: “Drivers are taking Google Maps’ advice for how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their trips, according to the company. In late 2021, Google debuted a feature in Google Maps that allows users to see the most fuel-efficient routes. The feature has since helped prevent around 1.2 million metric tons of planet-heating carbon …

Subjects: Climate Change, Environmental Law, Search Engines, Transportation

College ‘Email for Life’ at Risk for Many

Inside Higher Education: “…Many universities have offered an “email for life” option over the last decade, comforting students by providing a directory and archive of materials stored on their email over the years. But institutions are now grappling with how to keep that perk for students because of a Google change to its approach to …

Subjects: E-Mail, Education

Absolutist AI

Absolutist AI – Mitchell Barrington, arXiv:2307.10315 [cs.AI]: “This paper argues that training AI systems with absolute constraints — which forbid certain acts irrespective of the amount of value they might produce — may make considerable progress on many AI safety problems in principle. First, it provides a guardrail for avoiding the very worst outcomes of …

Subjects: AI, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Search Engines

Twitter Becomes X – TikTok Talks Text and E-commerce

TikTok Newsroom: “At TikTok, we’re always looking to empower our creators and community with innovative tools that inspire self expression. Today we’re thrilled to announce the expansion of text posts on TikTok, a new format for creating text-based content that broadens options for creators to share their ideas and express their creativity. With text posts, …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Social Media

Migration Into America’s Most Flood-Prone Areas More Than Doubled Since the Start of the Pandemic

Redfin News: “The most flood-prone U.S. counties saw 384,000 more people move in than out in 2021 and 2022—a 103% increase from the prior two years, when 189,000 more people moved in than out. The same trend took hold in the places most vulnerable to wildfires and heat as the pandemic homebuying boom and a …

Subjects: Climate Change, Economy, Environmental Law, Housing

COVID Tracking Project Records and Resources Now Available

This announcement is authored by COVID Tracking Project Archive Lead, Alex Duryee: “The UCSF Library Archives and Special Collections is pleased to announce that the COVID Tracking Project (CTP) records are available for research. The CTP is a crowdsourced digital archive that was managed by a group of journalists at The Atlantic and approximately 500 …

Subjects: Government Documents, Health Care, Internet, Knowledge Management, Medicine

How book-banning campaigns have changed the lives and education of librarians

Via LLRX – How book-banning campaigns have changed the lives and education of librarians – Nicole A. Cooke, Augusta Baker Endowed Chair and a Professor at the School of Library and Information Science, at the University of South Carolina, identifies the significant and socially charged work of librarians who are defending the rights of readers and …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Education, Free Speech, Freedom of Information, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Libraries

AI Watches Millions Of Cars Daily And Tells Cops If You’re Driving Like A Criminal

Forbes: “Artificial intelligence is helping American cops look for “suspicious” patterns of movement, digging through license plate databases with billions of records. A drug trafficking case in New York has uncloaked — and challenged — one of the biggest rollouts of the controversial technology to date… Rekor’s big sell is that its software doesn’t require …

Subjects: AI, Civil Liberties, E-Records, Health Care, Legal Research, Privacy, Transportation

Microsoft brings Bing AI support to Google Chrome, adds dark mode too

9to5Google: “Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing AI experience has long been locked to its own Edge browser, but now support for Google Chrome is available. Bing AI in Google Chrome is now live for most users, and works as you’d expect. Heading to bing.com and clicking on the “Chat” icon in the top left corner of the …

Subjects: AI, Internet, Knowledge Management, Search Engines