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A central concern about the development of artificial intelligence is that it will depend so heavily (at least for its starting point) on the input of the people who created it. A Daily Wire article by Luke Rosiak about social-justice turmoil in the Google “Ethical AI” team provides a detail of just how short-sighted a launch…
I was thinking earlier about how the news media is able to shift the narrative and mood of the country simply by virtue of the things that it chooses to report or not to report. Very rare events when every small update to any related story is splashed across the media nationally. On the other…
The headline is, of course, that unemployment dropped to 5.8% in May, from 6.3% in April, which is nice (although it ought to be higher, given that we’re coming out of a pandemic-and-government-driven recession. But the state Department of Labor and Training’s press release paints a peculiar picture: The number of employed Rhode Island residents…
One long-time wish list item from Rhode Island cities and towns has been for the state to start taking ownership of the fixtures that illuminate roads the state owns, and it is now doing so. Of course, with new lighting technology, the savings to municipalities won’t be huge by local-budget standards (averaging a little more…
Identity politics is a great destroyer. Not only does it pit neighbor against neighbor based on superficial qualities like skin color, but it acts as an ideological litmus test. To its practitioners, one either bends the knee or is non-personned as a “hater.” Look at what’s happening in Barrington. This is from a Sarah Doiron…
Assuming the Associated Press’s science writer, Seth Borenstein, is accurately conveying the methodology of a study proclaiming that 37% of “heat deaths” around the planet were “caused by higher temperatures from human-caused warming,” the project seems problematic on its face: Scientists used decades of mortality data in the 732 cities to plot curves detailing how…
Legislation from Democrat state Senator Leonidas Raptakis (S0089) and Democrat state Representative Patricia Serpa (H5830) begins to address the abuse of school information: The General Assembly tonight passed legislation sponsored by Sen. Leonidas P. Raptakis and Rep. Patricia A. Serpa which prohibits the use of a school district’s listserv to distribute any political advertisement, invitation,…
For a little lunchtime reading on a sunny day from the American Institute for Economic Research, Joakim Book highlights how little people (perhaps educated people, especially) really know about the progress humanity has made: Gapminder routinely asks 12 questions (sometimes with a thirteenth question on global temperatures, which most people tend to get right) about…
The opposition to the upcoming drag queen story hour in West Warwick was unanimous at the library’s trustee meeting Monday night, according to Larry Gillheeney, on Ocean Stat Current, but the event is still on. The library’s official statement on its Facebook page raises some disturbing questions: Over the past few days, there have been postings…
Something about the way labor unions are acting in the United States these days reminds me of the Catholic Church during a phase when it was ripe for criticism. From a Stephen Moore essay in The Epoch Times in April: Last week, the United Mine Workers of America union endorsed Biden’s energy policies. Yes, you read…