NEW RESOURCES

The Hechinger Report: College spending comes under closer scrutiny. “The American Council of Trustees and Alumni on Wednesday launched a site that makes it easy to track how your hard-earned tuition dollars are spent… It’s geared toward college trustees, lawmakers and policy wonks, who can use the site’s data to lobby for or against government spending for higher education or to compare their institution to others. But parents and students can take advantage of it as well. It’s a quick way to figure out not only how much a school costs but also how much of that cost is actually spent on classroom instruction.”

Google Blog: The Journey of Us: Celebrating Black History’s movers and changemakers. “…we’ll spend Black History Month celebrating people from past and present who drive change, starting with a new collection of documents about Sojourner Truth in Google Arts and Culture. By telling these stories, we hope to inspire even more people to start their own journeys. Sojourner Truth changed her reality in a way that inspires us to do the same: to continue on our journey towards a more diverse and inclusive Google. Our consumers, our products, and our values demand it.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The person who resisted the urge to headline this “SNOPES NOPES” is a better person than me. CNBC: Snopes quits fact-checking partnership with Facebook. “Snopes, a fact-checking organization, announced on Friday its decision to end its partnership with Facebook, which has been ramping its efforts to curb misinformation on its services since the 2016 U.S. election.”

NBC: Twitter and Facebook say they removed thousands of troll accounts in run-up to 2018 midterms. “Twitter and Facebook disclosed on Thursday that the companies had coordinated to remove thousands of accounts tied to foreign governments that sought to spread disinformation in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections.”

Gizmodo: Fake FCC Comments Linked to Ex-Trump Campaign Director’s Org, Boosted By Roger Stone . “An organization run by a former Trump campaign statewide director is being investigated by the New York attorney general’s office for its role in the submission of potentially hundreds of thousands of fraudulent comments to the Federal Communications Commission during the agency’s 2017 efforts to rollback Obama-era net neutrality rules.”

TechCrunch: We dismantle Facebook’s memo defending its ‘Research’. “Facebook published an internal memo today trying to minimize the morale damage of TechCrunch’s investigation that revealed it’d been paying people to suck in all their phone data. Attained by Business Insider’s Rob Price, the memo from Facebook’s VP of production engineering and security Pedro Canahuati gives us more detail about exactly what data Facebook was trying to collect from teens and adults in the U.S. and India. But it also tries to claim the program wasn’t secret, wasn’t spying and that Facebook doesn’t see it as a violation of Apple’s policy against using its Enterprise Certificate system to distribute apps to non-employees — despite Apple punishing it for the violation.”

USEFUL STUFF

Social Media Examiner: How to Organize Social Media Marketing Tasks: 3 Tools. “Do you need to bring some organization to your social media workflow? Looking for tools to help? In this article, you’ll discover three tools to help you better organize social media posting, monitoring, and campaign execution tasks.”

New York Times: A Beginner’s Guide to Getting Into Podcasts. “As a content-obsessed millennial, I have made podcasts part of my daily routine for years. I listen while commuting, cooking, running errands, putting away laundry, washing dishes or during any relatively mindless activity that can be done while wearing wireless headphones. My bond with podcasts is so cemented that it comes as a shock when someone I meet at a party — or someone in my family, or a friend I thought I knew — tells me that they, in the year 2019, do not listen to podcasts. And never have. And don’t really get what it’s all about. And, worse, don’t quite know how to start.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Wirral Globe: Lottery boost for Port Sunlight ‘Drawn Together’ online archive. “The documents, including more than 4,000 original plans and detail drawings, illustrate founder William Lever’s vision for Port Sunlight, an industrial model village for his workers and the artistic and physical development, expansion and evolution of the village over a span of 70 years.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BuzzFeed News: One Of The Biggest At-Home DNA Testing Companies Is Working With The FBI. “Family Tree DNA, one of the largest private genetic testing companies whose home-testing kits enable people to trace their ancestry and locate relatives, is working with the FBI and allowing agents to search its vast genealogy database in an effort to solve violent crime cases, BuzzFeed News has learned.”

ZDNet: Firefox will soon warn users of software that performs MitM attacks. “The Firefox browser will soon come with a new security feature that will detect and then warn users when a third-party app is performing a Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack by hijacking the user’s HTTPS traffic.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Ars Technica: Scientists solve the mystery of Rembrandt’s “impasto” paint recipe. “The 17th century Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn is justly considered one of the greatest artists of all time. He’s particularly praised for his masterful depiction of light and shadow in his oil paintings, an almost three-dimensional effect achieved with his signature ‘impasto’ technique. The recipes he used to mix his paints were believed to be lost to history. But now a team of Dutch and French scientists has used high-energy X-rays to unlock Rembrandt’s secret recipe, according to a new paper in the journal Angewandte Chemie.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

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