Articles and Columns for April 2023

• Whistleblowers Are the Conscience of Society, Yet Suffer Gravely For Trying to Hold the Rich and Powerful Accountable For Their Sins – Lawyer, activist, author, and whistleblower Ashley Gjovik states: “I blew the whistle and was met with an experience so destructive that I did not have the words to describe what happened to me. I set out to learn if what happened to me is a known phenomenon and, if so, whether there are language and concepts to explain the experience. I found it is well studied. This article focuses on experiences like mine, where a still-employed whistleblower takes disclosures of systemic issues public due to inaction or cover-ups by the institution. This article does not intend to discount the other varieties of whistleblower experiences; instead, it seeks to explain, expose and validate the turmoil many whistleblowers in similar positions are often forced to endure alone.” Gjovik’s article is an extensively researched and documented history of major whistleblower cases in the United Stated, across sectors and decades.
• Plain English for Lawyers: The Way to a C-Level Executive’s Heart – Why is poor legal writing so prevalent? Jerry Lawson identifies three key reasons: fear, time, and lack of skills, and addresses directly a course to solve the lack of skills issue.
• Mifepristone is under scrutiny in the courts, but it has been used safely and effectively around the world for decades – A flurry of court rulings in April 2023 has left the future of the abortion pill mifepristone in question. For now, a U.S. Supreme Court decision on April 21 allows the drug to remain accessible without additional restrictions as the merits of the case are weighed in lower court proceedings. Depending on the outcome, the pill could face a ban or tightened restrictions on its usage, a possibility that has many health care providers concerned. Grace Shih, a family physician practicing in Washington state, explains the science behind mifepristone as well as its safety and efficacy in medication abortions.
• GPT-3 Wrote an Entire Paper on Itself. Should Publishers be Concerned? – In this article, Saikiran Chandha, CEO and founder of SciSpace, discusses the impact of GPT-3 and related models on research, the potential question marks, and the steps that scholarly publishers can take to protect their interests.
• Imagine there’s no partners. And no associates, too – Jordan Furlong, Legal Sector Analyst and Forecaster, presents an engaging and actionable plan for figuring out how law firms are going to work in future. Furlong states this will occupy countless partnership meetings, conference agendas, and consulting engagements all over the legal industry throughout the next several years. Don’t worry if you don’t have all the answers — nobody else does, either he says. We’re all just getting started. What he suggest though is that figuring out what law firms are going to become requires first letting go of what they used to be. A good start towards accomplishing that would be to abandon the antiquated titles and categories into which we’ve been cramming law firm personnel for the last hundred years.
• Why universities should return to oral exams in the AI and ChatGPT era – As services like ChatGPT continue to grow in terms of both its capabilities and usage – including in education and academia – Professor Stephen Dobson asks is it high time for universities to revert to the time-tested oral exam?
• El Niño is coming, and ocean temps are already at record highs – that can spell disaster for fish and corals – During El Niño, a swath of ocean stretching 6,000 miles (about 10,000 kilometers) westward off the coast of Ecuador warms for months on end, typically by 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1 to 2 degrees Celsius). A few degrees may not seem like much, but in that part of the world, it’s more than enough to completely reorganize wind, rainfall and temperature patterns all over the planet. White corals indicate bleaching from heat stress. Marine heat waves can trigger coral bleaching. Dillon Amaya is a climate scientist who studies the oceans. After three years of La Niña, he advises that it’s time to start preparing for what El Niño may have in store.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, April 30, 2023 – Four highlights from this week: Privacy Guides – Search Engines; The true numbers behind deepfake fraud; 6 riskiest medical devices for cybersecurity; and ‘As an AI language model’: the phrase that shows how AI is polluting the web.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, April 22, 2023 – Four highlights from this week: Twitter forces all links to go through its own t.co link shortener; Hijacked AI assistants can now hack your data; AI Incident Database; and New ChatGPT4.0 Concerns: A Market for Stolen Premium Accounts.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, April 15, 2023 – Five highlights from this week: Privacy Violation by GoodRx and FTC Remediation; Does ChatGPT Have Privacy Issues?; Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to more users worldwide; Why Banks Are Suddenly Closing Customer Accounts; and A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, April 8, 2023 – Four highlights from this week: It’s Their Content, You’re Just Licensing it; Understanding the NIST Cybersecurity Framework; Here’s how Google Maps cracked down on fake contributions last year; and Clearview AI scraped 30 billion images from Facebook and gave them to cops.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, April 1, 2023 – Four highlights from this week: A.I. Is Sucking the Entire Internet In. What If You Could Yank Some Back Out?; Report: Terrible employee passwords at world’s largest companies; 2022 Was a Massive Year for ‘Bad Ads’ on Google Search; and Europol Sets Out ‘Grim’ Prospects For Law Enforcement In The Era Of ChatGPT.

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