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 …
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.
Articles and Columns for June 2024 Protecting the Vulnerable: Navigating Online Risks for Minors – Veronica Garrick’s paper is an insightful, factual and timely discussion of how in today’s digital age, minors are exposed to technology at a young age, presenting both great opportunities and risks. Online risks include data privacy breaches, access to inappropriate, …
Jerry Lawson discusses how antipathy toward slide shows is understandable but misdirected. A slide show is a tool, an instrument like a hammer, airbrush or violin. Lawson advocates the position that good slide shows can help presenters better educate, persuade, and even inspire.
Kevin Novak continues his discussion on critical strategies and managing people in workplaces which have increasingly shifted to indirect, digitized operations and communications. The basic toolkit for successful leaders has changed and will continue to evolve as the work environment shifts. Leaders still need the basics to run the business, but the role has changed from a top-down decision-maker to an empathetic and facilitative colleague. We know it’s a lot to ask leaders to be group dynamics pros, but person-to-person skills as a wise mentor is invaluable with younger workers. It is and always will be important to “read the room” or in today’s terms “read the screen.”
Referencing an article in this month’s Georgetown Law Technology Review, “…traditional AI algorithms normally operate by carrying out a specific function or completing a task using a data set that contains information on how that function or task has previously been done In other words, traditional AI is able to follow a set of rules, make predictions, or utilize instructions to complete a task; but it is not creating anything new in doing so. Generative AI (GAI) has the ability to create something new, specifically new content.” Marcus P. Zillman’s new resource guide spans subject matters including law, economics, education, information technology, planning and strategic deployment and use of GAI, as well a best practices and governance.
The post-Covid workplace is one in which the issue of trust, mindfulness and gratitude are increasingly hot button issues. Being grateful is an expectation in our personal lives, yet “gratitude in the workplace is especially critical because it satisfies the higher psychological need to feel a sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves – to feel a sense of meaning at work. Gratitude is seeing and hearing a workforce as a group of individuals. Trust is the foundation that builds a healthy organization. As Kevin Novak explains the combination of the two should be the North Star for retaining a workforce and cultivating its potential.
Articles and Columns for May 2024 Ransomware in the Digital Age: Multidisciplinary Legal Strategies for Minimizing Cryptocurrency Ransom Payments – 2023 witnessed an unprecedented escalation in ransomware attacks, affecting users from homeowners to critical infrastructure like healthcare, education, and government. With over 5,200 reported incidents—a 74% increase from the previous year—ransomware has not only intensified …
It is difficult to test Large-Language Models (LLMs) without back-end access to run evaluations. So to test the abilities of these products, librarians can use prompt engineering to figure out how to get desired results (controlling statutes, key cases, drafts of a memo, etc.). Some models are more successful than others at achieving specific results. However, as these models update and change, evaluations of their efficacy can change as well. Law Librarians and tech experts par excellence, Rebecca Fordon, Sean Harrington and Christine Park plan to propose a typology of legal research tasks based on existing computer and information science scholarship and draft corresponding questions using the typology, with rubrics others can use to score the tools they use.
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: Librarians Are Waging a Quiet War Against International “Data Cartels”; Why car location tracking needs an overhaul; How to find out if an AirTag is tracking you; and New mailing list aims to share hacking attempts on open-source projects.