April Urban

April Urban

@aprilurban.bsky.social

Data janitor at heart. Believer in the power of community and that data + information = power.

180 Followers 94 Following 44 Posts Joined Nov 2024
1 month ago
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Local and State Police Can Investigate Federal Agents, But Rarely Do It doesn’t happen often, but local law enforcement can arrest and charge federal agents. Legal experts say there’s a moral obligation to at least try to hold federal immigration officers accountable w...

Local police did not open investigations into six of the 12 shootings by on-duty federal agents that have led to the deaths or injuries of citizens and immigrants since September, a ProPublica analysis found.

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5 months ago
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👇🏽

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8 months ago

"your work is also part of a system that needs public support and trust, which it earns by demonstrating not just its usefulness, but also its openness, transparency, and accountability"
❤️❤️
Yup!

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8 months ago

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

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8 months ago
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Juneteenth and the Meaning of Freedom Emancipation is a marker of progress for white Americans, not black ones.

“There is a vast chasm between the concept of freedom inscribed on paper and the reality of freedom in our lives.” Revisit Jelani Cobb‘s piece, from 2020, on Juneteenth and the meaning of freedom.

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9 months ago
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Trump cut staffing at the VA, and now Dallas vets are waiting months for care.

Surgeries are being delayed. Vets are being left without mental health care.

I’ve called for an investigation—because if you claim to support veterans, act like it.

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9 months ago

Take a moment to submit a comment on the proposed restrictions to COVID vaccines. I'm personally pretty sure getting the COVID boosters along with the annual flu shot has helped my family stay healthier during peak disease season that's lately been swarming with RSV and so many other viruses.

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9 months ago
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How the Trump Administration Is Weakening the Enforcement of Fair Housing Laws Starting with cases involving sexual orientation and identity, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is hobbling enforcement of the Fair Housing Act. Said one HUD attorney: “People are…

“No one is watching, no one will hold them accountable, so they can just do what they want,” said one HUD attorney. “The civil rights laws that people marched for and fought for, ... it’s not happening. And people are really being harmed by it.”

By @jessecoburn.bsky.social

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10 months ago

"Our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it. Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways"

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10 months ago
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We're hiring! Join the Eviction Lab as a Data Engineer and help build powerful, scalable data tools that inform housing research and policy nationwide. Apply now: tinyurl.com/evictionlab2025

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10 months ago
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ERICA to the Rescue! ERIC, the research repository of the Department of Education, was defunded this week. The ERIC catalog lists over 2 million education-related publications. More than 500,000 of these publications are ...

ERICA to the Rescue! Read about our volunteer efforts to rescue & revive ERIC, Dept of Ed's research repository. www.datarescueproject.org/erica-to-the... Thanks to crizzo, @archive.org & @safeguardingdata.bsky.social for all of the hard work. Check out more rescued data on our Data Rescue Tracker!

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10 months ago

Toxicologist here! This will improve the health of zero Americans. Current synthetic food dyes are not causing health problems, and are often times used because they are actually safer than natural food dyes. Reminder that guns are the #1 cause of death of children but we are going to ban food dyes.

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10 months ago

Thanks for sharing!

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10 months ago
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We just brought Data Days over to Bluesky-- follow us at @datadayscle.bsky.social . Take our survey to let us know how Data Days CLE can best help you with #data and #civictech in 2025. Go to datadayscle.org for the survey.

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10 months ago
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An Indian Drugmaker, Investigated by ProPublica Last Year, Has Recalled Two Dozen Medications Sold to U.S. Patients FDA inspectors found serious problems at a Glenmark factory in India that manufactured the recalled drugs. Another medication made there has been tied to deaths of U.S. patients.

FDA inspectors found serious problems at a Glenmark factory in India that manufactured the recalled drugs. Another medication made there has been tied to deaths of U.S. patients.

By @sheinvestigates.bsky.social

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10 months ago

Why do we build the wall, my children, my children, why do we build the wall?

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10 months ago
A ggplot2 bar plot showing the counts of correct, partially correct, and incorrect answers from various LLMs on R coding problems. Claude Sonnet 3.7, shown in orange, answer questions correctly much more often than the GPT series models, shown in shades of blue. GPT-4o answers questions correctly less often than any of the GPT 4.1 series models.

New on my blog: OpenAI dropped a trio of models yesterday that they claim result from "focusing closely on real-world developer needs." I was curious whether this might mean stronger #rstats coding performance.

www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2025-04...

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10 months ago
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We filed suit today to compel the Office of Management & Budget to resume disclosing key federal spending plans called “apportionments,” which tell federal agencies how and when to spend federal funds. The law requires this disclosure—and the public has a right to know: protdem.org/4ijKGJV

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10 months ago

It was very frustrating to watch reporters in the Oval allow Bukele's assertion these people are "terrorists" to go unquestioned

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11 months ago

If I were a writer, I'd start on a short story where former US citizens shipped to El Salvador by a traitorous US President and tech oligarchy end up building the new mecca in El Salvador while the US and it's weird remaining cult-enraptured citizens crumble.

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11 months ago
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N.C. Lawmakers Move to Stop Votes From Being Discarded Based on Postelection Rule Changes Spurred by ProPublica’s reporting, Democrats have introduced a measure designed to block a right-wing strategy to disallow ballots after they were cast. It’s being used to try to upend the results of…

Spurred by ProPublica’s reporting, Democrats have introduced a measure designed to block a right-wing strategy to disallow ballots after they were cast. It’s being used to try to upend the results of a key state Supreme Court race.

By @dougbockclark.bsky.social

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11 months ago
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“Not Just Measles”: Whooping Cough Cases Are Soaring as Vaccine Rates Decline While much of the country is focused on the spiraling measles outbreak, experts warn that whooping cough and other preventable diseases could get much worse with falling vaccination rates and Trump’s ...

NEW: Whooping cough is killing babies. It’s not just measles cases that are soaring as vaccine rates decline. And the Trump administration recently cut $11 billion from state and local agencies on the front lines of protecting Americans from outbreaks. www.propublica.org/article/whoo...

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11 months ago

Yet again we put more work on schools and kids. So ridiculous.

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11 months ago
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How DOGE may have improperly used Social Security data to push voter fraud narratives A DOGE staffer working in the Social Security Administration has been pushing questionable claims about noncitizens voting — apparently using data that court records suggest DOGE shouldn't have.

NEW on @npr.org:

A DOGE staffer working in the Social Security Administration has been pushing questionable claims about noncitizens voting — apparently using data that court records suggest DOGE shouldn't have.

More on the claims and the latest in DOGE access concerns:

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11 months ago
A United States tile map depicts the measles vaccination rate in each state. For most states, the rate was below 95%, or "herd immunity", in school year 2023-24.

For @propublica.org: measles vaccination rates were *below herd immunity* in most states in the 2023-24 school year. Read the story on vaccine hesitancy & rising cases of measles and whooping cough by @deldeib.bsky.social:
www.propublica.org/article/whoo...

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11 months ago

Seriously.

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11 months ago
Use of this Service requires the creation of an ID.me Rx Account. To understand more about ID.me Rx, please review the ID.me Rx Terms of Service. Through your use of ID.me Rx you consent to ID.me collecting your health information and you understand that ID.me Rx is not subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) when it collects and processes this information.

I'm making an ID.me account (a private identity vendor selling its services to government), required to log into my IRS.gov account, and their privacy policy says I'm also creating an "an ID.me Rx Account," and consent to this company collecting my health information. *What*? www.id.me/privacy

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11 months ago
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Worries grow over risks to Americans as Trump cuts health, safety agencies The chorus of experts issuing warnings include Republican lawmakers, former Trump officials and civil servants who worked under GOP and Democratic presidents.

Trump, Musk and DOGE have touted the short-term savings from their cuts.

What they don’t mention: the long-term consequences of shrinking food inspections, disaster response and other federal safety efforts.

Me + @hannahnatanson.bsky.social on Trump’s big shift of risk to everyday Americans.

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11 months ago
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Emails Confirm Social Security Administration Canceled Maine Contracts As Political Payback Acting commissioner Leland Dudek called Maine Gov. Janet Mills a “petulant child” for defying Donald Trump.

The ability of people to access federal programs should not be a function of whether federal administrators personally like or dislike a state's governor. www.huffpost.com/entry/janet-...

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11 months ago

Ohio peeps, get on the horn to your state reps, they're trying to cut the budget for our public libraries. Tell them to restore the Public Library Fund (PLF) to 1.75% of the Ohio General Revenue Fund!

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