Information independence!

We live in a world awash with misinformation and disinformation. “Misinformation is false or inaccurate information—getting the facts wrong. Disinformation is false information which is deliberately intended to mislead—intentionally misstating the facts.” Disinformation in particular, often leveraged through X, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms, and created by political, corporate, criminal, and other bad actors besieges us on a daily basis. It’s a never…

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AI companions: addiction and privacy concerns

“The design of these AI characters makes lawmakers’ concern well warranted. The problem: Companions are upending the paradigm that has thus far defined the way social media companies have cultivated our attention and replacing it with something poised to be far more addictive.  In the social media we’re used to, as the researchers point out, technologies are mostly the mediators and facilitators of human connection….

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Facial recognition: technology and privacy

“Facial recognition technology is increasingly used for identity verification and identification, from aiding law enforcement investigations to identifying potential security threats at large venues. However, advances in this technology have outpaced laws and regulations, raising significant concerns related to equity, privacy, and civil liberties. Facial recognition connects an image of a face to an identity or connects an image of a face to a database…

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How to identify fake academic publications?

One of the most important parts of any search for information–whether academic or for personal reasons–has always been to think critically about the information you find; to be skeptical, to not assume the information must be true and/or objective just because it happens to come from a particular source or person. No one is entirely objective. And we/human beings are easily misled. Our entire digital…

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Extinction and climate change

Earth’s climate is changing rapidly. No, it is not a hoax, not a projection for the future, not a scare tactic from whatever political or advocacy group that you or your favorite politician may not like. In our lifetimes, it has changed–generally growing warmer and often dryer, with daily weather more prone to extremes–winds, rain, snow, cold, heat, more destructive storms leading to more extensive…

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

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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