by Corinne Murdock | Aug 12, 2023 | Education, News
By Corinne Murdock |
Applicants to Arizona State University’s (ASU) law school may have to take their admissions test on their own, but they won’t have to do their own applications.
ASU Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law will now allow applicants to use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to complete their applications. In a press release at the end of last month, the law school stated that generative AI will be a necessary tool for upcoming lawyers.
“In our mission to educate and prepare the next generation of lawyers and leaders, law schools also need to embrace the use of technology such as AI with a comprehensive approach,” stated the school.
Stacy Leeds, Willard H. Pedrick Dean and Regents Professor of Law, added that generative AI also allowed for more equitable admissions.
“Our law school is driven by an innovative mindset. By embracing emerging technologies, and teaching students the ethical responsibilities associated with technology, we will enhance legal education and break down barriers that may exist for prospective students,” said Leeds. “By incorporating generative AI into our curriculum, we prepare students for their future careers across all disciplines.”
Generative AI consists of large language model (LLM) tools: one of the most popular models is ChatGPT.
Last month, two New York lawyers were sanctioned for relying on a ChatGPT-generated brief that cited fake cases. The judge punished the pair for not conducting a proper review of the AI brief and for insisting that the fake cases cited were real, not for relying on generative AI in the first place.
The pair paid $5,000 for their oversight. The lawyers stated that they didn’t know that ChatGPT could create fake cases. However, the lawyers’ firm issued a statement disagreeing that the use of generative AI constituted bad faith.
“We made a good faith mistake in failing to believe that a piece of technology could be making up cases out of whole cloth,” stated the firm.
The New York lawyers may well become a case study at ASU. ASU’s law school also offers courses through its Center for Law, Science, and Innovation (LSI) on the legal questions of AI use, especially within the legal field.
One of LSI’s AI-centered projects, the Soft Law Governance of Artificial Intelligence, proposes using “soft law” governance for AI rather than existing legal frameworks. Soft law is a blanket term for recommendations or guidelines, rather than law. The project is funded by the Charles Koch Foundation.
ASU’s law school began allowing AI-generated applications this month.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
by Corinne Murdock | Aug 12, 2023 | News
By Corinne Murdock |
An audit released last month found that the Arizona Department of Child Services (DCS) has failed to follow state law on information sharing and case review attendance for foster children.
The report was the first in a three-part series on DCS, determining whether DCS followed law to provide the information necessary for local foster care review boards to complete foster children’s cases. The auditor general, Lindsey Perry, found that DCS caseworkers failed to provide all the necessary documents for children’s cases, and failed to attend case review meetings.
There are 109 local boards that determine foster cases; these boards rely on the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) to relay information from DCS. The auditor general found that DCS consistently failed to provide case documents to the AOC through their automated application, Guardian. The auditor general found that the poor DCS performance not only hindered children’s cases, but diminished trust from the AOC and the local boards.
“[T]he automated information exchange not providing some information to AOC on behalf of local boards has negatively impacted AOC’s and local boards’ trust and confidence in the Department and the Department’s reputation,” stated Perry. “As a result, AOC staff reported that they and local boards may assume that the Department has withheld information that should have been provided, which has negatively impacted AOC’s and local boards’ trust in and working relationship with the Department.”
Local boards require three necessary documents: the court report, which DCS develops for hearings; the case plan, in which DCS outlines the goals and tasks necessary to ensure a child achieves permanency; and the Team Decision Making (TDM) meeting summary, in which DCS summarizes decisions made during meetings about a child’s safety, stability, and permanency.
The auditor general report found that all 13 samples of 124 case reviews conducted by local boards on June 28, 2022, and July 6, 2022 failed to include a complete version of those three necessary documents. That came out to 31 of 39 case documents provided incompletely or not provided at all.
According to the report, AOC staff and local board volunteers experienced difficulty in conducting reviews due to the lack of information about children’s cases.
Part of the information exchange failure resulted from AOC staff failing to submit valid document requests. That mistake resulted in 15 of the 31 missing case documents. The auditor general also found that DCS caseworkers failed to store complete case documents in Guardian in 10 of the 31 faulty or missing case documents. This latter mistake by DCS accounted for some of the AOC staff members’ faulty document requests: AOC failed to obtain the necessary documents because DCS failed to upload into the system.
The auditor general noted that DCS policy doesn’t advise superiors on proper punitive measures.
4 of the 31 missing case documents were due to DCS determining they weren’t necessary and therefore weren’t stored in Guardian — a circumstance which DCS doesn’t communicate to AOC. The remaining 2 missing or inaccessible documents were due to a software issue and a limitation on legal document access, respectively.
The state legislature passed changes to the law through HB2213 requiring DCS to provide AOC direct, remote access to Guardian in addition to any DCS information necessary for local board duties.
DCS attempted to dismiss the significance of their shortcomings in information exchange via Guardian, advising the auditor general that AOC staff may request case documents via other means, such as when emailing reminders to caseworkers about local board reviews, or accessing the Maricopa County Superior Court IT system. However, the auditor general dismissed these alternatives as time-consuming.
“[O]btaining case documents from these alternative sources may require both AOC and Department staff to spend additional and potentially unnecessary time that could be otherwise spent on other mission critical activities,” stated Perry.
Perry advised that DCS should provide all necessary case documents, hold monthly supervision meetings with caseworks to ensure document compliance, revise and implement policies and procedures to require caseworkers to store court reports in Guardian by verification of supervisors, implement guidance for supervisors to handle non-compliant caseworkers, and solicit continued feedback from AOC on their information exchange. DCS agreed to implement the proposed changes.
The auditor general also found that 18 percent of caseworkers on a sample of days failed to follow policy requiring either attendance or having their supervisor attend local board case reviews, and notify AOC if attendance isn’t possible. In two of the 124 case reviews observed in which the caseworker failed to show or provide a case update, the auditor general noted that the local board was unable to determine the status of a child who’d been hospitalized for abuse and a child plagued by mental health and self-harm issues.
The auditor general recommended that DCS ensure caseworkers comply with policy requirements on case review attendance, revise and implement policy to provide case updates, and work with AOC to determine information for updates when caseworkers can’t attend.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
by Daniel Stefanski | Aug 11, 2023 | News
By Daniel Stefanski |
On Tuesday, the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) announced that it “joined a multi-state settlement with Robinhood Financial LLC, which will pay up to $10.2 million in penalties for operational failures that harmed main street investors.”
According to the ACC, “the investigation was sparked by Robinhood platform outages in March 2020, a time when hundreds of thousands of investors were relying on the Robinhood app to make trades. In addition, prior to March 2021, there were deficiencies at Robinhood in its review and approval process for options and margin accounts, weaknesses in the firm’s monitoring and reporting tools, and insufficient customer service and escalation protocols that in some cases left Robinhood users unable to process trades even as the value of certain stocks was dropping.”
The investigation was led by “state securities regulators in Alabama, Colorado, California, Delaware, New Jersey, South Dakota, and Texas coordinated through the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) regarding Robinhood’s operational failures with respect to the retail market.”
NASAA President Andrew Hartnett issued the following statement in conjunction with the announcement: “Today’s multistate agreement represents states at their best – working together for the benefit of Main Street investors. Robinhood repeatedly failed to serve its clients, but this settlement makes clear that Robinhood must take its customer care obligations seriously and correct these deficiencies.”
ACC Chairman Jim O’Connor also added, “This agreement is part of an ongoing effort by state securities regulators to protect investors and to make sure they are treated fairly by their financial services companies.”
The ACC’s news release made clear that “the Commission found no evidence of willful or fraudulent conduct by Robinhood, and that Robinhood fully cooperated with the investigation.” Also, “Robinhood neither admitted nor denied the findings as set out in the states’ orders.”
One of the findings of fact in the order before the ACC was that “Robinhood acquired approximately 89,136 new Arizona customers from October 1, 2019, to March 31, 2020, for a total customer count of approximately 290,356 as of March 31, 2020. From October 1, 2019, to March 31, 2020, Robinhood approved approximately 13,713 Arizona customers for option trading and approximately 1,934 Arizona customers for margin trading.”
The ACC’s release highlighted these violations as included in the order:
- Negligent dissemination of inaccurate information to customers, including regarding margin and risk associated with multi-leg option spreads.
- Failure to have a reasonably designed customer identification program.
- Failure to supervise technology critical to providing customers with core broker-dealer services.
- Failure to have a reasonably designed system for dealing with customer inquiries.
- Failure to exercise due diligence before approving certain option accounts.
- Failure to report all customer complaints to FINRA and state securities regulators, as may be required.
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
by Corinne Murdock | Aug 11, 2023 | News
By Corinne Murdock |
Tucson has received nearly $71.5 million to cover progressive housing and emissions initiatives.
Around $50 million will go into housing, and $21.5 million will go into emissions reduction and elimination.
The city received $50 million out of a total $370 million awarded to eight communities by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Choice Neighborhoods Implementation (CNI) initiative.
Tucson received the higher reward of $50 million alongside Birmingham, Alabama; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Wilmington, Delaware. The remaining three recipients — Atlanta, Georgia; Lake Charles, Louisiana; Miami-Dade County, Florida — received $40 million.
Tucson’s $50 million will only partially cover the 550 new or rehabilitated housing units planned by the city— the city disclosed that it required $334 million more from public, private, and nonprofit benefactors to complete its plan.
408 of the 550 units concern the city’s 17-story public housing facility, Tucson House. The remainder will be established across three new developments.
The 550 units are part of the Transformation Plan of the Thrive in the ‘05 initiative: a 2.3 square mile area marked by Oracle Road and Miracle Mile. Tucson Mayor Regina Romero and the Tucson City Council adopted the plan last year.
HUD CNI is a progression of former President Barack Obama’s original Choice Neighborhoods program. The Obama administration sought to disrupt the consolidation of crime and poverty prevalent in purely public and HUD-assisted housing by engineering mixed-income neighborhoods: a mixture of either market-rate and welfare-discounted housing, or entirely welfare-discounted housing. The program also focuses on establishing other amenities, such as schools and businesses, to improve those areas.
In addition to the CNI, Tucson’s initiative includes the Community Based Crime Reduction (CBCR), an effort to increase reliance on community-based policing led by Nadia Roubicek with the Arizona State University (ASU) Office of Community Health Engagement and Resiliency (OCHER). CBCR was established through the Department of Justice (DOJ) Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) Innovation Suite (also called the Smart Suite).
There’s also the Workforce & Economic Development, a partnership with the City of Tucson Economic Initiatives and Pima Community College, which provides employment and business resources and opportunities.
The fourth focus of Thrive in ‘05 — Tucson Community Access, Referral, Education, and Service (CARES) — offers residents medical and behavioral health care liaisons.
In addition to the $50 million for government housing, the city also received nearly $21.5 million from the Department of Transportation’s Federal Transit Administration to decarbonize its Sun Tran transit system. The funding will cover the replacement of the city’s remaining diesel bus fleet with 39 compressed natural gas buses. Their cut comes from a total of nearly $1.7 billion in funding for similar transit emissions reduction or elimination initiatives spanning 46 states.
In addition to the $21.5 million, Tucson contributed nearly $5.4 million to the grant.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
by Daniel Stefanski | Aug 11, 2023 | News
By Daniel Stefanski |
Arizona’s Democrat Governor is moving ahead with her plans to talk to the state’s utility companies to address the heatwave. This week, Governor Katie Hobbs announced that she had “scheduled a roundtable meeting with utility company leadership for August 18.”
Hobbs plans to use the event to “highlight her administration’s efforts to protect Arizonans during the historic heat wave and discuss actions utilities can take to address future challenges.”
In a statement, Hobbs said, “Extreme heat can be devastating when not properly addressed. That’s why I’m taking action to provide relief through additional resources and collaborating with utilities, local organizations, cities, and county officials. Together, we will keep Arizonans safe through this historic heat wave and ensure our state is prepared for future emergencies.”The governor also revealed that her Office would “provide $50,000 to Valley Interfaith Network for staffing, water, and expanded cooling center service throughout Arizona.”
Hobbs’ announcement followed a controversial letter sent to Arizona utility companies at the end of last month, in which she asked for “written plans outlining how they will protect Arizonans during this devastating heat wave.”
The governor directed the utility companies to focus their plans on the areas of Disconnects, Grid Security, Emergency Response, Customers in Arrears, and Community Service.
Republicans and Democrats largely broke to partisan corners with their responses to the governor’s efforts on this front. Phoenix Councilwoman Laura Pastor tweeted, “Phoenix has been experiencing a historically hot summer – if a statewide or even citywide power outage were to happen, lives would be lost. We need to know what to do during that situation and how we can help our residents. Governor Hobbs is asking the right questions.”
The Arizona Democratic Party also weighed in, posting, “As Arizona faces a historically hot summer, Democrats are delivering real relief! Thank you Governor Hobbs.”
Republican Representative Matthew Gress took an opposing view to the governor’s announcement, writing, “Governor, you *do* know the utilities already submitted those plans and briefed the Commission…back in April…right? And you do realize the excessive heat warning has been in effect for nearly a month? We’ve hit new records for several weeks now? Every time, our utilities performed flawlessly. But really glad you weighed in weeks after the heat wave started! You’re really on top of things.”
Representative Joseph Chaplik added, “Another example of an unqualified Hobbs Governor/CEO of AZ. As Gov, you should have already known all this from communicating with APS and SRP over the last 9 months with preparation for the summer. We all know we get hot in the desert during July. No need to publicize your late demands. You should be thanking them for being prepared.”
Long-time Arizona journalist Howie Fischer pointed out that the governor’s request to state utility companies was “not within her constitutional duties (but was) the role of the Arizona Corporation Commission.”
Senate President Pro Tempore T.J. Shope agreed with Fischer, tweeting, “Correct, it’s not within Governor Hobbs constitutional duties. Perhaps her interns oughta watch one of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources, Energy and Water Committee hearings that Senator Sine Kerr chairs so she can learn about energy plans and how the utilities plan for summer.”
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
by Corinne Murdock | Aug 10, 2023 | News
By Corinne Murdock |
The secretary of state may face a lawsuit come November if he fails to clean up alleged dirty voter rolls in 14 counties.
In a letter submitted Tuesday, Arizona Free Enterprise Club President and Executive Director Scott Mussi — in his capacity as a voter — accused Secretary of State Adrian Fontes of not following Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).
The pre-litigation letter alleged that four Arizona counties reported having more voters than voting-age adult citizens, per public voter registration records compared with Census Bureau data. These were identified as Apache County with 117.4 percent voter registration rate, La Paz County with 100.5 percent voter registration rate, Navajo County with 100.1 percent voter registration rate, and Santa Cruz County with 112.6 percent voter registration rate.
The letter also alleged that nine counties have voter registration rates exceeding 90 percent of adult citizens over 18 years old, and one county with its voter registration rate exceeding 80 percent, which outpace national voter registration rates in recent years. These counties were identified as Cochise (93.4 percent), Coconino (93.6 percent), Gila (90.6 percent), Maricopa (97.8 percent), Mohave (95.2 percent), Pima (92 percent), Pinal (91.8 percent), Yavapai (99 percent), Yuma (94.3 percent), and Graham Counties (81.1 percent).
The national voter registration rate sits at around 69.1 percent, per the Census Bureau. In Arizona, those rates were 76.4 percent in 2020 and 68.6 percent in 2018.
As of last month, there were nearly 4.2 million registered voters. Independent voters lead with 1.45 million registrants (34.5 percent), followed by Republicans with 1.44 million (34.4 percent), Democrats with 1.26 million (30 percent), Libertarians with 33,700 (0.8 percent), and No Labels members with 8,500 (0.2 percent).
“Discrepancies on this scale almost certainly cannot be attributed to above-average voter participation, but instead point to deficient list maintenance,” stated the letter.
The letter requested that Fontes modify the current list maintenance procedures to identify and remove individuals who are ineligible to vote due to a change in residence, incarceration, death, or those ineligible for other reasons.
Arizona voters weren’t alone in this endeavor. Also on Tuesday, Virginia voters filed a similar pre-litigation letter accusing the Virginia Commissioner of Elections Susan Beals of similar NVRA negligence across 101 counties. The Honest Elections Project (HEP) assisted both Arizona and Virginia voters in their pre-litigation notices. The voters gave their respective election leaders 90 days to comply with the NVRA, and 45 days to respond to the letter.
The requested response would include details of the NVRA compliance efforts, policies, and programs Fontes has taken or plans to take prior to the 2024 general election, along with complete timelines and results for any ongoing plans.
In a press release, Mussi said that it wasn’t only Fontes but the former secretary of state Katie Hobbs, now governor, which were to blame for the dirty voter rolls.
“It is apparent that Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and his predecessor have failed to perform the necessary voter list maintenance required by state and federal law,” said Mussi. “Clean and accurate voter rolls are a cornerstone to safe and secure elections, and we expect that our election officials will address these issues as quickly as possible.”
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
