NEW RESOURCES

New to me and recently updated. University of Maryland, Baltimore: Employee Assistance Digital Archive Growing Rapidly. “A free, publically accessible site where Employee Assistance (EA) professionals can post original works, historical documents and other related papers or multi-media, has grown to more than 1,500 articles since the archive was created five years ago at the University of Maryland, Baltimore.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Fast Company: Google Street View Now Has A Soundtrack, Thanks To AI. “Google Street View has never felt so enchanting. In New York’s Botanical Garden, children shout and play in the distance. On a highway in Shibuya, Tokyo, cars whoosh by with so much detail, you can hear the first drops of rain on the street. At Gaudi’s famous Barcelona cathedral, La Sagranda Familia, a priest chants in Latin as his deep voice echoes around the cavernous space. Yet none of these sounds are real. Or, at least, they weren’t recorded where you see them. Instead, an AI has added a soundtrack to all of Street View, and often, the sounds are so convincing that you would never know they were faked.”

PC World: Windows Meltdown patches halted for some AMD systems after PCs refuse to boot. “AMD processors aren’t affected by the devastating Meltdown CPU flaw, but the emergency fix for Meltdown and Spectre can apparently bring certain AMD CPUs to their knees. Microsoft has stopped offering the Windows security patch to some AMD systems after reports of PCs not booting.”

USEFUL STUFF

Larry Ferlazzo: Just Revised & Updated “Best Ways For Students To Create Online Animations”. “I just completely revised and updated Best Ways For Students To Create Online Animations. Let me know if I’m missing any. I’m beginning my annual review of many Web 2.0 – related ‘Best’ lists. Yesterday, I revised The Best Ways To Make Comic Strips Online.” I can’t include all Larry’s lists here because I wouldn’t have room for anything else. But I encourage you to explore his site if you haven’t.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

WUOM: MSU will use $1.47 million grant to build slave trade database. “Michigan State University wants people to have a more comprehensive understanding on the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It will use nearly $1.5 million to build a database designed to give details about the lives of enslaved people. MSU will use $1.47 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to put together an online database that will combine data MSU already has with information from other databases regarding the slave trade.”

Nieman Lab: The Offshore Journalism Project would let newsrooms send a “distress signal” when their content is at risk of being lost forever. “PrimaDaNoi.it, which has a staff of four, has since 2010 been subject to 15 right-to-be-forgotten lawsuits, according to Alessandro Biancardi, the site’s editor and publisher. ‘As we publish the verdicts of criminal cases, people attack us and ask us to remove…almost as if they were ordering in a restaurant,’ Biancardi recently told Nicolas Kayser-Bril and Mario Tedeschini-Lalli, the founders of the Offshore Journalism Project — an initiative to ‘maximize free speech’ around the world by ‘exploiting different jurisdictions.’ That is, figuring out ways to let news publishers, especially those from European countries with right-to-be-forgotten laws, preserve their digital work by archiving it in countries with stronger freedom-of-speech laws, namely the United States.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ZDNet: Hackers target Winter Olympics with new custom-built fileless malware. “Hackers are targeting the upcoming Winter Olympics with a phishing and malware campaign directed at the organisations that provide infrastructure and other support for the Games. The campaign targets a number of organisations involved with the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, set to take place in Pyeongchang, South Korea next month. It uses a previously unseen form of malware designed to hand control of the victim’s machine over to the attackers.”

BuzzFeed: Far-Right Activist Charles Johnson Has Sued Twitter Over His Suspension. “For years, the controversial right-wing activist Charles C. Johnson has threatened to sue Twitter, which banned him in 2015. Now, following a BuzzFeed News report that revealed the internal debate behind Twitter’s 2015 decision to bar him from its service, Johnson is putting his money where his mouth has long been.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

LegalFutures: Crowdsourcing ‘can accurately predict court decisions 80% of time’ says study. “Crowdsourcing is an accurate predictor of court judgments, at best proving accurate in over eight out of ten cases, according to a rigorous analysis. A team of academics arrived at the conclusion after assessing the results of a massive public competition to predict the outcome of US Supreme Court cases, involving cash prizes of up to $10,000 (£7,375) for the winners.”

Tulane University: Twitter chats can promote healthy behaviors, study says. “Looking for ways to keep health-related resolutions, like weight loss and healthy eating? Social media might help. Conversations on Twitter can lead to engaged, two-way communication about health, according to a recent study published by the Tulane Prevention Research Center (PRC) and its partners at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).” Good afternoon, Internet…

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