afternoonbuzz

Penn Museum, WWI Draft Registration Cards, Google Assistant, More: Friday Afternoon Buzz, February 23, 2018

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Penn Museum: Browsing The Collection Geographically. “Now Available: Browse the Penn Museum object collection geographically, via an interactive map. Choose from over 1,100 locations around the world, which provide access to more than 92% of the Penn Museum’s collections online.” This announcement also has a little information about how it was done, but I hope Penn Museum does a deeper dive!

Fold3: Texas and California Added to the WWII Draft Registration Cards Collection!. “Fold3 has added two new states to its collection of U.S. WWII Draft Registration Cards! The collection (from the National Archives) now includes Texas and California. The cards in this collection are registration cards for the draft and do not necessarily indicate that the individual served in the military.”

CNET: Google Assistant will soon understand nearly two dozen more languages. “In the next few months the search company’s digital assistant will be able to respond by text in Danish, Dutch, Hindi, Indonesian, Norwegian, Swedish and Thai on Android phones and iPhones. By the end of this year, the assistant will be available in more than 30 languages, reaching 95 percent of all eligible Android phones worldwide, Nick Fox, Google’s vice president of product, said in a blog post Friday.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

From the United Nations Library at Geneva, an announcement of a big new digitization intiative. “United Nations Library at Geneva has launched a major project to digitise the entire League of Nations Archives held by UN Geneva! This collection is inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register and contains 15 million pages of unique materials that offer insight into the history of the world’s first global organisation, which was established almost 100 years ago and had its seat at the Palais des Nations in Geneva.”

Mashable: See the breathtaking scope of the high school anti-gun walkouts on Snap Maps. “High school students across the country walked out of school on Wednesday to protest inaction from politicians on gun control policy. The protests are a direct response to the deadly high school shooting in Parkland, Florida last week that took 17 lives. A striking way to see the spread of this movement — from both a macro, and micro perspective — has emerged on Snap Maps.”

New York Times: When Is a Child Instagram-Ready?. “In his first weekend on Instagram, my 9-year-old posted 20 times in 24 hours. He put up a video of himself doing a front flip wearing only his boxer shorts, followed back every single user who followed him, and went ‘live’ in a friend’s basement without the parents knowing. It was exactly what I wanted: We had the beginnings of our first set of rules. I typed it up, and we both signed it.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Courthouse News Service: Virginia Legislature Moves to Expand Access to Court Records. “The Virginia General Assembly Wednesday advanced legislation to expand public access court records with bipartisan support after a local paper lost a lawsuit seeking information on sentencing disparities across the Commonwealth.”

Krebs on Security: Chase ‘Glitch’ Exposed Customer Accounts. “Multiple Chase.com customers have reported logging in to their bank accounts, only to be presented with another customer’s bank account details. Chase has acknowledged the incident, saying it was caused by an internal ‘glitch’ Wednesday evening that did not involve any kind of hacking attempt or cyber attack.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Inverse: How to Create Socially Responsible Algorithms, According to AI Institute. “AI Now’s report, Algorithmic Impact Assessments: Toward Accountable Automation in Public Agencies, outlines the need for transparency when it comes to deploying algorithms. Algorithms have a huge impact on our daily lives, but their impact sometimes goes unnoticed. Because they are baked into the infrastructure of social media and video platforms, for example, it’s easy to forget that programs often determine what content is pushed to internet users. It’s only when something goes wrong, like a conspiracy theory video reaching the top of YouTube’s trending list, that we scrutinize the automated decision procedures that shape online experiences.”

Phys.org: How life online influences young people. “Young people spend a lot of their time online. Even so, we still know very little about how this intensive use of social media influences their development. Brain researcher and Spinoza Prize winner Eveline Crone from Leiden University and media psychologist Elly Konijn (VU) describes what the research has already generated in terms of usable information and what kinds of urgent questions have to be answered. The study is published in Nature Communications.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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