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Podcast: The connection between the energy supply and political polarization

Podcast: The connection between the energy supply and political polarization

Carey King of the Energy Institute of the University of Texas at Austin discusses how the last 80 years of American history have shown a connection between energy consumption, economic output, and political polarization.

Listen here: https://link.chtbl.com/QQIv_DZe

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From Fixers to Builders
Illustration by iStock/DrAfter123

From Fixers to Builders

This piece was originally published in the Stanford Innovation Review on January 9, 2025.

How do we get people of all political identities to willingly support social progress without compromising anyone’s values? In September 2024, two months before the American public voted Republicans into control of every branch of the US national government, that question was definitively answered at a private, non-political gathering of philanthropic foundation executives and their communications officers.

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AI is Fabricating Misinformation: A Call for AI Literacy in the Classroom

Students using computers in a classroom.

Getty Images / Tom Werner

AI is Fabricating Misinformation: A Call for AI Literacy in the Classroom

Want to learn something new? My suggestion: Don’t ask ChatGPT. While tech leaders promote generative AI tools as your new, go-to source for information, my experience as a university librarian suggests otherwise. Generative AI tools often produce “hallucinations,” in the form of fabricated misinformation that convincingly mimics actual, factual truth.

The concept of AI “hallucinations” came to my attention not long after the launch of ChatGPT. Librarians at universities and colleges throughout the country began to share a puzzling trend: students were spending time fruitlessly searching for books and articles that simply didn’t exist. It was only after questioning that students revealed their source as ChatGPT. In the tech world, these fabrications are called “hallucinations,” a term borrowed from psychiatry to describe sensory systems that become temporarily distorted. In this context, the term implies generative AI has human cognition, but it emphatically does not. The fabrications are outputs of non-human algorithms that can misinform – and too often, do.

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Donald Trump is gearing up to politicize the Department of Justice. Again.

President-elect Donald Trump, Wednesday, January 8, 2025.

(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Donald Trump is gearing up to politicize the Department of Justice. Again.

Withhis loyalists lining up for key law-enforcement roles, Trump is fixated on former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who helped lead the January 6 congressional investigation. “Liz Cheney has been exposed in the Interim Report, by Congress, of the J6 Unselect Committee as having done egregious and unthinkable acts of crime,”Trump recently said. Then he added: “She is so unpopular and disgusting, a real loser!”

This accelerates a dangerous trend in American politics: using the criminal justice system to settle political scores. Boththe Trumps and the Bidens have been entangled in numerous criminal law controversies, as have many other politicians this century, includingScooter Libbey,Ted Stevens,Robert Coughlin,William Jefferson,Jesse Jackson Jr.,David Petraeus,Michael Fylnn,Steve Bannon,Bob Menendez, andGeorge Santos.

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Bird Flu and the Battle Against Emerging Diseases

A test tube with a blood test for h5n1 avian influenza. The concept of an avian flu pandemic. Checking the chicken for diseases.

Getty Images//Stock Photo

Bird Flu and the Battle Against Emerging Diseases

The first human death from bird flu in the United States occurred on January 6 in a Louisiana hospital, less than three weeks before the second Donald Trump administration’s inauguration. Bird flu, also known as Avian influenza or H5N1, is a disease that has been on the watch list of scientists and epidemiologists for its potential to become a serious threat to humans.

COVID-19’s chaotic handling during Trump’s first term serves as a stark reminder of the stakes. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention, last year, 66 confirmed human cases of H5N1 bird flu were reported in the United States. That is a significant number when you consider that only one case was recorded in the two previous years.

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