NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, from the Irish Times: Has your family an interesting Irish emigration story to share? . “Story collectors will record the stories and photograph the objects on the day. These records will become part of the online Europeana Migration Collection, a European project that aims to show how the flow of people and ideas adds to the richness of culture around Europe and the world. The digital archive already contains 210,999 items on the topic of migration to, from and within Europe.”

New to me: the Hip Hop Radio Archive. “The Hip-Hop Radio Archive aims to digitize, preserve, share, and contextualize recordings of hip-hop radio from the 1980s and 1990s from commercial, college, community, and pirate stations of all sizes, telling the stories of the shows and the people that made them…. This project’s primary purpose is to preserve the recordings that may only exist on cassettes recorded by fans in their bedrooms. There have been so many great music blogs over the last decade that relied on file sharing sites to spread classic hip-hop radio shows and while those sites are great for short-term sharing, they’re not a place where files will survive long-term. These sites and the files on them are in danger of just disappearing, erasing petabytes of content all at once. The Internet Archive is the solution: hosting by a non-profit organization that’s been around for over 20 years and is dedicated to digital preservation.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Blog: Now students can create their own VR tours . “…we’re introducing Tour Creator, which enables students, teachers, and anyone with a story to tell, to make a VR tour using imagery from Google Street View or their own 360 photos. The tool is designed to let you produce professional-level VR content without a steep learning curve. ‘The technology gets out of the way and enables students to focus on crafting fantastic visual stories,’ explains Charlie Reisinger, a school Technology Director in Pennsylvania.”

USEFUL STUFF

The Reluctant Entrepreneur: Testing out transcription services. “I tested these tools by uploading fifteen minutes of a podcast and comparing both overall quality and specifically the number of errors in a test paragraph. I found that they differed primarily in how many filler words (“um” and “uh”) they removed, whether they could distinguish between speakers, and how well they identified the start and end of sentences and punctuated accordingly. None of the transcripts were perfect but the two 3-star tools offered what I consider good-enough transcription. You will still need to review the transcripts and polish them if you want to publish or distribute them, but this is much less time-consuming than transcribing manually. Note that all these services offer a free trial, so test them with a representative sample of the audio or video you are working with, to see how well each one meets your needs.” Quick list, not a deep dive.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Drum: Google removes Singaporean YouTuber Amos Yee channel over brand safety fears. “YouTube vlogger Amos Yee is in the news again after his YouTube channel was taken down by Google over brand safety concerns after he posted videos defending paedophilia. The Singaporean was charged for six charges related to the anti-religion posts on his YouTube channel and two for failing to show up to court, two years ago. He then sought asylum in the United States after finishing his sentence.”

BuzzFeed: Inside The Ecosystem That Fuels Amazon’s Fake Review Problem . “One morning in late January, Jake picked up the box on his desk, tore through the packing tape, unearthed the iPhone case inside, snapped a picture, and uploaded it to an Amazon review he’d been writing. The review included a sentence about the case’s sleek design and cool, clear volume buttons. He finished off the blurb with a glowing title (‘The perfect case!!’) and rated the product a perfect five stars. Click. Submitted. Jake never tried the case. He doesn’t even have an iPhone.”

Azernews: IAPH intends to create global database to study best practices in field of ports. “Port heads, government representatives, professors and experts from around the world, including Europe, Japan, Iran, Georgia, Indonesia, and Nigeria are exchanging views at the World Ports Conference, organized by the International Association of Ports and Harbors (IAPH in Baku. The participants of the event taken place between May 8 and 11are discussing cargo transportation along the Silk Road, the development of transport hubs and the role of ports in this issue, as well as issues of multiculturalism, cultural differences in global logistics, the work of free trade zones, increasing competition among them and other topics.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Politico: Bolton pushing to eliminate White House cyber job. “President Donald Trump’s national security team is weighing the elimination of the top White House cybersecurity job, multiple sources told POLITICO — a move that would come as the nation faces growing digital threats from adversaries such as Russia and Iran. John Bolton, Trump’s hawkish new national security adviser, is leading the push to abolish the role of special assistant to the president and cybersecurity coordinator, currently held by the departing Rob Joyce, according to one current and two former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the discussions.”

FBI: FBI Releases the IC3 2017 Internet Crime Report and Calls for Increased Public Awareness. “On May 7, 2018, the FBI released the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) 2017 Internet Crime Report, which highlights trending Internet scams. The information in the report was compiled from complaints of suspected criminal Internet activity filed with the IC3 in 2017. The report’s data represents a total of 301,580 complaints with reported losses in excess of $1.4 billion. The top three crime types reported by victims in 2017 were non-payment/non-delivery, personal data breach, and phishing. ”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CNET: Human or bot? Google Duplex scares me. “In this age of disinformation, where fake news thrives and the public has trust issues with technology, Google designed a machine that can deceive humans. Gosh, what could go wrong?”

Brookings Institute: How misinformation spreads on social media—And what to do about it . “Most users who generate misinformation do not share accurate information too, so it can be difficult to tease out the effect of misinformation itself. For example, when President Trump shares misinformation on Twitter, his tweets tend to go viral. But they may not be going viral because of the misinformation: All those retweets may instead owe to the popularity of Trump’s account, or the fact that he writes about politically charged subjects. Without a corresponding set of accurate tweets from Trump, there’s no way of knowing what role misinformation is playing. For researchers, isolating the effect of misinformation is thus extremely challenging. It’s not often that a user will share both accurate and inaccurate information about the same event, and at nearly the same time.”

Wired: Your Smartphone Choice Could Determine If You’ll Get A Loan. “EVERY TIME YOU visit a website, you leave behind a trail of information, including seemingly innocuous data, like whether you use an Android or Apple device. And while that might feel like a mere personal preference, it turns out that lenders can use that type of passive signal to help predict whether you’ll default. In fact, new research suggests that those signals can predict consumer behavior as accurately as traditional credit scores. That could disrupt the traditional credit bureau industry that’s dominated since the 1980s—and have serious ramifications for privacy.” Good morning, Internet…

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