Estimating ideological positions of lawmakers has a long tradition in political science. Poole & Rosenthal (1985) proposed a "scaling procedure" to estimate ideological positions of lawmakers based on their voting behavior. Dynamic weighted nominal three-step estimation (McCarty et al. 1997), an extension of this procedure, results in the DW-Nominate scores that are widely accepted as benchmark ideological positions both on party level as well as on individual level (see, e.g., Poole et al. 2011, Lewis et al. 2022, Boche et al. 2018). Legislative votes, however, provide limited information on the latent ideological positions because voting behavior on individual level is often not documented and lawmakers rarely diverge from party-line voting due to robust party discipline (Hug 2010). Consequently, roll-call analysis for inferring the ideological positions adopted by legislators both within and across parties is of limited value (see, e.g., Lauderdale & Herzog 2016). Text-based scaling models are a promising alternative method to discern ideological stances based on political discussions.

For those women who are considering terminating their pregnancies, a new chatbot called Charley aims to help them start the process of getting an abortion. The chatbot, which launched on Sept. 12, is available on Charley's website, greeting visitors with the message, "Need an abortion? On its website, Charley is described as "designed by abortion experts, made for abortion seekers." One of its co-founders is Cecile Richards, former president of Planned Parenthood. Richards "oversees legal, political, and policy matters and leads fundraising efforts" for Charley, according to the chatbot's website. Another co-founder is Tom Subak, former chief strategy officer at Planned Parenthood. A new chatbot called Charley aims to help women start the process of getting an abortion. Charley isn't an app -- it lives online, on its own website. While individuals can freely visit the site, the company is also seeking medical providers who will agree to embed the chatbot directly on their own websites, "to meet abortion seekers wherever they are online," said Nicole Cushman, Charley's New York-based content manager, in an interview with Fox News Digital. Cushman, who has held leadership positions at Planned Parenthood, said the idea for the chatbot came about after Roe v. Wade was overturned -- with the goal of "improving people's online search experience." "Our research showed that people were turning primarily to Google for information about abortion options in the post-Roe landscape, and that it was very challenging for abortion seekers to connect to available options," she said. People "were ending up in an endless Google loop." "This was particularly the case if they were living in a state with an abortion ban or restriction -- they were ending up in an endless Google loop." One of Charley's co-founders is Cecile Richards, former president of Planned Parenthood. The company is seeking medical providers who will agree to embed the chatbot directly on their own websites. Charley's creators envisioned a "simple, effective way to pull together information from a range of sources" and "cut through the confusion," Cushman told Fox News Digital. Unlike large language models like ChatGPT, Charley doesn't allow people to type questions. Instead, the chatbot uses a "decision tree" format that guides visitors through a series of pre-written prompts, including the desired type of abortion and the date of their last menstrual period. It also asks for a zip code to determine the specific abortion laws in the visitor's state of residence. 'PRO-LIFE GENERATION IS ALIVE AND WELL' AS FURIOUS FIGHT FOR THE UNBORN CONTINUES For example, when Fox News Digital entered a zip code in Ohio, the response was: "Currently, abortion care is legal in Ohio, but only up to 22 weeks.

In this paper we suggest a minimally-supervised approach for identifying nuanced frames in news article coverage of politically divisive topics. We suggest to break the broad policy frames suggested by Boydstun et al., 2014 into fine-grained subframes which can capture differences in political ideology in a better way. We evaluate the suggested subframes and their embedding, learned using minimal supervision, over three topics, namely, immigration, gun-control and abortion. We demonstrate the ability of the subframes to capture ideological differences and analyze political discourse in news media.

Last week, I, alongside my colleague Assembly Environmental Conservation Committee Chair Steve Englebright, held the first-ever NYS Assembly roundtable on artificial intelligence and how we can utilize it to predict and combat climate change. We head into our last three intensive legislative weeks with June with a few thousand bills pending – though only a fraction will end up passing both bodies. Serious work continues and a whole host of important yet controversial bills including on housing and tenant protections, climate control and protection, surrogacy laws and driver licenses to name just a few! The Assembly and Senate this week passed a legislative package aimed at protecting people with disabilities and improving and expanding services available to them. As always, check out community events to see what's happening around the district!

Stars and innovators from music, movies and technology have descended on Austin for the SXSW Conference and Festivals, which kicked off Friday and runs through March 19. This weekend, the event played host to the car of the future, a big rally and a speech from the former vice president of the United States. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, yet he is just as worried about the rise of fake news and massive hacks as the rest of us. Berners-Lee's concerns were the topic of several panels at SXSW that zeroed in on the future of the Internet. Berners-Lee said he believes these issues must be confronted "in order for the web to fulfill its true potential as a tool which serves all of humanity."

Scott Shackford, introduces panel members during the Get A Warrant: The 4th Amendment and Digital Data panel during SXSW. Stars and innovators from music, movies and technology have descended on Austin for the SXSW Conference and Festivals, which kicked off Friday and runs through March 19. This weekend, the event played host to the car of the future, a big rally and a speech from the former vice president of the United States. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, yet he is just as worried about the rise of fake news and massive hacks as the rest of us. Although he did not attend this year, Berners-Lee's concerns were the topic of several panels at SXSW that zeroed in on the future of the Internet.

On Thursday morning, feminist-leaning dating app Bumble posted a picture to Instagram that read: "For every like this post gets, Bumble will donate a dollar to Planned Parenthood." The post received 28,747 likes by the time the campaign ended at 3pm on Thursday. "This isn't a political post," the caption reads. "Our team is a mixing pot, some of us are Republicans, some are Democrats, some are Independents, and some aren't even from America. But every single one of us knows how important it is for women to have safe and affordable healthcare."