MARI VCC News
[Apr. 04, 2026] Open Letter about “Generative AI”: A few days ago, Emily Tucker, Executive Director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law published an open letter on Medium titled “An Open Letter to Georgetown Students, In Response to Recent Announcements by the University about "Generative AI".” In this open letter she makes strong points against a broad accepting of generative AI in education. Her reasoning is very relevant and all students, not just the ones at Georgetown should carefully consider this open letter.
Platform News
[Apr. 25, 2026] World Happiness Report Finds Positive Impacts of Collaborative Platforms: The World Happiness Report 2026 has a strong focus on the impacts of social media and the Web in general on human happiness. The results of most studies indicate that the use of most social media seems to have a negative impact on happiness, while those tools that generate trust and collaboration have a positive impact. The report sumarizes: “Internet activities fall into two groups. Communications, news, learning, and content creation are associated with higher life satisfaction. Social media, gaming, and browsing for fun are associated with lower life evaluations.” This supports the mission of Place4Us as a trust-focused collaborative platform for intercreativity and learning.
[Apr. 25, 2026] Neurodivergence VCC opened: The "Made by Neurodivergence VCC" has been initialized and is open now.
[Apr. 21, 2026] SlaveryToday VCC opened: The "Fighting Modern Slavery VCC" has been initialized and is open now.
[Apr. 19, 2026] Earth Energy Imbalance is Increasing Rapidly: Finally the extreme increase in the Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI) is slowly starting to make headlines - far too late, though. The article “ What are zettajoules – and what do they tell us about Earth’s energy imbalance?” by Jonathan Watts published in the Guardian explains some of the basics. Importantly, the EEI double within only 13 years. In another article by Watts also in the Guardian and titled “ Earth being ‘pushed beyond its limits’ as energy imbalance reaches record high” the author points out that the World Meteorological Organization warned that Earth is struggling with a record energy imbalance, which is warming the oceans to unprecedented levels, making weather more extreme and threatening health and food supplies. Considering that Earth is more like a pool house with a very large pool than a greenhouse, the ocean is only delaying the heating of the atmosphere but not preventing it.
