Author: Kevin Engel

Librarian Grinnell College Grinnell, IA, USA

The “power of the summary”: why do we prefer and trust AI-generated summaries over doing the summarization ourselves?

Quick bibliographies

The easy answer is that it is much faster and requires less effort to click a button and get a custom summary of academic papers and their connections–rather than spending the time and mental effort to do it yourself. Or, is this preference just an extension of the utility of abstracts that have been used to summarize academic papers for decades–long before the public rise…

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Fake papers are contaminating the world’s scientific literature, fueling a corrupt industry and slowing legitimate lifesaving medical research

Intersections

Frederik Joelving, Retraction Watch; Cyril Labbé, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), and Guillaume Cabanac, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (from The Conservation) Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research, undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives. It is exceedingly difficult…

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How the oil industry and growing political divides turned climate change into a partisan issue

Intersections

Joe Árvai, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences (from The Conversation) After four years of U.S. progress on efforts to deal with climate change under Joe Biden, Donald Trump’s return to the White House is swiftly swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction. On his first day back, Trump declared a national energy emergency, directing agencies to use any emergency powers available to…

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Wildfires: Increasing frequency and intensity

Featured Article

Wildfires are in the news literally every day. Fire seasons are starting earlier and ending later. In recent times, Canada, Greece, Brazil, Hawaii, Chile, Oregon, and California–among many other places–have faced record-breaking and devastating fires. Featured article: *Cunningham, C. X., Williamson, G. J., & Bowman, D. M. J. S. (2024). Increasing frequency and intensity of the most extreme wildfires on Earth. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 8(8), 1420-1425….

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Added sugar and non-nutritive sweeteners in food: children, health, and effects later in life

Intersections

People consume many different types and amounts of sugars from the foods and beverages in their diet. “A high intake of sugar is linked to an increased risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers.” Does a high-sugar diet early in life lead to negative health consequences in later life? And, are some sugars healthier than others? For background, see — *Iqbal,…

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Free Science books and textbooks

Intersections

Thousands of academic books covering areas of the sciences are available (legally) to be used at no cost. Many can be downloaded and saved and then printed, if desired. Others can be read online but not saved/downloaded. More books are becoming freely available every month. While use is free, there is a cost to creating or modifying and publishing these books. That cost is often…

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