NEW RESOURCES

University of Michigan: U-M tool measures ‘iffy’ news on social media in time for 2018 election. “As the crucial mid-term election approaches, the University of Michigan Center for Social Media Responsibility offers media and the public a tool to help monitor the prevalence of fake news on social media through a Platform Health Metric called the Iffy Quotient. A web-based dashboard that shows the Iffy Quotient for Facebook and Twitter, dating back to 2016, will be updated regularly.”

Salt Lake Tribune: 115 arches were left out of the reduced Bears Ears and Grand Staircase national monuments. A University of Utah team is creating a digital archive to ‘preserve’ them.. “[Researchers] have mapped at least 115 natural rock arches — 37 in Grand Staircase and 78 in Bears Ears — that were left outside the monuments when they were drastically reduced in December 2017. The group started a digital archive to ‘preserve a sort of portrait’ of them all, said Jeff Moore, associate professor of geology and geophysics at the U.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

DigitalNC: Commencement programs and other select materials from Shaw University now available online at DigitalNC. “A new batch of materials documenting the history of Shaw University, a historically black liberal arts institution in Raleigh, NC, are now online and available for use at DigitalNC.”

TechCrunch: Dropbox finally adds automatic OCR for all your PDFs and photos . “Enterprise Dropbox users have a useful new feature that some would say is long overdue for the cloud storage company: optical character recognition that automatically transcribes all their images and PDFs. No more rummaging around in your saved photos for a receipt or opening dozens of mysteriously named documents to find the right one. Just search and ye shall find.”

Neowin: Microsoft: we’ve got your back, Linux, here are 60,000 patents to protect you . “Microsoft loves Linux. And it really wants to prove it. In lieu of a wedding ring, the company has decided to show its dedication to open-source software by joining the Open Innovation Network (OIN), a community designed to protect Linux and other open-source software from legal liability. As part of its grand gesture, the company is also planning on making 60,000 of its patents public, and making them available to the OIN.”

Ubergizmo: Google Is Killing Off Its ‘Reply’ App. “One of the features that we’ve been seeing Google do with its services is introduce ways to quickly reply to messages. It was initially introduced in Gmail where based on the content of the message, users could choose from various ‘smart’ replies for something simple. Google then decided to try applying it system wide with the launch of its Reply app.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Newshub: Divorce after cheating wife snapped on Google Maps. “Google Maps has sparked a divorce, after a husband discovered his wife in intimate photos with another man online. The man got a nasty shock while planning a trip, when he saw his wife on a bench stroking the hair of another man – with his head in her lap.”

University of Maryland: Fundraising Begins For White House Correspondents’ Association Pool Reports Collection. “The University of Maryland, the White House Correspondents’ Association and the Freedom Forum Institute celebrated the start of a partnership Tuesday that will bring a permanent digital archive of White House correspondents’ pool reports to the university. The White House Correspondents’ Association Pool Reports Collection — a unique record of the United States presidency — will be available online. It will consist of the reports written every day by members of the White House press corps on the activities of the president.” I mentioned this in April but we’re at the fundraising point now.

New York Times: How to Grieve for Online Friends You Had Never Met in Person. “More than ever before, we are using our smartphones and technology to form meaningful relationships with virtual strangers, both in romance and friendship; we celebrate one another’s successes, share our individual struggles, and despite geographical limitations, these bonds often span years. But what happens when the person on the other side of the screen dies?”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Exclusive: Vietnam cyber law set for tough enforcement despite Google, Facebook pleas. “Vietnam is preparing to strictly enforce a new cybersecurity law requiring global technology companies to set up local offices and store data locally despite pleas from Facebook, Google and other firms, a government document showed.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Register: Those Stanford whiz kids have done it again. Now a chatty AI bot to negotiate sales for you with Craigslist riffraff . “Artificially intelligent bots are notoriously bad at communicating with, well, anything. Conversations with the code, whether it’s between themselves or with people, often go awry, and veer off topic. Grammar goes out the window, and sentences become nonsensical. Remember the time this happened between a pair of Facebook-built chatbots, when they freaked people out so much that folks began to think the software had, supposedly, invented its own language? Well, a group of researchers at Stanford University in the US have figured out how to, in theory, prevent that chaos and confusion from happening.”

EurekAlert: Deep learning can distinguish recalled-benign mammograms from malignant and negative images . “An artificial intelligence (AI) approach based on deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN) could identify nuanced mammographic imaging features specific for recalled but benign (false-positive) mammograms and distinguish such mammograms from those identified as malignant or negative.”

Purdue News: AI tool automatically reveals how to write apps that drain less battery. “Purdue University researchers have created a new tool, called ‘DiffProf,’ that uses artificial intelligence to automatically decide for the developer if a feature should be improved to drain less battery and how to make that improvement.” Good morning, Internet…

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