NEW RESOURCES

Tennessee State Library and Archives: Kinsall Collection Now Available on TeVA. “The Lt. Col. J.Y. Kinsall Collection is now available to view online. This collection centered around Lt. Col. J.Y. Kinsall, a World War II and Korean War veteran. During his military career, Kinsall cultivated a passion for photography. Most of the photos and slides in this collection document his personal and military life during the Korean War. He took pictures of his family living in Japan, landscapes in South Korea, and photos of everyday life in Morocco.”

WCCO: Walker Art Center Unveils Online Archive Of 3 Decades’ Worth Of Filmmaker Interviews, Retrospectives. “Over the course of the last three decades, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has hosted retrospectives of many of the most internationally renowned contemporary filmmakers, as part of their Dialogues and Film Retrospectives series. The roster of luminaries highlighted by the Walker since 1990 includes directors like Clint Eastwood, Spike Lee, Robert Altman, Jane Campion, Werner Herzog, Agnes Varda, Abbas Kiarostami, Joel and Ethan Coen, Claire Denis, and John Waters; and also actors like Jodie Foster, Tom Hanks, Lily Taylor, and Harry Belafonte.”

Caltech: Introducing the Caltech Science Exchange. “Through the Caltech Science Exchange, the Institute aims to help visitors make sense of scientific issues that capture public interest and attention, but often are the subject of confusion or controversy. The site currently features multimedia content explaining the science behind COVID-19 and other viral threats. New topics, including voting and elections, sustainability, earthquakes, and genetics, will be added in the months ahead.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Anchor will now let you make video calls into audio podcasts. “Anchor, a podcast-making app owned by Spotify, will now let you take recordings of your video calls and chats and turn them into podcasts (via TechCrunch). If you’ve been doing a regular Zoom meetup with your friends to talk about Animal Crossing: New Horizons town designs, for example, this new tool could help you turn those conversations into a podcast you can publish and share.”

Neowin: Wikipedia is instituting new rules to battle “toxic behavior” by volunteers “In a bid to ensure safety against abuse on harassment on its platform, Wikipedia is putting a new code of conduct in place. Several members, particularly women and members of the LGBTQ community, have complained of the portrayal of “toxic behavior” by fellow editors on the platform. The website relies on these volunteers to keep it updated.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BBC: Web sleuths spot British Museum gaffe online. “The British Museum is updating its online collection after mistaking a copyright notice for the name of a Turkish postcard-printing company. The museum described ‘Her Hakki Mahfuzdur’ as ‘Turkey’s largest producer of postcards’. But a Turkish diplomat on Twitter pointed out the phrase means ‘all rights reserved’ – and is not the name of a stationery company.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Supreme Court Affirms That No One Owns the Law. “In a major victory for open government and fundamental due process, the Supreme Court ruled [April 27] that the annotations in a state’s official legal code—summaries of court decisions and other sources that explain the state’s laws—cannot be copyrighted. That is, that there cannot be a better-explained version of the law available only to those who can afford to pay for it. The law, in any form, must be accessible to all.”

TechCrunch: A massive database of 8 billion Thai internet records leaks. “Thailand’s largest cell network AIS has pulled a database offline that was spilling billions of real-time internet records on millions of Thai internet users. Security researcher Justin Paine said in a blog post that he found the database, containing DNS queries and Netflow data, on the internet without a password. With access to this database, Paine said that anyone could ‘quickly paint a picture’ about what an internet user (or their household) does in real-time.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EurekAlert: Red-flagging misinformation could slow the spread of fake news on social media. “A new study on the spread of disinformation reveals that pairing headlines with credibility alerts from fact-checkers, the public, news media and even AI, can reduce peoples’ intention to share. However, the effectiveness of these alerts varies with political orientation and gender. The good news for truth seekers? Official fact-checking sources are overwhelmingly trusted.”

MIT News: Automating the search for entirely new “curiosity” algorithms. “Engineers have discovered many ways of encoding curious exploration into machine learning algorithms. A research team at MIT wondered if a computer could do better, based on a long history of enlisting computers in the search for new algorithms.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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