NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, with new offshoots: Hasse receives N.J. conservation award for vast online mapping project. “Rowan University Professor of Geography John Hasse and a team of researchers have compiled a massive trove of New Jersey land use data and moved it all online for easy access, a project that will benefit students, journalists, municipal officials, developers and residents for decades to come.”

The Local, Germany: New website shows how German industry used Auschwitz prisoners as slaves. “The site pulls together more than a decade of research on some 45 sub-camps or ‘kommandos’ located on the periphery of the most notorious site of the Nazi Holocaust. Based on first-hand accounts and research in the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum and others, the site contains more than 3,500 photos, documents and maps. It tells the story of each sub-camp, including lists of the survivors and SS guards and information about their personal stories. The site also lists the industrial organisations implicated in exploiting prisoners at the camps.”

New-to-me, from the Daily Bruin: New online maps documents Native American ancestral territory at Fowler. “Current literature on indigenous Los Angeles rarely comes from those doing work inside tribal communities. Wendy Teeter, curator of archaeology at the Fowler Museum, will be giving a lecture at the Fowler Museum on Wednesday to discuss the web-based project ‘Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles.'”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Facebook abandons plan to sell ads in WhatsApp, report says. “Facebook has reportedly abandoned its plan to sell ads in messaging platform WhatsApp, according to a Thursday report by The Wall Street Journal. The company’s decision to bring ads to the app is reportedly what led to the departure of WhatsApp’s creators around two years ago.”

USEFUL STUFF

Make Tech Easier: Web Code Playground Tools You Should Try. “If you’re at all into web coding, you’ve probably used at least one code playground in your time. These aren’t your usual code editors, but places where you can test your code without worrying about the backend server setup. Codepen and JSFiddle are the two most popular, but, perhaps unsurprisingly (given that the target audience for web code playgrounds is people who have the skills to build code playgrounds themselves), there are many alternatives.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

SHOOT Publicity Wire (PRESS RELEASE): American Society of Cinematographers Appoints Terry McCarthy as CEO. “McCarthy [said] that there will be special events throughout the year to celebrate the 100th anniversary of American Cinematographer. ‘This magazine continues to have iconic status, and by the end of this year we will have every one of its 1,200 issues available in a searchable online database – a real treasure trove of 100 years of cinematography!'”

The Verge: YouTube advertisers blindsided by climate change denial videos. “YouTube has been recommending and serving ads against videos that feature denial of or misinformation about climate change, according to a new report. The identified videos had 21.1 million views between them and might be suggested to users after a search for ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming,’ or the conspiracy theory ‘climate manipulation.'”

Chicago Tribune: Are you getting paid for that Instagram post? Companies tap employees to spread more ‘authentic’ message online.. “Most major companies already have a presence on social media. Many partner with professional influencers hired for their audience. But some are now trying to add their own employees to the mix, whether they’re trying to attract customers, recruit new hires or just boost a brand’s image.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BBC: ‘OK Boomer’: From TikTok meme to the US Supreme Court. “You might have seen it as a meme on Twitter or TikTok but now it has made its way to the US Supreme Court. The catchphrase ‘OK Boomer’ went viral last year as a tongue-in-cheek dig by young people at older generations. In the highest US court, it was heard as part of a case about age discrimination.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Air & Space Magazine: These Amateur Archaeologists Dig Up the Buzz Bombs That Fell on England in WW2. “The brothers locate the crashed V-weapons by examining county and national records, including the official ‘bomb census’—an attempt by the wartime authorities to record the damage caused by falling bombs. Because those records are incomplete, they also check combat reports from fighter pilots on V-1 patrols. The brothers work closely with historical officers for the county of Kent and send a copy of the final report from each dig to Britain’s Ministry of Defence. They make a detailed risk assessment at each site before a dig begins.”

BBC: Social media data needed for ‘harm’ research, say doctors. “Leading UK psychiatrists say they will never understand the risks and benefits of social media use on children’s mental health unless companies hand over their data to researchers. Tech companies must be made to share data and pay a tax to fund important research, they say in a report.”

Outlook India: Govt exploring use of AI to tackle social media misuse. “To stop spread of disinformation leading to widespread public disorder, the government is exploring use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to remove such content automatically from social media platforms.” Good morning, Internet…

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