Articles and Columns for July 2024 Unlocking History: How a Small Group of Researchers Dominates the Declassification Appeals Process – Attorney and FOIA expert Michael Ravnitzky shines a spotlight on people, process and procedural challenges with his illuminating article. A small core group of researchers and historians have filed most of the declassification appeals being …
This semi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, government documents, NGO/IGO papers, industry white papers, academic papers and speeches on the subject of AI’s fast paced impact on the banking and finance sectors. The chronological links provided are to the primary sources, and as available, indicate links to alternate free versions. Six highlights from this post: Hearing Entitled: AI Innovation Explored: Insights into AI Applications in Financial Services and Housing; How Banks Can Combat Fraud, Cybercrime With Advanced Technology, AI; AI in banking risk management: exploring latest trends and use cases; JPMorgan Chase has begun rolling out a generative artificial intelligence product; How Banks Can Combat Fraud, Cybercrime With Advanced Technology, AI; and Gen AI takes over finance: The leading applications and their challenges.
Attorney and FOIA expert Michael Ravnitzky shines a spotlight on people, process and procedural challenges with his illuminating article. A small core group of researchers and historians have filed most of the declassification appeals being reviewed by the responsible appellate body. While these individuals are working diligently to facilitate public access to long-classified records that shed light on our nation’s history, their efforts also highlight weaknesses in the declassification framework.
Legal tech expert and frequent speaker Jerry Lawson affirms that the best substantive presentation material looks even better if packaged well. Formatting slide shows is an art. Compliance with some basic slide show formatting principles won’t make you Monet, but will put you on the road to being a passable PowerPoint artist. Lawson shares his presentation tips and techniques.
Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: New Hack Threat: Thieves Take Over Your Phone Number; AT&T failed to test disastrous update that kicked all devices off network; How Russia-Linked Malware Cut Heat to 600 Ukrainian Buildings in Deep Winter; and Ransomware attack closes LA County Superior Court buildings.
Jordan Furlong is a leading analyst of the global legal market and forecaster of its future development. In this insightful article he contends that our legal education and licensing systems produce one kind of lawyer. The legal market of the near future will need another kind. If we can’t close this gap fast, we’ll have a very serious problem.
Reading and writing articles published in academic journals and presented at conferences is a central part of being a researcher. When researchers write a scholarly article, they must cite the work of peers to provide context, detail sources of inspiration and explain differences in approaches and results. A positive citation by other researchers is a key measure of visibility for a researcher’s own work. But what happens when this citation system is manipulated? A recent Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology article by Lonni Besançon and Guillaume Cabanac and their team of academic sleuths – which includes information scientists, a computer scientist and a mathematician – has revealed an insidious method to artificially inflate citation counts through metadata manipulations: sneaked references.
Long COVID is a term that describes the constellation of long-term health effects caused by infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. These range from persistent respiratory symptoms, such as shortness of breath, to debilitating fatigue or brain fog that limits people’s ability to work, and conditions such as heart failure and diabetes, which are known to last a lifetime. New research and reports conclude that long COVID is a complex chronic condition that can result in more than 200 health effects across multiple body systems. Physician scientist, subject matter expert and author Ziyad Al-Aly helps us understand the science and the real world implications of suffering from Long Covid.
If elected to serve a second term, Donald Trump says he supports a spoils system, a plan that would give him the authority to fire as many as 50,000 civil servants and replace them with members of his political party loyal to him. Under this plan, if he eventually deemed those new employees disloyal, he claims he could fire them too. Law professors Sidney Shapiro and Joseph P. Tomain write in their new book How Government Built America about how newly elected President Andrew Jackson, after he took office in 1828, fired about half the country’s civil servants and replaced them with loyal members of his political party. The result was not only an utterly incompetent administration, but widespread corruption.
As part of the reporting process for The Markup’s investigation into inequitable insurance pricing, they dug through more than 52,000 pages of documents that insurance companies filed with government regulators detailing their pricing algorithms. Aaron Sankin reports on the many different ways you can save some money on your car insurance, including built-in discounts that you could be taking advantage of. These discounts reward customers who could save insurers money in the long run by, say, taking steps to reduce their risk of getting in costly crashes or opting into features that lower companies’ administrative costs.