NEW RESOURCES

Mashable: Grubhub is making it easier to support women in the restaurant industry. “In honor of Women’s History Month in March, the popular delivery service partnered with Women Chefs & Restaurateurs (WCR) — a supportive resource for women in the culinary industry — to launch RestaurantHER, an effort that includes a map highlighting women-led restaurants across the United States.”

Library of Congress: Irish-American Heritage Month: New Resources. “To celebrate Irish-American Heritage Month—and of course St. Patrick’s Day!—we’re adding new images to our Free to Use and Reuse archive and releasing a new resources guide associated with the Irish-American experience.”

Great Falls Tribune: Watch historic footage of Montana life saved by Montana Historical Society. “A 1926 rodeo in Rosebud County. A Blackfeet medicine woman thanking the Sun God for the recovery of her grandson from polio. The building of Fort Peck Dam. Vintage airplanes in flight. The Montana Historical Society’s new Moving Image Archive is bringing back to light (and to YouTube) historic films, and they’re a rare look into life in days of Montana gone by.” I took a quick shufti at the channel, and while I don’t think it’s super new, it’s definitely worth a browse.

FreeCodeCamp: We just released 3 years of freeCodeCamp chat history as Open Data — all 5 million messages of it. “This dataset is a record of activity from freeCodeCamp’s most popular chatroom, the general chatroom, which the Gitter team has told me is the most active room on all of Gitter. The dataset contains posts from learners, bots, moderators, and contributors between December 31, 2014 and December 9, 2017.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Google AI now can give YouTube videos a wacky background. “Google… trained a neural network with lots of carefully labeled imagery that helped it learn how to distinguish facial features — eyes, hair, glasses, mouths and so on — from everything else. The result is a system that can swap out backgrounds fast enough to keep up with video. Digital video frames whip by at 30 frames per second, but Google’s technology works at 40 frames per second on a Google Pixel 2 phone and more than 100 frames per second on an Apple iPhone 7.”

USEFUL STUFF

Fossbytes: Google’s Internal “Machine Learning Crash Course” Goes Online For Free . “Google has created a new website called ‘Learn with Google AI‘ featuring educational material to give insight into core machine learning concepts, as well as, applying ML to the real world problems. The content developed by Google engineers caters to beginners who want to get started with ML and all the way to advanced deep learning pros and researchers.” Why are there only 24 hours in a day? Clearly this is a design flaw.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Gizmodo: Iowa Researchers Accuse Russia of Injecting Anti-GMO Propaganda Into U.S. Media. “Researchers from Iowa State University are claiming that US versions of popular Russian-funded news media are littered with articles and links casting genetically modified organisms in a negative light. It’s an effort, say the researchers, to discredit American agricultural practices and to portray Russian crops as an ‘ecologically cleaner’ alternative to GMOs.”

New York Times: Facebook Lets Ads Bare a Man’s Chest. A Woman’s Back Is Another Matter.. “When Krista Venero, an author who writes under the pen name K.L. Montgomery, bought ads on Facebook for a romance novel she published last year, she thought her marketing fell well within the bounds of the social network’s policies. The ad showed an image of a woman photographed from behind with a portion of her upper back exposed…. Facebook rejected her ad, however, and when she disputed the decision, a representative told her that it implied nudity and that the company did not allow ads ‘with a sexual undertone.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ZDNet: Hit by ransomware? This new free decryption tool for GandCrab might help. “Victims of one the newest – and most unusual – families of ransomware could now be able to recover their files without giving into the demands of criminals because decryption tools have been released for free. A GandCrab ransomware decryption tool has been released as part of the No More Ransom initiative, following a combined operation by Bitdefender, the Romanian Police, the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) and Europol.”

Marketplace: Shouldn’t a company have to tell you when it’s been hacked?. “Just a friendly reminder that the United States does not, at the time of this writing, have any kind of federal data breach notification laws on the books. Such a law that would provide specific rules about what a company — let’s say, Equifax, Intel, Uber or Yahoo, just as a couple high-profile examples — has to do after a major hack, like how soon it needs to tell customers the hack occurred and how executives should behave when they find out there’s been a breach.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Berkman Klein Center: The Yemen War Online: Propagation of Censored Content on Twitter . “This study, conducted by the Internet Monitor project at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, analyzes the sharing of information on Twitter among different political groups related to the ongoing conflict in Yemen. The study finds that the networks on Twitter are organized around and segregate along political lines. The networks cite web content, including censored websites, that reflects and informs their collective framing of the politically sensitive issues. Each of the factions relies almost entirely on their own sources of information.”

Washington Post: We studied thousands of anonymous posts about the Parkland attack — and found a conspiracy in the making. “Forty-seven minutes after news broke of a high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., the posters on the anonymous chat board 8chan had devised a plan to bend the public narrative to their own designs: ‘Start looking for [Jewish] numerology and crisis actors.’ The voices from this dark corner of the Internet quickly coalesced around a plan of attack: Use details gleaned from news reports and other sources to push false information about one of America’s deadliest school shootings.” Good morning, Internet…

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