One more from Morgan Stanley per this FT article today

www.ft.com/content/b003...

Oh fun, friend and @northeasternu.bsky.social Professor John Wihbey is presenting on his new book, Governing Babel, on 10/29 at @shorensteinctr.bsky.social

hksexeced.tfaforms.net/f/registrati...

Join our first public event on October 21, 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗰𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝗥𝗲𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗠𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮 𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻!

This is the launch of our event series, designed to share essential research on what ails, and how we can improve, the information environment.

Attend via zoom: mediafragmentation-online.eventbrite.com

An unprecedented assault on freedom of speech and American democracy.

What you choose to do tomorrow is what you will have done when autocracy came to America.

Do something that will make you proud.

This @beijingpalmer.bsky.social post reminded me I have been meaning to update @pewresearch.org's estimate of total newspaper newsroom jobs - which was 30,820 as of 2020

Using BLS OEWS data (w/ same methodology as Pew) the 2024 number is 29,260 - down another 5%

www.pewresearch.org/chart/sotnm-...

Less than 2% of the world gets any news from BlueSky, per @reutersinstitute.bsky.social, far lower than the big six.

I'm not saying we all need to go fight on X specifically, but we cannot just stay here, either.

Oh and that that 18% is substantially more likely (than other R's) to support deportations, cutting congressionally approval federal budgets, ending birthright citizenship, funding cuts to universities, and other illiberal and anti-democratic actions of the Trump administration.

Republican support for ignoring opposing court orders has roughly doubled, and with as many as 25-30% of MAGA republicans supporting non-compliance, according to @prl.bsky.social

prlpublic.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/reports/Cour...

Really interesting working paper showing that running simple penalized logistic regression on LLM word embeddings can outperform bigger LLMs using only output text.

This intuitively makes some sense to me, plus it's more stable and cheaper! Intriguing.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

We're looking for someone who wants to read and analyze empirical analyses and scientific evidence on the state, ills, and remedies, of the information ecosystem.

Then make that science more accessible and actionable, enabling a healthier info ecosystem, and thereby healthier democracy.

I'm excited to get started and will share more soon - for now, here are some photos from the last few months, where I took a step back for a 99-day walkabout through Argentina, Chile, and Peru.

I try not to be an overly benchmark-watching-person but Stable Beluga's performance on TruthfulQA is interesting.

A possibly meaningful improvement on an (IMO) fairly important test, that has been relatively intractable since it came out two years ago

Fun paragraph and important point from Center for Democracy and Technology’s May report on non-English LLMs, "Lost in Translation"

https://cdt.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/non-en-content-analysis-primer-051223-1203.pdf