NEW RESOURCES

The Supreme Court of the state of California has launched a temporary archive of its oral argument Webcasts. “The Supreme Court of California launched its live webcasting of oral argument calendars with the early-May calendar in San Francisco … A temporary archive of these oral arguments is now available below. Each archive contains a full day of oral argument with an index of the cases argued under the view window–click on a particular case and the video, or audio, of that case with captions will play in the view window.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Trekker is headed to one of my favorite cities: Boston. “Save the Harbor/Save the Bay, a non-profit organization, has teamed up with Google to take 360-degree images of several local beaches to be included on the Internet behemoth’s ‘Street View’ maps. Call it Google beach view.”

The Virtual Museum of Canada has announced approval of 11 new projects. “The new virtual exhibit projects highlight Canadian culture and history in content that is both iconic and offbeat. Cape Breton coal miners become skilled tunnel-makers during the First World War; Canadians build salmon canneries along British Columbia’s coastal waters; underwater explorers discover shipwrecks at the bottom of Lake Superior; First Nations and Inuit youth celebrate their identity in Quebec; and contemporary Inuit artists discover new meanings in historical Cape Dorset prints.”

Twitter is making it easier to see tweets from locations. “What’s new is that specific location tags now appear in the main Timeline and on profiles, clueing people in to the fact there are location feeds to browse. The Foursquare branding and design of the location feeds is new too. Despite confirming the news to us previously, Twitter says a basic version of location feeds was available before, but there was no way to tell a tweet was tagged with a location unless you opened its detail view. ”

Google is testing a storage manager for Chrome OS. Long overdue! “This simple feature will help Chrome OS users find out the total capacity of their device, free space available, and the space that has been consumed so far. The storage manager breaks down space consumed in offline and downloaded files.”

USEFUL STUFF

From PetaPixel: How to Use Hashtags on Instagram Properly as a Photographer. I’m going to have to try using the “hub” names as search terms.

From HootSuite, a guide to Snapchat business marketing. Titled as the “ultimate” guide, but I dunno… I thought it was a good overview of the possibilities.

TechCrunch has a writeup about an interesting AI app for your photos. “A new iOS app, called Prisma, is using deep learning algorithms to turn smartphone photos into stylized artworks based on different artwork/graphical styles. Snap or choose your photo, select an ‘art filter’ to be applied and then wait as the app works its algorithmic magic — returning your stylized image in a matter of seconds, along with options to share it to your social networks.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The first movie on SnapChat is a horror film. “While filmmakers have experimented with shooting with contemporary technological media—2015’s Unfriended, for example, was shot exclusively on Skype—few have endeavored to marry a medium with a distribution method. Like a modern-day reincarnation of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast, Sickhouse tricks the audience into participating in and ultimately disseminating the story itself—via the very platform on which it was conceived. (After the initial Snapchat release, the filmmakers released an expanded 80-minute version of Sickhouse on Vimeo On Demand, which you can buy below.)”

Hiawatha Bray at the Boston Globe: Live From Everywhere, It’s Facebook. “While Periscope can tap into Twitter’s 310 million monthly users and Tumblr claims an audience of half a billion, Facebook is fishing in a much bigger pond — 1.65 billion users every month. Get these Facebookers hooked on live video, and many of them will never leave. Facebook runs a Web page where you can see hundreds of live videos from around the world. It’s a good place to find popular stuff. But it’s also full of dreary drivel — people talking to themselves, mostly. That’s no way to build up a loyal audience.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

From The New York Times: Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem. “Warnings by luminaries like Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom about ‘the singularity’ — when machines become smarter than humans — have attracted millions of dollars and spawned a multitude of conferences. But this hand-wringing is a distraction from the very real problems with artificial intelligence today, which may already be exacerbating inequality in the workplace, at home and in our legal and judicial systems. Sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination are being built into the machine-learning algorithms that underlie the technology behind many “intelligent” systems that shape how we are categorized and advertised to.”

More good stuff from the London School of Economics and Political Science: Today I Learned (TIL): Using Reddit as a tool for public engagement, profile raising and scholarly dissemination. “Increasingly US universities and research organisations, such as the American Chemical Society and mega-journal PLOS One, are making regular use of science AMAs as a way of boosting interest in their work, and raising the profile of academics with a global audience. It seemed like too good an opportunity to ignore, and so we asked one of our Faculty academics to help us test the potential reach of a Reddit science AMA. Our willing subjects were Dr Todd Hartman, a Lecturer in Quantitative Methods at the Sheffield Methods Institute, and Dr Rhys Hester from the Robina Institute at the University of Minnesota, who co-authored on a recent paper about racial bias in criminal sentencing in South Carolina. Their research had been widely picked up by the media, and it was a topic that seemed likely to pique the interest of Reddit’s science community and beyond.” Good morning, Internet…

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