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The technology that runs Congress lags so far behind the modern world that its flag-tracking system just caught up to 2017-era Pizza Hut

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theconversation.com – Lorelei Kelly, Research Lead, Modernizing Congress, McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University – 2025-01-24 07:39:00

Tracking one of these items to your door has been possible since 2017 – tracking the other is all new.
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Lorelei Kelly, Georgetown University

On a typical day, you can’t turn on the news without hearing someone say that Congress is broken. The implication is that this dereliction explains why the institution is inert and unresponsive to the American people.

There’s one element often missing from that discussion: Congress is confounding in large part because its members can’t hear the American people, or even each other. I mean that literally. Congressional staff serve in thousands of district offices across the nation, and their communications technology doesn’t match that of most businesses and even many homes.

Members’ district offices only got connected to secure Wi-Fi internet service in 2023. Discussions among members and congressional staff were at times cut short at 40 minutes because some government workers were relying on the free version of Zoom, according to congressional testimony in March 2024.

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Congressional testimony discusses meetings being cut off at 40 minutes.

The information systems Congress uses have existed largely unchanged for decades, while the world has experienced an information revolution, integrating smartphones and the internet into people’s daily personal and professional lives. The technologies that have transformed modern life and political campaigning are not yet available to improve the ability of members of Congress to govern once they win office.

Slow to adapt

Like many institutions, Congress resists change; only the COVID-19 pandemic pushed it to allow online hearings and bill introductions. Before 2020, whiteboards, sticky notes and interns with clipboards dominated the halls of Congress.

Electronic signatures arrived on Capitol Hill in 2021 – more than two decades after Congress passed the ESIGN Act to allow electronic signatures and records in commerce.

The nation spends about US$10 million a year on technology innovation in the House of Representatives – the institution that declares war and pays all the federal government’s bills. That’s just 1% of the amount theater fans have spent to see ‶Hamilton“ on Broadway since 2015.

It seems the story of American democracy is attractive to the public, but investing in making it work is less so for Congress itself.

The chief administrative office in Congress, a nonlegislative staff that helps run the operations of Congress, decides what types of technology can be used by members. These internal rules exist to protect Congress and national security, but that caution can also inhibit new ways to use technology to better serve the public.

Finding a happy medium between innovation and caution can result in a livelier public discourse.

A group of people sit around a desk facing a television monitor, and with cameras facing them.
The pandemic compelled Congress to allow witnesses to testify before committees by videoconference.
Stefani Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images

A modernization effort

Congress has been working to modernize itself, including experimenting with new ways to hear local voices in their districts, including gathering constituent feedback in a standardized way that can be easily processed by computers.

The House Natural Resources Committee was also an early adopter of technology for collaborative lawmaking. In 2020, members and committee staff used a platform called Madison to collaboratively write and edit proposed environmental justice legislation with communities across the country that had been affected by pollution.

House leaders are also looking at what is called deliberative technology, which uses specially designed websites to facilitate digital participation by pairing collective human intelligence with artificial intelligence. People post their ideas online and respond to others’ posts. Then the systems can screen and summarize posts so users better understand each other’s perspectives.

These systems can even handle massive group discussions involving large numbers of people who hold a wide range of positions on a vast set of issues and interests. In general, these technologies make it easier for people to find consensus and have their voices heard by policymakers in ways the policymakers can understand and respond to.

Governments in Finland, the U.K., Canada and Brazil are already piloting deliberative technologies. In Finland, roughly one-third of young people between 12 and 17 participate in setting budget priorities for the city of Helsinki.

In May 2024, 45 U.S.-based nonprofit organizations signed a letter to Congress asking that deliberative technology platforms be included in the approved tools for civic engagement.

In the meantime, Congress is looking at ways to use artificial intelligence as part of a more integrated digital strategy based on lessons from other democratic legislatures.

YouTube video
A panel discussion of various ideas for modernizing how Congress hears from the American people.

Finding benefits

Modernization efforts have opened connections within Congress and with the public. For example, hearings held by video conference during the pandemic enabled witnesses to share expertise with Congress from a distance and open up a process that is notoriously unrepresentative. I was home in rural New Mexico during the pandemic and know three people who remotely testified on tribal education, methane pollution and environmental harms from abandoned oil wells.

New House Rules passed on Jan. 3, 2025, encourage the use of artificial intelligence in day-to-day operations and allow for remote witness testimony.

Other efforts that are new to Congress but long established in business and personal settings include the ability to track changes in legislation and a scheduling feature that reduces overlaps in meetings. Members are regularly scheduled to be two places at once.

Another effort in development is an internal digital staff directory that replaces expensive directories compiled by private companies assembling contact information for congressional staff.

The road ahead

In 2022, what is now called ”member-directed spending“ returned to Congress with some digital improvements. Formerly known as “earmarks,” this is the practice of allowing members of Congress to handpick specific projects in their home districts to receive federal money. Earmarks were abolished in 2011 amid concerns of abuse and opposition by fiscal hardliners. Their 2022 return and rebranding introduced publicly available project lists, ethics rules and a search engine to track the spending as efforts to provide public transparency about earmarks.

Additional reforms could make the federal government even more responsive to the American people.

Some recent improvements are already familiar. Just as customers can follow their pizza delivery from the oven to the doorstep, Congress in late 2024 created a flag-tracking app that has dramatically improved a program that allows constituents to receive a flag that has flown over the U.S. Capitol. Before, different procedures in the House and Senate caused time-consuming snags in this delivery system.

At last, the world’s most powerful legislature caught up with Pizza Hut, which rolled out this technology in 2017 to track customers’ pizzas from the store to the delivery driver to their front door.The Conversation

Lorelei Kelly, Research Lead, Modernizing Congress, McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University

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Even as polarization surges, Americans believe they live in a compassionate country

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theconversation.com – Tara Sonenshine, Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice in Public Diplomacy, Tufts University – 2025-02-11 12:06:00

Even as polarization surges, Americans believe they live in a compassionate country

Most Americans responding to a survey said compassion is declining but still strong.
stellalevi/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images

Tara Sonenshine, Tufts University

Compassion comes easily to me.

As the granddaughter of immigrants from Lithuania and Poland who spoke little English, I understand what it’s like to be treated as a stranger in America.

As a journalist, I covered stories of war and trauma in the 1990s, including the crushing of Chinese protests in Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, followed by the Soviet Union’s collapse two years later. I covered the war between Iraq and Iran. I witnessed ethnic strife in South Africa and the toll poverty takes in Mexico.

As a professor of cultural engagement and public diplomacy, I have watched and studied how compassion can help build and strengthen civil society.

And having worked in senior levels of the U.S. government for Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama on international conflict resolution, I have learned that compassion is a key ingredient of peacemaking.

Especially now, as President Donald Trump seeks to deport millions of immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization and to stop funding the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has long spent billions of dollars a year helping the world’s poorest people, compassion seems lacking among U.S. leaders.

Perhaps that all explains my curiosity about a new study on the state of compassion in America – part of the glue that holds communities together.

Defining compassion

Sociologists define compassion as the human regard for the suffering of others, and the notion of using action to alleviate this pain.

The report that caught my eye was issued in January 2025 by the Muhammad Ali Center, which the late boxer co-founded 20 years ago in Louisville, Kentucky, to advance social justice.

As the Ali Center explains, compassion starts with the individual – self-care and personal wellness. It then radiates out to the wider community in the form of action and engagement.

You can see compassion at work in the actions of a Pasadena, California, girl, who started a donation hub for teens affected by fires that ripped through the Los Angeles region in early 2025. She began collecting sports bras, hair ties and fashionable sweaters – helping hundreds of her peers begin to recover from their losses in material and emotional ways.

It’s also visible in the estimated 6.8 million people in the U.S. who donate blood each year, according to the American Red Cross.

Resilience in America

While Ali is best known for his battles in the ring and his outspoken political views, he also helped those in need in the U.S. and other countries through large charitable donations and his participation in United Nations missions to countries like Afghanistan, where he helped deliver millions of meals to hungry people.

The researchers who worked on the Ali Center report interviewed more than 5,000 U.S. adults living in 12 cities in 2024 in order to learn more about the prevalence of compassionate behaviors such as charitable giving, volunteering and assisting others in their recovery from disasters.

They found that the desire to help others still animates many Americans despite the nation’s current polarization and divisive politics.

The center has created an index it calls the “net compassion score.” It approximates the degree to which Americans give their time and money to programs and activities that nurture and strengthen their communities.

Cities with high compassion scores have more community engagement and civic participation than those with low scores. A higher-scoring community performs better when it comes to things like public housing and mental health resources, for example. Its residents report more career opportunities, better communications between local government and citizens, more community programs and more optimism around economic development where they live.

The report provides some clues as to what drives compassionate behavior in a city: a sense of spirituality, good education, decent health care, resources for activities like sports, and opportunities to engage in local politics.

All told, Americans rate their country as a 9 on a scale that runs from minus 100 to 100.

The report also identified some troubling obstacles that stand in the way of what it calls “self-compassion” – meaning how volunteers and donors treat their own mental and physical health. Frequent struggles with self-care can lead to rising levels of isolation and loneliness.

Three people pose for a picture in front of an Ali Center backdrop
Jeni Stepanek, left, chair of the Muhammad Ali Index; Lonnie Ali, co-founder and vice chair of the Muhammad Ali Center; and DeVone Holt, the center’s president and CEO, at the launch of the Muhammad Ali Index on Jan. 16, 2025.
Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Muhammad Ali Center

Doubting their own capacity

The 2025 Compassion Report’s findings show that many Americans still want to live in a compassionate country but also that Americans view the country as less compassionate today than four years ago.

The report delves into gaps in compassion. About one-third of those interviewed acknowledged that there are groups toward whom they feel less compassionate toward, such as people who have been convicted of crimes, immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization and the rich.

Only 29% said they feel compassion toward everyone.

The report also identifies gender gaps. Despite expressing greater awareness of systemic challenges, the women surveyed reported less self-compassion than men.

It’s not the first compassion study ever done. But I believe that this one is unique due to its focus on specific cities, and how it assessed limits on the compassion some people feel toward certain groups.

Helping health and humanity

The Compassion Institute, another nonprofit, seeks to weave compassion training into health care education to “create a more caring and humanitarian world.” It cites the benefits of compassion for human beings, with everything from reducing stress to alleviating the effects of disease on the mind and body.

Academic institutions, including Stanford University, have conducted many studies on how teaching compassion can guide health care professionals to both treat patients better and achieve better outcomes.

A team of Emory University researchers examined how training people to express more compassion can reduce stress hormones levels, triggering positive brain responses that improve immune responses.

Offering an advantage

Although there are plenty of adorable videos of dogs and cats behaving kindly with each other or their human companions, historically compassion has differentiated humans from animals.

Human beings possess powers of emotional reasoning that give us an edge.

Scholars are still working to discover how much of human compassion is rooted in emotional reasoning. Another factor they’ve identified is the aftermath of trauma. Studies have found evidence that it can increase empathy later on.

You might imagine that in a world of hurt, there’s a deficit of compassion for others. But the Ali Center’s report keeps alive the notion that Americans remain compassionate people who want to help others.

My experiences around the world and within the U.S. have taught me that human beings both have the power to be violent and destructive. But despite it all, there is, within all of us, the innate ability and desire to be compassionate. That is a net positive for our country.The Conversation

Tara Sonenshine, Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice in Public Diplomacy, Tufts University

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Legal fight against AI-generated child pornography is complicated – a legal scholar explains why, and how the law could catch up

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theconversation.com – Wayne Unger, Assistant Professor of Law, Quinnipiac University – 2025-02-11 07:46:00

Legal fight against AI-generated child pornography is complicated – a legal scholar explains why, and how the law could catch up

Child pornography laws may be clear, but AI makes enforcement more difficult.
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Wayne Unger, Quinnipiac University

The city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was shaken by revelations in December 2023 that two local teenage boys shared hundreds of nude images of girls in their community over a private chat on the social chat platform Discord. Witnesses said the photos easily could have been mistaken for real ones, but they were fake. The boys had used an artificial intelligence tool to superimpose real photos of girls’ faces onto sexually explicit images.

With troves of real photos available on social media platforms, and AI tools becoming more accessible across the web, similar incidents have played out across the country, from California to Texas and Wisconsin. A recent survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit, found that 15% of students and 11% of teachers knew of at least one deepfake that depicted someone associated with their school in a sexually explicit or intimate manner.

The Supreme Court has implicitly concluded that computer-generated pornographic images that are based on images of real children are illegal. The use of generative AI technologies to make deepfake pornographic images of minors almost certainly falls under the scope of that ruling. As a legal scholar who studies the intersection of constitutional law and emerging technologies, I see an emerging challenge to the status quo: AI-generated images that are fully fake but indistinguishable from real photos.

Policing child sexual abuse material

While the internet’s architecture has always made it difficult to control what is shared online, there are a few kinds of content that most regulatory authorities across the globe agree should be censored. Child pornography is at the top of that list.

For decades, law enforcement agencies have worked with major tech companies to identify and remove this kind of material from the web, and to prosecute those who create or circulate it. But the advent of generative artificial intelligence and easy-to-access tools like the ones used in the Pennsylvania case present a vexing new challenge for such efforts.

In the legal field, child pornography is generally referred to as child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, because the term better reflects the abuse that is depicted in the images and videos and the resulting trauma to the children involved. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled that child pornography is not protected under the First Amendment because safeguarding the physical and psychological well-being of a minor is a compelling government interest that justifies laws that prohibit child sexual abuse material.

That case, New York v. Ferber, effectively allowed the federal government and all 50 states to criminalize traditional child sexual abuse material. But a subsequent case, Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition from 2002, might complicate efforts to criminalize AI-generated child sexual abuse material. In that case, the court struck down a law that prohibited computer-generated child pornography, effectively rendering it legal.

The government’s interest in protecting the physical and psychological well-being of children, the court found, was not implicated when such obscene material is computer generated. “Virtual child pornography is not ‘intrinsically related’ to the sexual abuse of children,” the court wrote.

States move to criminalize AI-generated CSAM

According to the child advocacy organization Enough Abuse, 37 states have criminalized AI-generated or AI-modified CSAM, either by amending existing child sexual abuse material laws or enacting new ones. More than half of those 37 states enacted new laws or amended their existing ones within the past year.

California, for example, enacted Assembly Bill 1831 on Sept. 29, 2024, which amended its penal code to prohibit the creation, sale, possession and distribution of any “digitally altered or artificial-intelligence-generated matter” that depicts a person under 18 engaging in or simulating sexual conduct.

YouTube video
Deepfake child pornography is a growing problem.

While some of these state laws target the use of photos of real people to generate these deep fakes, others go further, defining child sexual abuse material as “any image of a person who appears to be a minor under 18 involved in sexual activity,” according to Enough Abuse. Laws like these that encompass images produced without depictions of real minors might run counter to the Supreme Court’s Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition ruling.

Real vs. fake, and telling the difference

Perhaps the most important part of the Ashcroft decision for emerging issues around AI-generated child sexual abuse material was part of the statute that the Supreme Court did not strike down. That provision of the law prohibited “more common and lower tech means of creating virtual (child sexual abuse material), known as computer morphing,” which involves taking pictures of real minors and morphing them into sexually explicit depictions.

The court’s decision stated that these digitally altered sexually explicit depictions of minors “implicate the interests of real children and are in that sense closer to the images in Ferber.” The decision referenced the 1982 case, New York v. Ferber, in which the Supreme Court upheld a New York criminal statute that prohibited persons from knowingly promoting sexual performances by children under the age of 16.

The court’s decisions in Ferber and Ashcroft could be used to argue that any AI-generated sexually explicit image of real minors should not be protected as free speech given the psychological harms inflicted on the real minors. But that argument has yet to be made before the court. The court’s ruling in Ashcroft may permit AI-generated sexually explicit images of fake minors.

But Justice Clarence Thomas, who concurred in Ashcroft, cautioned that “if technological advances thwart prosecution of ‘unlawful speech,’ the Government may well have a compelling interest in barring or otherwise regulating some narrow category of ‘lawful speech’ in order to enforce effectively laws against pornography made through the abuse of real children.”

With the recent significant advances in AI, it can be difficult if not impossible for law enforcement officials to distinguish between images of real and fake children. It’s possible that we’ve reached the point where computer-generated child sexual abuse material will need to be banned so that federal and state governments can effectively enforce laws aimed at protecting real children – the point that Thomas warned about over 20 years ago.

If so, easy access to generative AI tools is likely to force the courts to grapple with the issue.The Conversation

Wayne Unger, Assistant Professor of Law, Quinnipiac University

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Rural Americans don’t live as long as those in cities − new research

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theconversation.com – Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning and Professor of Public Policy, University of Southern California – 2025-02-11 07:45:00

Rural Americans don’t live as long as those in cities − new research

Part of the problem is that people living in rural areas don’t always have easy access to health care.
cstar55/iStock via Getty Images

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, University of Southern California; Bryan Tysinger, University of Southern California, and Jack Chapel, University of Southern California

Rural Americans – particularly men – are expected to live significantly shorter, less healthy lives than their urban counterparts, according to our research, recently published in the Journal of Rural Health.

We found that a 60-year-old man living in a rural area is expected on average to live two fewer years than an urban man. For women, the rural-urban gap is six months.

A key reason is worse rates among rural people for smoking, obesity and chronic conditions such as high blood pressure and heart disease. These conditions are condemning millions to disability and shortened lives.

What’s more, these same people live in areas where medical care is evaporating. Living in rural areas, with their relatively sparse populations, often means a shortage of doctors, longer travel distances for medical care and inadequate investments in public health, driven partly by declines in economic opportunities.

Our team arrived at these findings by using a simulation called the Future Elderly Model. With that, we were able to simulate the future life course of Americans currently age 60 living in either an urban or rural area.

The model is based on relationships observed in 20 years of data from the Health and Retirement Study, an ongoing survey that follows people from age 51 through the rest of their lives. Specifically, the model showed how long these Americans might live, the expected quality of their future years, and how certain changes in lifestyle would affect the results.

We describe the conditions that drive our results as “diseases of despair,” building off the landmark work of pioneering researchers who coined the now widely used term “deaths of despair.” They documented rising mortality among Americans without a college degree and related these deaths to declines in social and economic prospects.

The main causes of deaths of despair – drug overdoses, liver disease and suicide – have also been called “diseases of despair.” But the conditions we study, such as heart disease, could similarly be influenced by social and economic prospects. And they can profoundly reduce quality of life.

We also found that if rural education levels were as high as in urban areas, this would eliminate almost half of the rural-urban life-expectancy gap. Our data shows 65% of urban 60-year-olds were educated beyond high school, compared with 53% of rural residents the same age.

One possible reason for the difference is that getting a bachelor’s degree may make a person more able or willing to follow scientific recommendations – and more likely to work out for 150 minutes a week or eat their veggies as their doctor advises them to.

YouTube video
Rural communities are increasingly hampered by their lack of access to health care.

Why it matters

The gap between urban and rural health outcomes has widened over recent decades. Yet the problem goes beyond disparities between urban and rural health: It also splits down some of the party lines and social divides that separate U.S. citizens, such as education and lifestyle.

Scholarship on the decline of rural America suggests that people living outside larger cities are resentful of the economic forces that may have eroded their economic power. The interplay between these forces and the health conditions we study are less appreciated.

Economic circumstances can contribute to health outcomes. For example, increased stress and sedentary lifestyle due to joblessness can contribute to chronic health issues such as cardiovascular disease. Declines in economic prospects due to automation and trade liberalization are linked to increases in mortality.

But health can also have a strong influence on economic outcomes. Hospitalizations cause high medical costs, loss of work and earnings, and increases in bankruptcy. The onset of chronic disease and disability can lead to long-lasting declines in income. Even health events experienced early in childhood can have economic consequences decades later.

In tandem, these health and economic trends might reinforce each other and help fuel inequality between rural and urban areas that produces a profoundly different quality of life.

What still isn’t known

It should be noted that our results, like many studies, are describing outcomes on average; the rural population is not a monolith. In fact, some of the most physically active and healthy people we know live in rural areas.

Just how much your location affects your health is an ongoing area of research. But as researchers begin to understand more, we can come up with strategies to promote health among all Americans, regardless of where they live.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.The Conversation

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning and Professor of Public Policy, University of Southern California; Bryan Tysinger, Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management, University of Southern California, and Jack Chapel, Postdoctoral Scholar in Economics, University of Southern California

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