TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Slack is bridging email to chat, improving calendar integration and search. “Slack arrived more than five years ago with the bold attempt to try to kill email in the workplace. It’s 2019, we’re all still sending emails, and Slack may have even made emails stronger. Thankfully, Slack has realized that our email and calendaring solutions are useful and should work more closely with its chat software. We’ve seen this recently with Office 365 integration, and now the company is going a few steps further by bridging email and calendaring directly into Slack.”

FamilySearch: Add Audio to Pictures on FamilySearch.org . “For years, FamilySearch has helped you preserve family memories by allowing you to upload photos and attach them to your family tree. Now you can take another step in preserving memories by adding audio recordings to the pictures you upload to FamilySearch.org.”

Fold3: New States Added to WWII Draft Registration Card Collection!. ” We’ve updated our WWII Draft Registration Card collection and added records from Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Washington! We now have Draft Registration Cards from 38 states or regions in this collection!”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: Introduce Your Kid to More Diverse YouTube Game Streamers. “One of our readers emailed us with an interesting problem: He’s the father of three boys, ages 6, 10, and 12, and they love watching gaming streamers on YouTube, but all the gamers they watch are white dudes. Guys like DanTDM and Ninja make fantastic content that really connects with kids, but they do it from a white man’s point of view, and don’t represent the diversity that exists among people who actually play games. YouTube’s ‘recommended’ algorithm offers little help, as it tends to serve up videos like the ones you already watch (in this case, more white guys), so I put together this list of five awesome game streamers who are not straight, white, men, but who are appropriate for kids.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CNN: Dutch tulip growers beg selfie-taking millennials to stop trampling their flowers. “Tulip growers in the Netherlands are pleading millennials to stop taking selfies among the flowers, after tourists caused thousands of euros’ worth of damage by trampling over the plants in search of the perfect picture.”

The Iris: Creating a Digital Museum to Memorialize America’s Slave Past. “Scholar James Young once posed this provocative question: How does a nation memorialize a past it might rather forget? Art historian Renée Ater is exploring this question by researching 25 monuments to the slave past located in the South, Midwest, and Northeast of the United States. A 2018 Getty Scholar and an associate professor emerita of the history of art at the University of Maryland, College Park, Ater plans to publish her findings in a forthcoming digital project, Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past: Race, Memorialization, and Civic Engagement.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Digital Trends: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant’: Clooney, Microsoft unveil TrialWatch app. “CFJ’s TrialWatch program, which formally launched this year, aims to monitor trials around the world that pose a high risk of human rights violations: trials that oppress vulnerable groups, silence speech, or target political opponents. Through the program, a small group of trial lawyers and activists are trained to report on legal proceedings, boiling a trial down to a series of facts that can be easily recorded and ultimately compared.The new app augments the ability of TrialWatch’s monitors, making it easier to document happenings in a courtroom.”

The Globe and Mail: Google exempt from back taxes in France, appeals court confirms. “Google will not have to pay 1.1 billion euros ($1.22-billion) in back taxes demanded by French authorities, an appeals court in France ruled on Thursday, dashing the government’s bid to overturn a 2017 decision.”

CNET: Pirated streaming devices are filled with malware, researchers find. “It seems there’s no such thing as a free show. Security researchers from the Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA) and Dark Wolfe Consulting looked into six streaming devices that offered free shows through pirated apps and found nearly half of them were packed with malware.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: Google’s algorithms discriminate against women and people of colour. “At the start of Black History Month 2019, Google designed its daily-changing homepage logo to include an image of African-American activist Sojourner Truth, the great 19th-century abolitionist and women’s rights activist. But what would Truth say about Google’s continual lack of care and respect toward people of colour? While bringing more attention to Sojourner Truth is venerable, Google can do better. As a professor and researcher of digital cultures, I have found that a lack of care and investment by tech companies towards users who are not white and male allows racism and sexism to creep into search engines, social networks and other algorithmic technologies.”

Quartz India: Twitter is sleepwalking through this Indian election. “Yesterday (April 24), the microblogging platform announced the launch of a feature that allows users to report posts attempting to ‘undermine the process of registering to vote or engaging in the electoral process.’ Examples of this type of content, a company blog post explained, could be intentionally misleading instructions about how to vote or register to vote, or other such election-related misinformation. The problem, though, is the timing. ”

The Next Web: Deep learning can help us eradicate suicide – but only if we let it. “Humanity’s mental health crisis has reached pandemic proportions. Bluntly put: we don’t seem capable of solving the problem on our own. Cutting edge AI research shows a clear path forward, but society as a whole will have to accept the fact that mental health is real in order for us to take the first steps.” Good morning, Internet…

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