NEW RESOURCES

Air Force Museum of New Zealand: Air Force Museum Photo Archives Go Online. “Although at this stage only approximately 5,000 images are available, an estimated 0.5% of the total collection, more are coming online every day. Usually these are photos that researchers have requested and because there’s only me working in the Photo Archive, generally these are all I have time to digitise and make available. As time permits, I’ll be working through many thousands of files which simply need only a small amount of work before they can be made available. The initial focus will be on named course groups, starting with wartime pilots’ courses and aircraft pictures.”

Carnegie Mellon University: Leading AI Scholars Featured in New Oral Archive. “[Illah] Nourbakhsh and [Jennifer] Keating have captured the thoughts of some leading AI scholars in a new oral archive that became available online this year. It includes video and transcripts from 22 people, including MIT’s Daniela Rus, Harvard University’s Barbara Grosz and Microsoft’s Eric Horvitz, as well as a number of CMU faculty members such as Martial Hebert, David Danks, Mark Kamlet, Tuomas Sandholm and Jim Herbsleb.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Royal College of Physicians of Ireland: Cataloguing of RCPI’s historic book collection complete. “The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland is celebrating an important milestone in the ongoing project to catalogue our historic library holdings. We have now catalogued all the books in our collection, with all 14,718 items now available in our online library catalogue. This significant project, led by Keeper of Collections, Harriet Wheelock, has taken ten years to complete.” The link provided in the announcement doesn’t work, but if you remove the leading www it works fine.

Neowin: Facebook publishes white paper focused on online content regulation. “The paper aims to establish some guidelines for how regulation around online content needs to be created and what factors need to be taken into account. CEO Mark Zuckerberg had already called for internet regulation last year, but this paper includes more tangible guidelines for how this can be done.”

The Next Web: Microsoft just combined Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into a single handy Android app. “…today Microsoft publicly released the first unified Office app for Android. The app was previously only available for Office Insiders during a preview period that began in November with a small group of users, according to Thurrott.com. Now it’s available publicly right in the Play Store.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

ABC News (Australia): $9 million debt to Google highlights lack of transparency around Australian political advertising . “Just after the 2019 election, Australian political parties owed Google more than $9 million. This debt is revealed in financial declarations filed with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC). By June 30, parties were required to record any debts over $13,800 they owed for the last financial year.” $9 million Australian dollars is just under $6 million US at this writing.

Eesti Rahvusringhääling: Report: Folklore archive jeopardized by lack of funding. “At the beginning of the year, the question of the future of the Estonian Folklore Archives (Eesti rahvaluule arhiiv) came into focus, since the organization has not received funds for research projects this year.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: EU privacy body warns of privacy risks in Google, Fitbit deal . “Alphabet Inc-owned Google’s $2.1 billion bid for fitness trackers company Fitbit could pose privacy risks, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) warned on Thursday, adding its voice to other critics of the deal.”

The Verge: Ring cameras can help you spy on your neighbors, but they haven’t really helped police. “Ring’s security devices are advertised as a way to have peace of mind about your home, and the company’s work with law enforcement to provide additional security is well-documented. But two recent stories about the Amazon-owned company demonstrate how its security cameras can distort your view of how much crime actually takes place near your house and how they may not actually help police solve crimes at all.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Aleteia: The Catholic Church’s new tool for ending hunger: machine learning. “Drought, major storms, crop disease, other climate-related events, and illness are ‘shocks’ that threaten food security, says Catholic Relief Services, the American Catholic Church’s overseas aid agency. Now, CRS says it has a tool that it says can help aid agencies better respond to such shocks so that ordinary people don’t go hungry. That tool is called MIRA, or Measurement Indicators for Resilience Analysis.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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