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Education, Advocacy and Activism

Free training, tools and resources for journalists, advocates, activists and campaigns, with a focus on Idaho transparency, civic data and liberty.

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🤖 Training: Data and AI

11 learning modules. This page updates itself when items move between sections.

What artificial intelligence is, what it costs and how to check what it tells you: how AI works, AI issues and law, AI for research and writing, image, video and voice generation, AI detection, the presidential orders on energy and AI, and data centers from the server rack to the planning hearing.

In this section
  1. How AI Works: The Kinds of AI and What They Are For Learning Module
  2. AI Issues: Technical, Legal, Social and Logistical Learning Module
  3. Using AI for Research and Writing Learning Module
  4. AI Image, Video and Voice Generation Learning Module
  5. AI for Voice and Music Learning Module
  6. AI Detection: Spotting Machine-Written Words and Text Learning Module
  7. Energy, AI and Data Center Policy: What the Orders Say Learning Module
  8. Data Centers: Types, Purposes and How They Work Learning Module
  9. Data Centers in Your Community: Power, Water, Land, Money Learning Module
  10. Data Center Planning Issues Learning Module
  11. Spotting Misinformation and Doctored Media: Checking Claims, Images, Audio and Video Learning Module

🧠 How AI Works: The Kinds of AI and What They Are For Learning Module

Free lessons with sources, a short quiz and progress saved in your browser.

Learn what the word AI covers, how machines learn from data, how chatbots and image generators actually produce their output, and why they get things wrong. Finish able to tell the kinds of AI apart and read a model announcement without getting fooled. A module of Issues and Advocacy Training, 9 lessons.

What is included: 9 lessons and pages
  1. What "AI" Means, and How We Got Here 14 min
    The word AI covers seventy years of very different machines. Learn the main eras, from hand-written rules to the 2017 transformer and the 2022 ChatGPT launch, and why each one mattered.
  2. The Kinds of AI and What Each Is For 16 min
    A field guide to ten kinds of AI, from rule-based systems to agents that use tools, with what each one does well, how it fails, and where you already meet it.
  3. How Machine Learning Learns 17 min
    Data, features, training, loss, overfitting and test sets, worked through a tiny example you can do with a pencil.
  4. Neural Networks and Deep Learning in Plain Words 16 min
    What an artificial neuron is, how weights and layers stack up, and how gradient descent nudges billions of numbers toward better answers.
  5. How Large Language Models Work 19 min
    Tokens, next-token prediction, attention, pretraining, fine-tuning and RLHF, the context window and temperature, each with a worked example.
  6. Why Chatbots Make Things Up, and What Fixes Help 18 min
    Where hallucinations come from, how retrieval and search grounding cut them down, and what reasoning models and tool use add, with the limits of each.
  7. How Image, Audio and Video Generators Work 17 min
    Diffusion from noise, text encoders that connect words to pictures, latent space, video as moving diffusion, and how text-to-speech and voice cloning work.
  8. Narrow vs General, Open vs Closed, Local vs Cloud, and Agents 17 min
    Four distinctions that come up in nearly every AI announcement and debate: narrow versus general AI, open versus closed weights, running a model on your own machine versus in the cloud, and what makes something an agent.
  9. Who Makes What: Model Families as of October 2026, and a Working Glossary 18 min
    A map of the major AI companies and their model families as of October 2026, how to read a model name and a launch announcement, and a glossary of the terms from this module.
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Open How AI Works: The Kinds of AI and What They Are For ↗

⚙️ AI Issues: Technical, Legal, Social and Logistical Learning Module

Free lessons with sources, a short quiz and progress saved in your browser.

Understand artificial intelligence with your feet on the ground: what it runs on and costs, what it uses in power and water, the copyright fights, bias, privacy, jobs, safety debates and the laws as of October 2026, plus how to test an AI claim before you repeat it or act on it. A module of Issues and Advocacy Training, 9 lessons.

What is included: 9 lessons and pages
  1. What AI Runs On: Chips, Compute and Cost 16 min
    Follow an AI answer back to the chips, buildings and money behind it, and learn to tell training costs from the cost of everyday use.
  2. Energy and Water: What Is Measured and What Is Guessed 17 min
    Sort AI energy and water numbers into measured, company-reported and modeled, and learn why per-query estimates range over a factor of a hundred.
  3. Training Data and Copyright: The Cases So Far 18 min
    Learn where training data comes from, how US fair use works, and where the major AI copyright cases stood as of October 2026.
  4. Bias and Errors: How AI Gets Things Wrong 16 min
    Trace how bias gets into AI systems, look at documented cases, and learn what hallucination rates measure and what they leave out.
  5. Privacy and Security: Your Prompts, Injection and Deepfakes 16 min
    Find out what happens to what you type into an AI tool, how attackers hijack AI through hidden instructions, and how deepfake fraud works.
  6. Jobs and the Economy: What the Research Shows So Far 16 min
    Separate measured effects of AI on work from forecasts, and learn why exposure, productivity and job loss are three different numbers.
  7. AI Safety and Risk: Who Argues What 16 min
    Map the main positions in the AI risk debate, from present-day harms to catastrophic risk, and learn what evidence each side relies on.
  8. AI Law and Regulation as of October 2026 18 min
    Get the current state of AI rules in the EU, at the US federal level and in the states, including Idaho's election deepfake law and Colorado's rewritten AI Act.
  9. Checking an AI Claim: Benchmarks, Demos, Vendors and Records 18 min
    Test AI claims the way you would test any other: read benchmarks skeptically, separate a demo from daily use, ask vendors and agencies the right questions, and request the records.
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Open AI Issues: Technical, Legal, Social and Logistical ↗

🔎 Using AI for Research and Writing Learning Module

Free lessons with sources, a short quiz and progress saved in your browser.

How AI research and writing tools work, which kind fits which job, where they invent citations, quotes and numbers, and how to check what they hand you before you rely on it. A module of Issues and Advocacy Training, 9 lessons.

What is included: 9 lessons and pages
  1. Choosing the Right AI Tool for the Job 14 min
    The main kinds of AI research tools, what each one is good and bad at, and which kind fits which job.
  2. How Prompts Shape AI Answers: Role, Task, Context, Constraints, Format, Examples 15 min
    What the six parts of a prompt do to an AI answer, why vague prompts get guessed answers, and how follow-up corrections change the result.
  3. How AI Handles Budgets, Audits, Transcripts and Bills 18 min
    Where AI helps and where it slips when finding primary sources, reading long public documents, pulling tables, summarizing meetings and comparing bill versions, with a worked county budget example.
  4. Verifying Everything AI Tells You 17 min
    How AI tools produce hallucinated citations, fabricated quotes and wrong numbers, the repeatable check that catches them, and what Source Checker and Article Values Graph add as a second pass.
  5. Analyzing Data with AI, and Checking the Math Yourself 16 min
    How AI tools that run code on spreadsheets clean data, compute changes and draft charts, where they go wrong, and how to check every result with your own arithmetic and a sanity test.
  6. What AI Writing Assistants Do to Your Text 15 min
    What happens when AI outlines, tightens, titles and line-edits text, where it quietly adds claims, and how to check an AI-edited document before anyone relies on it.
  7. Recognizing AI Tells in Writing 16 min
    The words, structures and rhythms that make writing read as machine-made, why they cost a writer trust, and what specific, human writing has that generated text lacks.
  8. AI Ethics, Disclosure and Privacy Rules 17 min
    What AP's AI standards and the 2026 SPJ Code of Ethics require, what honest AI disclosure looks like, where fabrication starts, and why confidential material stays out of cloud tools.
  9. Worked Case: From Records Request to Verified Findings 22 min
    One resident's fuel card inquiry from a records request to verified findings presented to a county commission, with every AI step, every check and every number shown.
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Open Using AI for Research and Writing ↗

🎨 AI Image, Video and Voice Generation Learning Module

Free lessons with sources, a short quiz and progress saved in your browser.

How AI image, video, voice and music generators work, what they cost, where they fail, how labels and provenance data work, and what the law says about deepfakes and copyright. A module of Issues and Advocacy Training, 9 lessons.

What is included: 9 lessons and pages
  1. How Image Generators Work in Practice 16 min
    What diffusion does, why prompts are followed loosely, what seeds and aspect ratios control, and which image tools lead as of October 2026.
  2. How Image Prompts Steer the Picture 15 min
    What subject, setting, style, light and composition each do to an AI image, why text in images breaks, how negative prompts work where a tool supports them, and how frame size shapes ImageStudio's three outputs.
  3. Editing, Consistency and Upscaling 15 min
    How inpainting fixes part of an image, how outpainting extends it, how reference images keep a character or style the same across a series, and why upscaling invents detail.
  4. AI Images in News and Advocacy: Illustration versus Evidence 16 min
    Where illustration ends and evidence begins, how labels on AI work travel or get lost, why real people are off limits, and what C2PA Content Credentials and SynthID-style watermarks can and cannot prove.
  5. AI Video Generation: Tools, Costs and Limits 18 min
    What text-to-video and image-to-video tools can do as of October 2026, what clips cost and how long they run, where they fail, and why finished pieces are assembled from short shots on a timeline.
  6. AI Voice and Music 16 min
    How text to speech, voice design and voice cloning work, what consent cloning requires, what Dialogue Editor and MusicStudio do, how AI music licensing changed, and how synthetic audio gets disclosed.
  7. Deepfakes and the Law 17 min
    What Idaho's synthetic media election law requires, what the federal TAKE IT DOWN Act made a crime and requires of platforms, Idaho's explicit synthetic media crime, and the AI labeling rules on YouTube, TikTok and Meta, all as of October 2026.
  8. Copyright of AI Output and Tool Licensing 15 min
    Why purely AI-generated material is not protected by U.S. copyright, how human selection, arrangement and editing can be, what Thaler v. Perlmutter settled, and what the main tools' terms say about ownership and commercial use.
  9. Worked Case: Anatomy of a 30-Second AI-Assisted Explainer 22 min
    How one residents' group built a labeled 30-second vertical explainer from facts to export, where AI did the work and where it was kept out, and how the disclosure, captions and project log held it together.
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Open AI Image, Video and Voice Generation ↗

🎙️ AI for Voice and Music Learning Module

Free lessons with sources, a short quiz and progress saved in your browser.

Understand how synthetic voices and AI music are made, what makes scripts and prompts come out right the first time, how the results get cleaned and loudness-checked, and what consent, honest labels and the law require as of October 2026. A module of Issues and Advocacy Training, 9 lessons.

What is included: 9 lessons and pages
  1. How Synthetic Speech Works 17 min
    Follow text through a modern speech model: normalization, the acoustic model, the vocoder or codec, the voice embedding that sets who is speaking, the prosody that sets how, and the speech-to-speech shortcut that borrows your own delivery.
  2. Voice Studio in Depth 18 min
    Work every Voice Studio tool on purpose: Text2Speech settings and models, captions and video voiceover, Speech2Speech, Speech2Text as a proofreader, SoundEffects, AudioIsolation and MusicGeneration, with a credit budget worked out before you start.
  3. Multi-Voice Scripts in Dialogue Editor 16 min
    Learn the script format Dialogue Editor reads, how voices are cast per speaker, how audio tags and stability shape delivery, how long scripts are split and joined, and how the history and log files keep every version.
  4. How Synthetic Voices Read a Script 17 min
    Why synthetic voices misread scripts and what they read reliably: the symbols normalization gets wrong, respelled names, sentences built for breath, punctuation and tags, and timing a script to a slot before a credit is spent.
  5. How AI Music Generation Works 18 min
    Why music is harder than speech for a model, how research systems like Jukebox, MusicLM and MusicGen turn text into songs, what Suno, Udio, Mureka and ElevenLabs Music offer as of October 2026, and what the fight over training data is about.
  6. Prompting Songs in MusicStudio and Cleaning Them in SoundStudio 19 min
    What makes a style prompt work, how section tags structure lyrics, what MusicStudio's modes, models, studio tools and stem splitting do, and SoundStudio's workflow for cleaning the result.
  7. Voice Cloning Consent and the Law on Voice and Likeness 19 min
    What real consent for a voice clone covers, and the rules as of October 2026: Tennessee's ELVIS Act, California and New York digital replica and synthetic performer laws, the federal NO FAKES Act's status, the FCC's AI robocall ruling, and Idaho's election deepfake law.
  8. Copyright, Platform Rules and Disclosure for AI Audio 18 min
    What you can and cannot own in an AI-assisted song or narration, where the label lawsuits against Suno and Udio stand as of October 2026, what Spotify and YouTube require, and what disclosure that travels with the audio looks like.
  9. Worked Example: Inside a 60-Second Podcast Intro 24 min
    Follow a 60-second podcast intro from a timed script to a loudness-checked export: a synthetic narrator in Voice Studio, an AI music bed, ducking and Delivery Check in SoundStudio, disclosure in the audio and the show notes, and a project log.
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Open AI for Voice and Music ↗

🔍 AI Detection: Spotting Machine-Written Words and Text Learning Module

Free lessons with sources, a short quiz and progress saved in your browser.

How AI text detectors work, from word-choice tells and perplexity scores to trained classifiers, watermarks and content credentials, how accurate they really are, who gets wrongly flagged, what the law says, and how to judge a claim that something was written by a machine. A module of Issues and Advocacy Training, 9 lessons.

What is included: 9 lessons and pages
  1. What AI Detection Is and Why People Care 20 min
    What it means to detect machine-written text, who depends on getting it right, and the documented cases where AI text slipped through and where people were wrongly accused.
  2. How Machines Write, and Why It Leaves Fingerprints 18 min
    How a language model turns probabilities into sentences, why that process leaves statistical traces, and what perplexity and burstiness measure, with a worked calculation.
  3. How AI Text Detectors Work 20 min
    The five families of AI text detectors, what each one actually measures, how the major commercial tools describe themselves, what independent tests found, and how to read the score a detector gives you.
  4. Watermarks and Provenance: Marking Machine Text at the Source 18 min
    How AI companies hide statistical watermarks in generated text, why editing, translation and short passages weaken them, how content credentials and platform labels work for images, audio and video, and what changed when the EU marking rules took effect in August 2026.
  5. The Tells: Word Choice, Habits and Invented Facts 18 min
    What the research actually shows about AI vocabulary and style tells, why a tell that is real across millions of documents is weak evidence about one document, and why invented citations and quotes are the strongest tell because anyone can check them.
  6. Accuracy and False Positives: Who Gets Flagged and Why 19 min
    How detector accuracy is measured, why a 1 percent false positive rate still flags hundreds of innocent people at scale, what independent tests found, which writers get wrongly flagged most, how paraphrasing and humanizer tools defeat detectors, and which universities turned their detectors off.
  7. Detection in Practice: How Institutions Handle Suspected AI Text 17 min
    What schools, universities, newsrooms, journals, search engines, marketplaces, platforms and employers actually do when they suspect machine-written text, and why the careful ones rely on process and records more than on detector scores.
  8. Law and Policy: Rules on AI-Generated Text and Its Labels 18 min
    What the EU AI Act's Article 50, the FTC's fake review rule and enforcement actions, the U.S. Copyright Office, Thaler v. Perlmutter, Idaho's election and chatbot laws and California's AI Transparency Act actually require about machine-written text, who each one covers and when it applies.
  9. Judging a Claim That Something Was Written by AI 17 min
    A step-by-step method for weighing an accusation that a text was machine-written, the kinds of evidence that settle authorship and the kinds that do not, how officials can handle a flood of public comments, and how writers can keep proof of their own work.
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Open AI Detection: Spotting Machine-Written Words and Text ↗

🏛️ Energy, AI and Data Center Policy: What the Orders Say Learning Module

Free lessons with sources, a short quiz and progress saved in your browser.

Read the 2025 and 2026 presidential orders, plans and pledges on energy, AI and data centers in their own words, see who wrote and backs them, weigh the evidence on an AI slowdown, and sort out which rules limit AI and which products push it on you. A module of Issues and Advocacy Training, 9 lessons.

What is included: 9 lessons and pages
  1. Reading a Presidential Action: Order, Fact Sheet, Plan or Pledge 16 min
    Tell an executive order from a fact sheet, a plan, a proclamation and an agency rule, find the parts of an order that actually bind anyone, and check its deadlines against what happened.
  2. The Energy Orders: Emergency, Dominance, Coal, Nuclear and the Grid 19 min
    Read what the 2025 and 2026 energy orders actually direct, from the national energy emergency and the coal and grid orders to the August 2026 emergency on foreign grid equipment, and follow one order into a real utility bill fight.
  3. The AI Orders: From Revoking EO 14110 to 'Super Intelligence' 19 min
    Walk the federal AI actions of 2025 and 2026 in order, from the day-one revocation of the Biden AI order through the AI Action Plan, the 'woke AI' procurement order, the Genesis Mission, the June 2026 frontier model security order and the September 2026 renaming order.
  4. Data Centers on Federal Land: EO 14318, DOE Sites, Army Bases and the Ratepayer Pledge 18 min
    Read what the July 2025 data center permitting order actually changes, follow the DOE and Army site selections through October 2026, including Idaho National Laboratory, and see what the 2026 ratepayer pledge does and does not bind.
  5. Who Is Behind It: Officials, Agencies, Companies and Money 17 min
    Match each energy and AI order to the officials and agencies that carry it out, see which companies stand to gain from the site deals and the pledge, and follow the political money on both sides of the AI regulation fight.
  6. The AI Slowdown: What the Evidence Shows as of October 2026 18 min
    Sort the evidence on an AI slowdown into spending, revenue, model progress and physical limits, name who argues each side, and see what a slowdown would mean for a local data center deal.
  7. Rules That Limit AI: Idaho's Chatbot Law, the States and the Preemption Fight 18 min
    Read Idaho's 2026 Conversational AI Safety Act section by section, see where it sits among state, federal and EU rules, and follow the federal effort to preempt state AI laws through its 2026 status.
  8. AI You Did Not Ask For: Copilot, Recall, Search and Phone Defaults 17 min
    Find out which AI features in Windows, Microsoft 365, Google Search and Android are on by default as of October 2026, which ones you can turn off or remove, and how, plus why no current law requires an opt-out.
  9. Checking the Claims and Tracking What Comes Next 16 min
    Test common claims about the energy, AI and data center orders against the documents, write a one-sentence description any side would accept as accurate, and keep a calendar of the deadlines due from late 2026 into 2028.
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🏢 Data Centers: Types, Purposes and How They Work Learning Module

Free lessons with sources, a short quiz and progress saved in your browser.

Follow a phone tap to a server and back, tell the kinds of data centers apart, and read the power, cooling, efficiency, siting and outage numbers that come up when one is proposed near you. A module of Issues and Advocacy Training, 9 lessons.

What is included: 9 lessons and pages
  1. What a Data Center Is and What It Does 14 min
    Follow one phone tap out to a server and back, and learn why the internet needs buildings full of computers, power gear and cooling.
  2. The Types of Data Centers, Side by Side 16 min
    Tell enterprise, colocation, hyperscale, cloud region, edge, AI, HPC, crypto mining and modular facilities apart by size, owner, purpose and power profile.
  3. Who Builds Data Centers, and Why Now 15 min
    Meet the hyperscalers, developers, REITs, utilities and investors behind data centers, and read the 2023 to 2026 AI buildout in real dollars and megawatts.
  4. Inside the Building: White Space, Racks, Servers and GPUs 15 min
    Walk the floor of a data center, learn what racks, servers, GPUs, storage and network gear do, and see why rack power has jumped from about 5 to 10 kW to well over 100 kW.
  5. Power Systems: From the Substation to the Server 17 min
    Follow electricity from the utility line through substations, switchgear, UPS, batteries and generators, and learn what N, N+1, 2N and Uptime Tiers I to IV promise.
  6. Cooling: Air, Water and Liquid to the Chip 17 min
    Learn how data centers move heat out of the building, from hot and cold aisles to evaporative coolers, chilled water, direct-to-chip liquid and immersion, and what each costs in water and power.
  7. Efficiency Metrics: PUE, WUE and CUE 16 min
    Calculate PUE, WUE and CUE from real-looking numbers, know the typical ranges and who reports them, and spot the ways each metric can mislead.
  8. Site Selection, Construction and Jobs 17 min
    See how developers score sites on power, fiber, water, land, taxes, latency, climate and disaster risk, how long a build takes, and how many people work there during and after construction.
  9. Security, Reliability and Why Outages Happen 15 min
    Learn the layers of physical security around a data center, what the outage data says about causes and costs, and how to read an outage account without guessing.
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⚡ Data Centers in Your Community: Power, Water, Land, Money Learning Module

Free lessons with sources, a short quiz and progress saved in your browser.

Size up a proposed data center the way a careful resident or advocate would: what it means for the grid, water, land, taxes and jobs, how to find out who is behind it, and what the strongest case on each side rests on. A module of Issues and Advocacy Training, 9 lessons.

What is included: 9 lessons and pages
  1. How Much Electricity a Data Center Uses 16 min
    Read the national numbers on data center electricity, turn a campus's megawatts into homes-equivalent with the math shown, and spot the tricks in load forecasts.
  2. The Grid Side: Queues, Tariffs and Who Pays 18 min
    Follow a data center through the utility process, from interconnection request to large-load tariff, and learn how regulators in Ohio, Virginia, Texas and Idaho are deciding who pays for new lines and plants.
  3. Water: Cooling, Aquifers and Reclaimed Supply 17 min
    Learn how data centers use water, convert water-use effectiveness into gallons for a real campus, and check company and agency claims against reported examples.
  4. Land, Noise, Diesel Generators, Light and Traffic 16 min
    Size up the physical footprint of a campus: acreage, the hum, backup diesel generators and their air permits, night lighting and construction traffic.
  5. Taxes and Incentives: Who Gives Up What 18 min
    Read the sales tax exemptions, property tax abatements and payment-in-lieu deals offered to data centers, compare states, and weigh the studies on net fiscal impact.
  6. Jobs: Construction Crews and Permanent Staff 15 min
    Separate construction jobs from permanent jobs, compute the incentive cost per job, and test the job numbers developers and studies put forward.
  7. Secrecy and Process: Who Is Behind It and How to Find Out 18 min
    Understand NDAs, code names and LLC shells, then trace a project through business filings, land records, planning and zoning, utility dockets, air permits and public records requests.
  8. The Case For and the Case Against 16 min
    Lay out the strongest evidence-based argument for hosting a data center and the strongest against, and see how to describe the dispute without stacking the deck.
  9. Case Study: Following Project Falcon from Rumor to Hearing 22 min
    Follow an invented data center proposal from first rumor to public hearing, step by step, with the records, math and questions a resident or advocate needs.
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🏗️ Data Center Planning Issues Learning Module

Free lessons with sources, a short quiz and progress saved in your browser.

Follow a data center proposal through every approval it needs, from land option to switch-on, and learn which questions to ask, which records to request and which conditions actually hold up at each step. A module of Issues and Advocacy Training, 9 lessons.

What is included: 9 lessons and pages
  1. The Approval Path: From Land Option to Switch-On 18 min
    Map every approval a data center needs, who grants each one, which law controls it in Idaho, and where the first public record usually appears.
  2. Zoning Questions: Is a Data Center Even an Allowed Use? 17 min
    Read a use table, see why classifying a data center as a warehouse matters, and work through setbacks, height, substations and the notice rules that can sink an approval.
  3. Conditions That Hold Up: Noise, Generators, Water, Light and Bonds 19 min
    Learn how noise limits are written and measured, what generator rules add to federal law, how water, lighting, screening, decommissioning and road conditions work, and how to tell an enforceable condition from a wish.
  4. Ratepayer Protections at the Utility Commission 18 min
    See how a data center power contract moves through the Idaho Public Utilities Commission, which costs a large-load deal can and cannot fence off, and what Idaho Power's filings show as of October 2026.
  5. Water Planning: City Contracts, Water Rights and Reclaimed Supply 18 min
    Compare the ways a data center gets water in Idaho, follow an IDWR application or transfer, convert gallons to acre-feet and cubic feet per second, and read a water service agreement.
  6. Tax Incentive Decisions: State Exemptions, County Deals and Clawbacks 18 min
    Learn who decides each Idaho data center tax break, what a county exemption under 63-602NN requires, how Idaho's budget-based levy changes what an exemption costs residents, and what makes a clawback work.
  7. Community Benefit Agreements: What They Can and Cannot Enforce 16 min
    See what data center community benefit agreements contain, who can enforce them, where they fall short, and how they compare with conditions of approval and development agreements.
  8. Secrecy and Open Government: What Idaho Law Makes Public 17 min
    Sort data center records into public and exempt under Idaho's public records law, read the trade secret and economic development exemptions closely, and tell a routine confidentiality agreement from one that undermines public decisions.
  9. The Checklist, and the Case For and Against Hosting 19 min
    Use a step-by-step checklist of questions and records for each approval, then weigh the strongest planning-level arguments for and against hosting a data center, each with its named sources.
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Open Data Center Planning Issues ↗

📘 Spotting Misinformation and Doctored Media: Checking Claims, Images, Audio and Video Learning Module

Free lessons with sources, a short quiz and progress saved in your browser.

How to tell what is true online: the kinds of false and misleading content, checking a claim with lateral reading and SIFT, reverse image and video search, metadata and its limits, edited images, deepfake audio and video and what detection can and cannot do, content credentials, checking quotes, statistics and screenshots, Idaho examples, and how to correct a falsehood without spreading it. A module of Issues and Advocacy Training, 10 lessons.

What is included: 10 lessons and pages
  1. Kinds of False and Misleading Content 24 min
    Sort false and misleading material into plain categories (honest mistakes, deliberate lies, true-but-harmful leaks, satire, old content recirculated, missing context, fake outlets, scams), see why it spreads, who profits, and how to use the course.
  2. Checking a Claim: Lateral Reading and SIFT 26 min
    Use Mike Caulfield's four moves (Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace to the original) and lateral reading to check a claim in minutes, including how to check an organization, find primary sources and read fact-check sites.
  3. Reverse Image and Video Search 26 min
    Learn how reverse image search works, run a check with several engines, crop to the part that matters, pull keyframes from a video, use archives, and read a scene for place and time, with an old-photo-recirculated worked example.
  4. Metadata and Its Limits 24 min
    See what image, video and document metadata can show (camera, time, sometimes place), why it is easily stripped, edited or faked, how screenshots and social platforms change it, and how time zones trip people up.
  5. Edited Images and How to Spot Them 24 min
    The common ways a photo gets changed or misused, from cropping to splicing to a swapped caption, what error level and clone clues can and cannot tell you, and why the tells for AI-generated images keep expiring.
  6. Deepfake Audio and Video, and the Limits of Detection 26 min
    How voice clones, face swaps and lip-sync fakes work in plain terms, the scams that use them and the safe-word and callback defense, what detectors can and cannot do, and how to check by process instead of by gut feeling.
  7. Content Credentials and Provenance (C2PA) 24 min
    What C2PA and Content Credentials are, who has built support for them, how to inspect a file, what a credential does and does not show, why missing credentials do not mean fake, and how to handle provenance for your own photos and publishing.
  8. Checking Quotes, Statistics and Screenshots 24 min
    How to trace a quote to where it was first said, read a statistic by its denominator and source, spot a misleading chart, and test a screenshot of a post or text message before you believe or share it.
  9. Idaho Rumors and Election Information 26 min
    How rumors move through county, school and neighborhood settings, where to get election facts from the people who run elections, what Idaho law says and does not say about false election statements and manipulated media, and three invented case studies checked step by step.
  10. Correcting Without Amplifying, and Reporting 26 min
    How to answer a falsehood without spreading it, the truth sandwich, when to message privately, how to correct your own mistakes, where to report content, scams and election concerns, how to protect yourself from harassment, and a correction policy a newsroom or group can adopt.
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