NEW RESOURCES

PR Newswire: New Auto Recall Search Tool Launches to Enhance Outreach and Notification to Vehicle Owners (PRESS RELEASE). “Automakers today announced the launch of a new tool aimed at increasing consumer participation in auto recalls by allowing approved commercial and governmental entities, including state departments of motor vehicles, state vehicle registrars, state vehicle inspection programs, motor vehicle insurers, auto finance companies, motor vehicle dealers, vehicle fleet managers, automotive parts recyclers and vehicle auction companies, to search for open recalls for thousands of autos at once, free of charge. ”

DigitalNC: New Paper, the Hertford County Herald, Now Available. “The Hertford County Herald, courtesy of Chowan University, is the newest paper available on DigitalNC, with issues up that span the years 1914-1923. The Hertford County Herald was established in 1910, and was published in the town of Ahoskie, North Carolina. The paper, which came out every Friday, was comprised of 8 dense pages to keep residents of Hertford County informed.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Mashable: Gun vloggers turn to Pornhub after YouTube ban. “Following YouTube’s announced ban of several types of gun-related content, as reported by Bloomberg, at least one gun blogger has moved its video operations to the popular pornography site, Pornhub.”

Programmable Web: 150 Translation APIs: Google Translate, Merriam-Webster and Microsoft Translator. “Our API directory now includes 150 translation APIs. The newest is the Lingotek APITrack this API. The most popular, in terms of user click-throughs to the provider site, is the Google Translate API. Below you’ll find some more stats from the directory, including a list of the most popular translation APIs.” Wow!

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: How to Quickly Delete Lots of Old Facebook Posts. “Facebook has had a bad few months. The Cambridge Analytica fiasco is only the latest thing making people re-evaluate how Facebook fits into their lives. You could always totally quit Facebook if you want, but for many that’s not an option. Maybe you need it for work, maybe you need it to participate in groups or message friends, or maybe you just like using it. But what about all those old, embarrassing or sensitive posts? Or what if you want to wipe all your old posts and just start fresh?”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

TechCrunch: Tumblr confirms 84 accounts linked to Kremlin trolls. “Tumblr has confirmed that Kremlin trolls were active on its platform during the 2016 US presidential elections. In a blog post today the social platform writes that it is ‘taking steps to protect against future interference in our political conversation by state-sponsored propaganda campaigns’. The company has also started emailing users who interacted with 84 accounts it now says it has linked to the Russian trollfarm, the Internet Research Agency (IRA).”

MD Magazine: Physicians Unite on Twitter, Divide on Practice. “For Jennifer Gunter, MD, an affable obstetrician-gynecologist based in California, ‘Twitter is like a giant cocktail party.’ She began writing nearly a decade ago, determined to counter the spread of medical misinformation online. Soon, she realized that to be appealing on social media is to be genuine, and her advocacy for women’s health issues along with a generous dose of levity—as in, a photo of her toilet-trained cat—has helped make Gunter the life of the party on Twitter, with nearly 70,000 followers. The fact that Twitter can be reminiscent of a cocktail party, however, is exactly why some doctors were initially, or remain, reluctant to join. ”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Guardian: Facebook gave data about 57bn friendships to academic. “Before Facebook suspended Aleksandr Kogan from its platform for the data harvesting ‘scam’ at the centre of the unfolding Cambridge Analytica scandal, the social media company enjoyed a close enough relationship with the researcher that it provided him with an anonymised, aggregate dataset of 57bn Facebook friendships.”

The Independent: Data gathered from Facebook users likely spread to other databases and dark web, say experts . “The data on millions of Facebook users that a firm wrongfully swiped from the social network has likely spread to other groups, databases and the dark web, experts said, making company’s pledge to safeguard its users’ privacy hard to enforce.”

The Atlantic: My Cow Game Extracted Your Facebook Data. “Cow Clicker is not an impressive work of software. After all, it was a game whose sole activity was clicking on cows. I wrote the principal code in three days, much of it hunched on a friend’s couch in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I had no idea anyone would play it, although over 180,000 people did, eventually. I made a little money from the whole affair, but I never optimized it for revenue generation. I certainly never pondered using the app as a lure for a data-extraction con. I was just a strange man making a strange game on a lark. And yet, if you played Cow Clicker, even just once, I got enough of your personal data that, for years, I could have assembled a reasonably sophisticated profile of your interests and behavior.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Digital Trends: Like an A.I. acid trip, this neural net rebuilds reality with flowers and fire. “When computers get creative, the results are frequently fascinating — as a new project created by artist and machine learning Ph.D. student Memo Akten admirably demonstrates. A bit like projects such as Google’s Deep Dream image generator, Akten has been applying artificial neural networks to create some unusual visual effects. His ‘Learning To See’ project uses image recognition neural nets to interpret the images it sees on a live video feed. The twist? He trained his different neural networks exclusively on a diet of only water, sky, flowers or fire still images so that regardless of what image they actually see, they interpret it as waves crashing, fires roaring, or flowers growing.”

BBC News: DeepMind explores inner workings of AI. “As with the human brain, the neural networks that power artificial intelligence systems are not easy to understand. DeepMind, the Alphabet-owned AI firm famous for teaching an AI system to play Go, is attempting to work out how such systems make decisions. By knowing how AI works, it hopes to build smarter systems. But researchers acknowledged that the more complex the system, the harder it might be for humans to understand.” Good morning, Internet…

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