1. A Talk That Asks What We Lose When AI Stands In for People Imagine walking into a room where the conversation is about something both deeply human and increasingly technological: what happens when we replace people with computer simulations in research? That is the question at the heart of a talk by Eun Cheol Choi, a Ph.D. candidate in Communication at the University of Southern California. His presentation, titled Proxies for People: Social Networks, Misinformation, and Simulated Respondents, invites us to think carefully about a practice that is becoming more common across many fields—using large language models as stand-ins…

Santa Cruz County voters heading into the Nov. 3 general election can expect a quiet, stubborn thing: business as usual. That is the promise from County Clerk Tricia Webber, who has spent months reassuring residents that the voting process is safe, stable, and unchanged. National headlines have been full of election chaos, from executive orders to legal battles to late-night misinformation. Webber has heard it all from the voters who call her office. They want to know if their mail-in ballot will arrive, whether they need to pay for postage, whether their vote will even count. The confusion began when…