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Follow up to previous posting – The Afghanistan Papers A secret history of the war – see also two new reports from Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR): SIGAR released its 11th lessons learned report examining the past 20 years of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. After spending $145 billion trying to rebuild …
Harper’s – “…The Commission on Information Disorder is the latest (and most creepily named) addition to a new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia, and policy research: Big Disinfo. A kind of EPA for content, it seeks to expose the spread of various sorts of …
Lifehacker: “Most of the time, you’re probably skimming the web instead of actually reading it. And that’s okay for quick news updates and browsing social media. But when you’ve opened up a long article that you actually want to read, things start to get difficult. You find your mind wandering, and paying attention to the …
Mashable: “If you ever find yourself with the need to combine several PDFs into one single file, you may be immediately frustrated: It’s not immediately obvious how to achieve what you’re trying to do. Luckily, Adobe, the creator of the PDF, offers a super-simple and free online tool that will help you combine your files …
“Review-it provides anonymous resource reviews (electronic, print, software, other) to the law library committee. This is a crowd sourced review tool that shares feedback on legal resource tools to the community at large as a benefit in saving time and individual analysis. Have a tool you would like to review? Or are you seeking feedback …
Fast Company – “Remote work has oodles of benefits for employers and employees alike: a larger talent pool, less overhead, flexible scheduling, and more. There are some drawbacks, though, especially for hybrid companies with a mix of remote and in-office workers: potential communication issues, isolation for remote people on in-person teams, and culture challenges. To …
The New York Times: “…Nature has been an escape for many of us during the Covid-19 pandemic. The freedom of wild animals has seemed especially wonderful when our own movements and associations have been clipped. If you watch wildlife closely, however, you will eventually witness the uncontrolled spread of illness — the worst-case scenario we …
“A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals [Dec. 9, 2019] that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable. The documents were generated by …
Popular Science: “To no one’s surprise, scientists from Yale University found that social media platforms like Twitter amplify our collective moral outrage. Additionally, they found that it was mostly politically moderate users who learned to be more outraged over time. Their findings are detailed in a new study in Science Advances. “We were interested in …
The Verge: “AI research company OpenAI is releasing a new machine learning tool that translates the English language into code. The software is called Codex and is designed to speed up the work of professional programmers, as well as help amateurs get started coding. In demos of Codex, OpenAI shows how the software can be …
Vox: “Humans have warmed the planet by an average of 1.2 degrees Celsius since industrialization began in the 19th century. This small-sounding change has helped fuel severe wildfires, record-breaking heatwaves, floods, and an ever-growing list of other disasters. What’s worrying is that Earth will continue to heat up — likely past 1.5 degrees — even …
Oliver Burkeman: “…The real lesson – or one of them – is that it pays to use whatever freedom you do have over your schedule not to “maximise your time” or “optimise your day”, in some vague way, but specifically to ringfence three or four hours of undisturbed focus (ideally when your energy levels are …