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• Every day, journalists and researchers rely on the United States Freedom of Information Act to examine and report on the inner workings of our democracy. And every March, open government advocates celebrate these FOIA heroes during Sunshine Week.
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• The University of Central Florida thought state lawmakers would be satisfied with the ritual sacrifice of President Dale Whittaker. They were wrong.
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• Some College Park residents find themselves in a crappy situation, literally. Those living around Lake Adair share space with a roosting community of cormorants, who eat fish out of the lake and then, well, what goes in comes back out. Orlando city officials say the birds are to blame for the lake’s rising nutrient levels and algae growth, and for 20 years they’ve been trying to drive the birds away. When the birds are in the trees, city workers visit Lake Adair twice a day – once mid-morning and again in the evening – with spotlights, air horns, pyrotechnics, pressurized water, flare guns and whistler bombs; one resident described the neighborhood as “sounding like a war zone.” In 1997, an …
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• This year’s Academy Awards broadcast has been plagued with setbacks. First, the on-again, off-again hosting debacle with Kevin Hart — there’s still no host announced for this Sunday night’s event. Last week we learned that the custom of having the previous year’s acting award-winners present trophies to the new winners would not be observed this year. Then it was announced that four major categories — editing, cinematography, live action short, and makeup and hairstyling — would be announced off-air, which threw the industry into a furor. But perhaps the worst Oscar fail this year is the absence of nominations for films directed by women, despite an upwelling of popular and critically acclaimed films including Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really …
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• The five warmest years in recorded history have been the last five. Climate change is increasingly looking irreversible. Not a day has gone by since its unveiling without news mentions of the Green New Deal. Unfortunately, President Trump, Republicans and even centrist Democrats are dismissing it as a pipe dream. It’s ironic that Republicans – both lawmakers and voters – have their heads in the sand on global warming, because the states that will be hurt worst are voting for people who are opposed to climate policy. A newly released Brookings Institution study used economic modeling to estimate climate-related losses (in dollars and deaths) state by state from 2080 to 2099. Then it compared voting records by state and found …
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• The grant will help enhance access to high-quality care for people with HIV and supports strategies to reach communities of color for the estimated 10,000 to 12,000 living with HIV or AIDS in the Metro Orlando area.
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• Amazon’s facial Rekognition software, a brand which is being tested in Orlando as a surveillance system, misidentifies darker-skinned women as men roughly a third of the time, according to a new MIT Media Lab study.
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• After yet another record-breaking season of hurricanes, flooding and fire, never have more Americans felt concern about climate change. A study by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that Americans who believe that global warming is happening outnumber those who don’t by more than 5 to 1. Sixty-two percent of the public now understands that global warming is caused mostly by humans, while a record low 23 percent think it is due mostly to natural environmental changes. Separate research by the University of Chicago found a similar level of acceptance that climate change is real, but also exposed a political divide: 86 percent of Democrats polled say climate change is underway, versus 52 percent of Republicans. In Florida, …
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• In October, city officials passed a new ordinance that allowed the electric bike rental company Lime to operate downtown. This one-year pilot program makes Orlando the first city in Florida with a fleet of “dockless” rental bikes. With dockless bikes, convenience is the point. Download the app, locate a GPS-chipped bike on the map, and you’re off. When you get where you’re going, leave the bike wherever you like, so long as it’s not obstructing vehicle or pedestrian traffic – there’s no need to return it to a docking station. Lime charges $1 to unlock the bike and 15 cents per minute to ride, with no membership fee. Also convenient is the lithium-battery power assist, which helps the less athletic …
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• Amazon’s facial recognition technology isn’t the only tool that Orlando is considering in its efforts to monitor the public using street cameras – the University of Central Florida has also developed a mass surveillance system for the city. UCF researchers have installed an artificial intelligence-powered software that can recognize facial characteristics and body movements to detect assaults, robberies and even explosions in real time. Orlando was the subject of blistering criticism last year after reports revealed that the police department was piloting Amazon’s Rekognition, a facial-recognition technology that plugs into security cameras to identify and track people of interest as they walk down the street. But by early 2016, students and professors from UCF’s Center for Research in Computer Vision …
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