NEW RESOURCES

Glasgow (KY) Daily Times: Bevin announces launch of site to help combat opioid epidemic. “[The new tool] acts as a search engine for individuals seeking a SUD treatment facility for themselves or family members. Users can locate facilities based on geographic location, facility type, and type of treatment needed. The search results also identify which facilities have current openings for patients.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Inc: LinkedIn Set to Bring Groups Back from the Dead (But, Why?) . “Once upon a time, LinkedIn groups were thriving communities of professionals who shared common business interests. There was simply no better place to go on the Internet for industry- related discussions and networking. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, LinkedIn removed groups from the core features and banished them to a difficult-to-find back page on the site…. Last month, LinkedIn began notifying group owners by sending them a message announcing a renewed focus on groups by re-integrating them into the core user experience during 2018.”

Engadget: YouTube will address ‘egregious’ acts by creators in new policies. “The massive backlash to Logan Paul’s Aokigahara forest video pushed YouTube to make a few changes in how it handles the content it hosts. The company took some specific actions against Paul himself, putting his original projects on hold and pulling his Preferred status, but it has also begun to tweak its policies and regulations overall. Now, in a blog post, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki says there are more changes to come.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: How to Spot a ‘Deep Fake’ Face-Swapped Video. “While swapping someone’s face in a photograph has always been relatively easy, swapping someone’s face in a video used to be time consuming and difficult. Up until now, it’s mainly just been done by VFX studios for big budget Hollywood movies, where an actor’s face is swapped onto their stunt double. But now, with Deep Fake, anyone with a computer can do it quickly and automatically.”

Library of Congress: Digital Scholarship Resource Guide: Tools for Spatial Analysis (part 5 of 7). “In what has been often termed the ‘spatial turn,’ quantitative humanities and social sciences have come to emphasize place and space in their analyses. The mass amounts of geographical and temporal data available has lent itself to new ways of imagining and visualizing global networks. Increasingly sophisticated maps and timelines are increasingly simple to make and use. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is the field of techniques and scholarship that combines tabular data with geographical features to query, map, and visualize information. GIS technologies developed in the natural sciences to track things like weather, traffic, and disease patterns, but have moved into the humanities, enabling the spatial mapping of literature and history.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Verge: A single YouTube channel is flooding Bing’s video search with fake news. “Over the course of the last several years, every major social platform has been plagued by fake news. Now Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, has a fake news problem of its own. Because of how the search engine’s autofill feature works, people who visit Bing looking for news videos may be redirected to a flood of fake news videos, all generated by a single source.”

Quartz: Google’s advertising business is showing holes. “Alphabet brought in a lot of cash last quarter thanks to Google’s swelling ad sales. But the business is starting to show holes. The company missed Wall Street’s expectations for earnings, which, after backing out a one-time tax charge, came in at $9.70 per share, short of the $9.98 forecast by analysts polled by FactSet. It posted a loss of $3.02 billion for the quarter due to the $9.9 billion charge tied to changes to the US tax system. Alphabet’s Class A shares fell as much as 5% to $1,125.79 in after-hours trading, but rebounded to around $1,150 by the time of publication.”

The Guardian: ‘Fiction is outperforming reality’: how YouTube’s algorithm distorts truth. “Company insiders tell me the algorithm is the single most important engine of YouTube’s growth. In one of the few public explanations of how the formula works – that sketches the algorithm’s deep neural networks, crunching a vast pool of data about videos and the people who watch them – YouTube engineers describe it as one of the ‘largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence’. Lately, it has also become one of the most controversial.” Long and substantive article.

SECURITY & LEGAL

Boy Genius Report: Warning: The latest Netflix email scam is so bad, even cops are warning people. “Phishing scams are nothing new and at this point, even less-than-savvy users have basically become experts at spotting them. It’s typically pretty easy because they’re often littered with spelling and grammar mistakes, and sometimes they don’t even use formatting that’s anything like real emails a company has sent out in the past. Every so often, however, a new email scam pops up that’s just good enough to pose a real problem for unsuspecting targets, and such is the case with a new scam that popped up recently.”

District Dispatch / ALA: Pending bills would improve access to information. “Academic libraries are on the front lines of innovation and job creation, supporting education for tomorrow’s workforce and research that will create new technologies. By advocating for improved access to information, libraries can support those missions. Several bills pending in Congress would improve the public’s access to research and data produced with public funding. If enacted, these bills would expand the information resources that academic libraries could offer to their faculty and students.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Phys.org: The benefits of social media for young people in care . “Young people in care benefit from the psychological, emotional and social support gained via social media networks – according to new research from the University of East Anglia’s Centre for Research on the Child and Family (CRCF). Until now, the automatic assumption has been that platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp only pose a risk for this vulnerable group.” I believe in this case “in care” would be what the United States would refer to as “foster care” – at least one aspect of it. You can get more information here.

Digital Trends: Google wants to peer into your past to predict your future browsing habits. “In a patent filing revealed on February 1, Google outlined a system that aims to shave precious seconds off of your everyday web browsing. By looking into your past behaviors, Google’s proposed system for ‘predicting user navigation events’ would begin pre-loading links it thinks you’ll click on. This doesn’t sound new, Google has been doing search prediction ever since its early days, but the method here is novel.” Good morning, Internet…

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