National health news outlet KFF Health News has published a dataset showing how much state and local governments are receiving in settlements from companies that made, sold, or distributed prescription painkillers and were found to have fueled the opioid crisis through their actions. Currently the information the outlet has gathered only reflects the largest settlement to date, which is 26 billion national settlement to be paid out by four pharmaceutical distributors. The dataset will grow with the addition of more payouts in an effort to assess whether settlements help combat the opioid crisi ..read more

U.S. small business lending firm OnDeck Capital has mapped the global reach of American exports using 2022 data from the U.S. International Trade Administration (ITA). The map highlights the biggest foreign trading partner of each U.S. state and their total exports in dollars. According to the visualization, Canada is the biggest foreign trading partner for 34 of 50 U.S. states and Texas is the largest international exporter with roughly $144.3 billion in exports.  Take a look. Image credit: OnDeck ..read more

A Los Angeles jury found in 2015 that “Blurred Lines”—Pharrell Williams’ hit song with Robin Thicke—had illegally infringed on the copyright of Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” This was a landmark ruling because prior cases had only extended copyright protection to lyrics and melody. In Williams v. Gaye the court allowed several other elements, such as harmony, pitch, rhythm, timbre, and tempo, to be considered as well. As a dissenting judge on the appellate court later wrote, this decision allows someone to “copyright a musical style” and “establishes a dangerous precedent that strikes a de ..read more

There has been a concerning rise in nefarious uses of AI-enabled voice cloning recently. Bad actors have targeted families and small businesses with disturbing extortion scams. The scams themselves are not new, the term “virtual kidnapping scam” has been around for many years to describe the ways fraudsters trick victims into paying a ransom to free a loved one they believe is being threatened. But AI has made these scams more sophisticated as the technology can be trained on publicly accessible audio recordings of regular people to make them sound incredibly authentic and believable. Join the ..read more

This week’s list of top data news highlights covers April 6, 2024 to April 12, 2024 and includes articles on creating a building’s digital twin and automating grading in schools. 1. Creating Digital Twins of Universities The University of Liverpool partnered with a Glasgow-based climate technology firm called  Integrated Environmental Solutions to produce a digital twin of a university building. The university connected live operational data about the building to the digital twin to evaluate the efficiency of an ongoing heating, ventilation, and air conditioning refurbishment project. So ..read more

In this submission, the Center argues that the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office should refine how it applies the purpose limitation principle to the development and deployment of generative AI models. The purpose limitation principle states that organizations should only collect and process data for specified, explicit, and legitimate purposes. However, the ICO should not attempt to apply this principle to general purpose generative AI models where, by definition, the various potential uses of these models are unknown. Instead, it should apply this principle to organisations that fine-tu ..read more

Researchers at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University have published a dataset containing roughly 8,000 government records regarding plague mortality rates in London, UK between 1603 and 1752. The Center is transcribing and publishing this data online, enabling historical research on Londoners’ lived experiences during this period. Get the dataset.  Image credits: Death by Numbers ..read more

AirDNA, a Denver-based company that analyzes short-term rental data, produced a map of Airbnb occupancy data along the path of the total solar eclipse on April 9, 2024 in the United States. The visualization shows the higher occupancy rates in red along the path of totality and lower occupancy rates in blue. American cities in the 2024 solar eclipse path saw rental occupancy rates increase to 88 percent, showing the growth in demand for housing during the rare event. The cities with the highest occupancy rates for the eve of the eclipse were Jeffersonville, Vermont; Killeen, Texas; and Niagara ..read more

This week’s list of top data news highlights covers March 30, 2024 to April 5, 2024 and includes articles on detecting dementia using mobile data and using algorithms to renourish food deserts.  1. Streamlining Business Operations AI startup Cohere has released a new language model called Command R+ to perform business-critical tasks more effectively and at a cheaper cost to firms. The model uses advanced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which optimizes the output of a large language model, improving the quality and relevance of generated text. 2. Predicting the Solar Corona Ahead of ..read more

Gallup, an American multinational analytics organization, released a World Happiness Report that maps the state of happiness globally, turning the responses of approximately 1,000 respondents into a visual that shows regional and cultural patterns regarding happiness. The World Happiness Report averages the score from people’s rating of their lives on a 0 to10 scale (called life evaluations) over three years from 2021 to 2023. This year, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland kept their top happy positions from last year, while Afghanistan was the least happy country in the world, according to this pol ..read more