Category «Librarian Resources»

We Found 650,000 Ways Advertisers Label You

If you spend any time online, you probably have some idea that the digital ad industry is constantly collecting data about you, including a lot of personal information, and sorting you into specialized categories so you’re more likely to buy the things they advertise to you. But in a rare look at just how deep—and weird—the rabbit hole of targeted advertising gets, Investigative Data Journalist Jon Keegan and Visualizations Engineer Joel Eastwood of the The Markup analyzed a database of 650,000 of these audience segments, newly unearthed on the website of Microsoft’s ad platform Xandr. The trove of data indicates that advertisers could also target people based on sensitive information like being “heavy purchasers” of pregnancy test kits, having an interest in brain tumors, being prone to depression, visiting places of worship, or feeling “easily deflated” or that they “get a raw deal out of life.”

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Subjects: Big Data, Civil Liberties, Competitive Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Data Mining, E-Commerce, Health, Privacy

How book-banning campaigns have changed the lives and education of librarians

Nicole A. Cooke, Augusta Baker Endowed Chair and a Professor at the School of Library and Information Science, at the University of South Carolina, identifies the significant and socially charged work of librarians who are defending the rights of readers and writers in the battles raging across the U.S. over censorship, book challenges and book bans. Cooke states, “as long as there have been book challenges, there have been those who defend intellectual freedom and the right to read freely. Librarians and library workers have long been crucial players in the defense of books and ideas. At the 2023 annual American Library Association Conference, scholar Ibram X. Kendi praised library professionals and reminded them that “if you’re fighting book bans, if you’re fighting against censorship, then you are a freedom fighter.”

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Subjects: Communication Skills, Education, Free Speech, KM, Legal Research, Librarian Resources, Libraries & Librarians

The Survey Is Dead; Long Live the Survey: Can ChatGPT Replace Traditional Research Surveys?

Iantha Haight writes that her library recently hosted a guest speaker, David Wingate, a professor in BYU’s computer science department who does research on large language models, for a faculty lunch and learn. The entire presentation was fascinating, but the most intriguing part for me and many of the law faculty in attendance was the idea that generative AI systems will become so good they will be able to replace human subjects in answering research surveys. How? Generative neural networks trained on huge amounts of data—terabytes and even petabytes—ingest enough information about people that they can answer survey questions as if they were members of the survey population.

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Subjects: AI, KM, Law Librarians, Legal Technology, Librarian Resources, Library Software & Technology, Reference Resources, Reference Services, Surveys

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, April 8, 2023

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, 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: 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.

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Subjects: Big Data, Business Research, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Privacy, Social Media, Technology Trends

Manhattan grand jury votes to indict Donald Trump, showing he, like all other presidents, is not an imperial king

Following news that a Manhattan grand jury had voted to indict Donald Trump, CNN’s John Miller announced on Thursday evening March 30, 3023: “I am told by my sources that this is 34 counts of falsification of business records, which is probably a lot of charges involving each document, each thing that was submitted, as a separate count.” Prof. Shannon Bow O’Brien, a presidency scholar, takes on the concept of the imperial presidency: “Throughout history, many presidents have pushed the boundaries of power for their own personal preferences or political gain. However, Americans do have the right to push back and hold these leaders accountable to the country’s laws. Presidents have never been monarchs. If they ever act in that manner, I believe that the people have to remind them of who they are and whom they serve.”

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Subjects: Accounting, Business Research, Criminal Law, Government Resources, Leadership, Legal Research, Public Records, United States Law

2023 Finding People MiniGuide

This guide by Marcus P. Zillman is a selected list of free and fee based (some require subscriptions), people finding resources, from a range of providers. A significant number of free sources on this subject matter are sourced from public records obtained by a group of companies who initially offer free information to establish your interest, from which point a more extensive report requires a fee to obtain. It is important to note that can be many errors in these data, including the inability to correctly de-duplicated individuals with the same common names. Also note that each service targets a different mix of identifying data such as: name, address, date of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives, education, employment, criminal records. social media accounts, income. As we conduct research throughout the day it is useful to employ both impromptu and planned searches about individuals that are referenced.

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Subjects: Business Research, Competitive Intelligence, KM, Public Records, Search Engines, Search Strategies

A survey of over 17,000 people indicates only half of us are willing to trust AI at work

Professor Nicole Gillespie, and Research Fellows Caitlin Curtis, Javad Pool and Steven Lockey, discuss their new 17-country study involving over 17,000 people reveals how much and in what ways we trust AI in the workplace, how we view the risks and benefits, and what is expected for AI to be trusted. They find that only one in two employees are willing to trust AI at work. Their attitude depends on their role, what country they live in, and what the AI is used for. However, people across the globe are nearly unanimous in their expectations of what needs to be in place for AI to be trusted.

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Subjects: AI, Information Management, Software, Technology Trends

Algorithms are moulding and shaping our politics. Here’s how to avoid being gamed

In a recent paper, Prof. Chantelle Gray coined the term “algopopulism”: algorithmically aided politics. The political content in our personal feeds not only represents the world and politics to us. It creates new, sometimes “alternative”, realities. It changes how we encounter and understand politics and even how we understand reality itself.

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Subjects: AI, Conflicts, Education, Search Engines, Search Strategies

The expanding role of technology in the law firm business model

The premise of this article by COO and legal technologist Kenneth Jones is that individual capabilities and excellence (either legal or technical) standing alone are not enough to ensure long-term, sustainable success. No superstar technologist or lawyer is equipped to do it all, as there are too many specialties and functional roles which need to be filled. Rather, a better approach is to construct team-based, cross-functional units that offer greater operational efficiency while building in layers of redundancy that reduce the potential for surprises, errors, or disruption. This comprehensive and actionable guide validates deploying the cross-functional team approach across the enterprise.

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Subjects: Information Management, KM, Leadership, Legal Profession, Legal Technology, Management, Team Building
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