Aunt Melida

The Early Republic Tracker The Early Republic Tracker documents instances where the federal government is removing facts and stories essential to the public’s understanding American history from public historical sites, muse…

Please circulate and share this important resource: thepanorama.shear.org/2025/04/09/t...

Image: Photos of Cathi Fuhrman and Erin Jones From Principles to Practice: Building Censorship Resistant Library Policies Tuesday, February 10 11:00am – 11:45am CST Claim your spot now! Torch and Open Book Illustration Preserving Intellectual Freedom Sponsor: Sourcebooks Recharging in Challenging Times An ALA Virtual Event Feb. 10, 2026 FOR OUR LIBRARIES. American Library Association

Image: Photos of Becky Calzada, Leila Green Little, Ashley Hope Pérez, and Eric Stroshane Seeking Support in the Midst of a Challenge Tuesday, February 10 12:45pm – 1:30pm CST Claim your spot now! Torch and Open Book Illustration Preserving Intellectual Freedom Sponsor: Sourcebooks Recharging in Challenging Times An ALA Virtual Event Feb. 10, 2026 FOR OUR LIBRARIES. American Library Association  

Image: Photo of Danya Leebaw Academic Freedom for Library Workers: Why it Matters and How to Defend it Tuesday, February 10 2:15pm – 3:00pm CST Claim your spot now! Torch and Open Book Illustration Preserving Intellectual Freedom Sponsor: Sourcebooks Recharging in Challenging Times An ALA Virtual Event Feb. 10, 2026 FOR OUR LIBRARIES. American Library Association

From drafting clear policies to rallying champions and protecting academic freedom for library workers, these Intellectual Freedom sessions provide the grounding you need to navigate your library's challenges with confidence.

#ALAVirtual26 Claim your spot now! https://www.ala.org/virtual-event

YouTube video by Senator Bernie Sanders It's Time for a Moratorium on Data Centers | Sen. Bernie Sanders

I will be pushing for a moratorium on the construction of data centers that are powering the unregulated sprint to develop & deploy AI.

The moratorium will give democracy a chance to catch up, and ensure that the benefits of technology work for all of us, not just the 1%.

AOC: I want to remind you where the real crime is. It's in the oligarchs taking $170 billion of our money from health care and food assistance and public programs and taking that and funneling it into a secret police program.

Canada launches billion dollar plan to recruit top researchers Canada on Tuesday launched a CAN$1.7 billion ($1.2 billion) program to recruit leading global researchers, part of the effort to poach intellectual talent looking to leave the United States because of...

🎉 At last it's public ... "Canada on Tuesday launched a CAN$1.7 billion ($1.2 billion) program to recruit leading global researchers, part of the effort to poach intellectual talent looking to leave the United States because of President Donald Trump's policies." 🇨🇦 💪 www.france24.com/en/live-news...

Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They're Doing It's unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians have now discovered that people are using Virtual

If lawmakers genuinely care about young people's wellbeing, they should invest in education, support parents with better tools, and address the actual root causes of harm online. What they shouldn't do is wage war on privacy itself. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

You do not have to hand it to the Catholic bishops. In the same meeting, they banned gender affirming care at all Catholic hospitals nationwide.

www.npr.org/2025/11/12/g...

Infograph shows California Policy Lab logo and text that say's "WE'RE HIRING!" and "Researcher/Senior Researcher (Health & Safety Net)

Please share with your networks: The California Policy Lab is hiring a Researcher/Senior Researcher focused on health & safety net: capolicylab.org/careers/rese...

Rep. Sykes reintroduced the Safer Homes and Families Legislative Agenda to help survivors of domestic violence leave a hard situation, and ensure that they have the support they need once they do. Congress must act to protect survivors.

Tools from EFF's Tech Team EFF’s team of technologists and computer scientists engineers solutions to the problems of sneaky tracking, inconsistent encryption, and more. Where users face threats to their privacy and security

Where users face threats to their privacy and security online, EFF’s technology tools are there to defend them. www.eff.org/tools

Pope Leo calls for news agencies to stand as bulwark against "post-truths," lies and manipulation Pope Leo XIV has encouraged international news agencies to stand firm as a bulwark against the "ancient art of lying" and manipulation.

"He quoted Hannah Arendt's 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' in asserting that the world needs free and objective information."

www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news...

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson on the local media's lawsuit against the federal government for firing tear gas canisters and pepper balls at them:

"It's a sad state in America when reporters have to go to court to not get shot at by the federal government."

On WCPT 820, Tennessee Democratic U.S. House candidate Justin J. Pearson:

"All these millionaires in Congress now, they're talking about, 'I'm not gonna take my check during the shutdown.' But you don't need a check in the first place, right? ... So no, you shouldn't be getting a check."

Trump Canceled 94 Million Pounds of Food Aid. Here’s What Never Arrived. ProPublica obtained records from the Department of Agriculture that detail the millions of pounds of food, down to the number of eggs, that never reached food banks because of the administration’s cut...

The Trump administration has cancelled 4,304 deliveries to food banks so far this year, refusing to deliver 94 million pounds of contracted-for food. Food banks simply can’t feed people enough anymore. Millions of Americans are going hungry as a result.

The arts for disease prevention and health promotion: a systematic review - Nature Medicine The arts, according to a systematic synthesis of data from 95 studies (across 26 countries), may support non-communicable disease prevention by providing opportunities for increased physical activity,...

Don't underestimate the effect of the arts—music, dance, visual, gardening, crafts, theater—for promoting health, a systematic review
@naturemedicine.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The US town that pays every pregnant woman $1,500: ‘We’re not OK with our babies being born into poverty’ Infants in Rx Kids in Flint, Michigan, saw lower rates of prematurity and other issues, saving millions in NICU visits

A program in Flint, MI, gave $1,500 to any/all pregnant people and $500/month for the first year of their infant’s life.

Among the benefits, those babies experienced lower rates of prematurity and low birth weight, which resulted in fewer NICU admissions, saving the city of Flint $6.2 million/year.

Remote policies helped women work. In-office mandates and child care costs are driving them back out. Low flexibility and high child care costs are pushing mothers with young kids to the sidelines after they joined the workforce in record numbers during the pandemic. Emma Nelson The Minnesota Star Tribune September 13th at 6:01 AM CDT

"The labor participation rate for women with children younger than 5 had the biggest midyear drop in more than 40 years during the first six months of 2025."

Why Language Models Hallucinate, by Kalai et al. Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such “hallucinations” persist even in state-of-the-art systems and undermine trust. We argue that language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty, and we analyze the statistical causes of hallucinations in the modern training pipeline. Hallucinations need not be mysterious—they originate simply as errors in binary classification. If incorrect statements cannot be distinguished from facts, then hallucinations in pretrained language models will arise through natural statistical pressures. We then argue that hallucinations persist due to the way most evaluations are graded—language models are optimized to be good test-takers, and guessing when uncertain improves test performance. This “epidemic” of penalizing uncertain responses can only be addressed through a socio-technical mitigation: modifying the scoring of existing benchmarks that are misaligned but dominate leaderboards, rather than introducing additional hallucination evaluations. This change may steer the field toward more trustworthy AI systems.

Ironically, it appears that AI chatbots hallucinate for the same reason that students feel compelled to use them:

They were socialized in a high-stakes testing culture that rewards guessing and maybe getting it right over admitting when there's something you just don't know.

What You Are Looking For Is in the Library
Michiko Aoyama; Alison Watts
(Translator)

The Posse Comitatus Act comes for Trump's authoritarianism Trump's efforts to go after U.S. cities — first Los Angeles and D.C., with, it appears, Chicago next — are alarming. A lot happened, as to all three cities, on Tuesday.

NEW: The Posse Comitatus Act comes for Trump's authoritarianism.

Trump's efforts to go after U.S. cities — first Los Angeles and D.C., with, it appears, Chicago next — are alarming. A lot happened, as to all three cities, on Tuesday.

Tonight, at Law Dork:

Dozens of scientists find errors in a new Energy Department climate report More than 85 scientists say that a recent U.S. Department of Energy report is full of errors and misrepresents climate science.

More than 85 scientists say that a recent U.S. Department of Energy report is full of errors and misrepresents climate science.

In Which Nadine Amuses a Dragon and Makes Autumn Happen

BREAKING: Big moment as CDC staff stage a mass walkout.

They have lined the street outside its HQ to greet and salute the four top officials who have resigned in protest at RFK Jr’s attack on the agency’s science base.

(🎥 AP)

Law Firm Pressures Brown University to Erase Research on Anti-Wind Groups

My lab's been attacked by an anti-wind group and their lawyers. They threatened the science funding of my whole university, to shut me and my undergraduate research assistants up.

NYT just covered it. 1/n

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...

Federal Court Blocks Trump’s Effort to Censor Schools, End Equity Programs Read more here.

A federal judge in Maryland struck down Education Department orders from Trump that threatened to withhold federal funding from school districts unless they removed lessons on race and dismantled student support programs serving particular communities.

Nature: Cancelling mRNA studies is the highest irresponsibility

go.nature.com/3HDx4wD

cc Jay Bhattacharya

Spain’s Sanchez Calls for National Climate Pact as Fires Rage Spain’s Pedro Sanchez called for a nationwide pact uniting all levels of government to combat what he called an accelerating climate emergency as wildfires raged in several regions of the country.

I think this is the first time I've ever seen a Prime Minister use an active wildfire to call for climate action let alone a national climate pact?

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Trump's new executive order about AI states that companies' models must not incorporate the idea that trans people exist as a concept. Seems bad.

The summary is that they are trying to criminalize every aspect of homelessness so they can arrest & forcibly commit unhoused people. Currently(/before), there are not enough mental health & substance use treatment beds/facilities, and this does not add anything, which only leaves imprisoning people