How to Avoid the Ethical Nightmares of Emerging Technology
Editorial: Reverse ruinous cuts to federal library program
The Trump administration’s shuttering of the IMLS will be felt at the local and state levels.
Editorial: Reverse ruinous cuts to federal library program
The twelfth edition of our Canadian Leisure & Reading Study is now available! Get your copy here: https://buff.ly/2eXUyAP
Canadian Leisure & Reading Study 2024
https://www.booknetcanada.ca/canadian-leisure-and-reading-study-2024
This free report looks at how Canadians are spending their leisure time and the behaviours of Canadian readers in 2024.
Using data from BookNet Canada’s survey of 1,211 adult, English-speaking Canadians, it asks in-depth questions about Canadians’ leisure activities, with a particular focus on how readers and non-readers spend their free time, how readers discover and acquire their books, readers’ format preferences, popular Fiction and Non-Fiction genres, the value of books across formats, and more.
You can find last year’s report here.
Organizations Aren’t Ready for the Risks of Agentic AI
“As companies move from narrow to generative to agentic and multi-agentic AI, the complexity of the risk landscape ramps up sharply. Existing AI risk programs—including ethical and cyber risks—need to evolve for organizations to move fast without breaking their brand and the people they impact. The good news is that organizations don’t need to solve everything at once. They need to honestly assess where they are on the complexity curve, build the capabilities required for their current stage, and create the infrastructure to evolve safely to the next. This means investing in comprehensive employee training, developing robust monitoring systems, and creating intervention protocols before they’re desperately needed. This task is difficult, but the reward is the safe, wide-scale deployment of truly transformative technologies.”
“The Ethical Nightmare Challenge.” “In the face of AI hallucinations, deepfakes, the threat of job loss, IP violations, discriminatory outputs, privacy violations, its black box nature, and more, the challenge asks leaders to:
- Identify the ethical nightmares for their organizations that may result from wide-scale AI use.
- Create the internal resources that are necessary for nightmare avoidance.
- Upskill employees so they can use those resources, along with their updated professional judgment, to avoid those nightmares.”
10 Steps for Public Relations Professionals to Improve their Pitches in 2025
10 Steps for Public Relations Professionals to Improve their Pitches in 2025
Abstract
Democracy and freedom of press may affect how science is prioritized, produced, communicated and disseminated. We aimed to map the production of scientific publications worldwide in terms of democracy and freedom of press ratings of countries. Democracy ratings used the Democracy Index in 2024 and in 2006 (when first released by the Economist Intelligence Unit) and Freedom of Press ratings used the 2024 index by Reports Without Borders. The Scopus database was used for publications from each country. Fractional counts were assigned for publications co-authored by authors from different countries. Full articles, reviews, conference papers, books and book chapters were included. In 2024, countries characterized as full democracies produced only 22% of the Scopus-indexed publications, versus 66% in 2006. There was no correlation between the ratio of publications indexed in 2024 versus 2006 and the absolute or relative change in Democracy Index between 2006 and 2024 (r=0.02 and r=0.00, respectively). 78% of publications in 2024 came from countries with problematic (including USA) or worse (including China) freedom of press. Proportions of publications originated from countries with problematic or worse situations were 81%, 91%, 61%, 62%, and 63% for political, economic, legislative, sociocultural, and safety/security dimensions, respectively. Results were similar when limited to articles published in 2024 in journals with continuous annual presence in Scopus during 2006-2024. In conclusion, most published science originates from countries struggling or suffering in democracy and/or freedom of press. The deeper causes and implications of this emerging landscape require further study.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.”
Will AI speed up literature reviews or derail them entirely?
The publication of ever-larger numbers of problematic papers, including fake ones generated by artificial intelligence, represents an existential crisis for the established way of doing evidence synthesis. But with a new approach, AI might also save the day.
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