NEW RESOURCES

NY CaribNews: African Film Festival, Inc. launches AFF Digital Streaming Service and Film Archives. “African Film Festival, Inc. (AFF), the premier U.S. presenter of African cinema, has unveiled its new streaming platform and digital archives at its online home… The portal to the Continent includes more than 800 profiles of directors from across the diaspora, from veterans like Ousmane Sembène, Safi Faye, Souleymane Cissé and Tunde Kelani to emerging talents like Mamadou Dia, Nuotama Bodomo, Abba Makama, and Mariama Diallo as well as more than 1,000 film profiles, and interviews, articles, reviews, photographs and more.”

Phys .org: Destroyed ancient temple now open for virtual exploration. “Five years after its destruction, the ancient Temple of Bel in Palmyra, Syria has been digitally reconstructed by the UC San Diego Library’s Digital Media Lab using cutting-edge 3-D methods and artificial intelligence applications. Inspired by a past collaboration between the Library and UC San Diego’s Levantine Archeology Laboratory, this project has resulted in the digital preservation of more than a dozen lost reliefs, sculptures, frescos and paintings, all made publicly available on the Library’s Digital Collections website.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechRepublic: IBM creates an open source tool to simplify API documentation. “APIs are essential to programming, but they can get complicated. IBM has launched a new tool for developers that should make writing API documentation a bit easier: The OpenAPI Comment Parser. ‘Developers need instructions on how to use your API and they need a way to try it out. Good documentation handles both,’ IBM developer advocate Nicholas Bourdakos said in a blog post about the new developer tool.”

CNET: Apple says WordPress doesn’t have to add in-app purchases. “Apple’s remarks come after WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg tweeted Friday that Apple was going to cut off updates and bug fixes to the open-source software app unless it committed to supporting in-app purchases for WordPress’ payment plans.”

Engadget: Twitter ‘Transparency Center’ shows government data requests by country. “About every six months, Twitter releases a transparency report detailing things like how many state-backed accounts it has suspended and the number of government requests for information on account holders. Today, Twitter is unveiling a centralized hub for those reports and the data they contain. The new Twitter Transparency Center is now live.”

USEFUL STUFF

Make Tech Easier: How to Get Started with Google Drawings to Create Flowcharts. “Everyone’s familiar with Google Docs and Google Sheets, but did you know that there’s also a Google Drawings? If you had no idea that this website existed, it’s a great tool to have in your repository for helping you get work done. Let’s explore how to use Google Drawings to create flowcharts.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Harvard Gazette: Challenge of archiving the #MeToo movement. “For decades, Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library has been the nation’s leading repository for a range of primary-source materials documenting the lives and legacies of women in America. Its collections are crammed with letters and posters, journals and photographs — the physical records of an individual, a family, a social action, a political campaign. Today, newer collections often arrive with hard disks and thumb drives; ‘papers’ now include emails. But until recently, social media had not figured largely. Then came a cultural moment that shook the nation and helped transform the way the library collects and curates material in a communications age when hashtags can muster millions and tweets are commentary, conversation, and official declaration.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: U.S. regulator proposes scaling back personal information from trading database. “The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday said it would remove some personal information from a controversial trading database, bowing to pressure from the brokerage industry which has long warned the project would be vulnerable to hacks. Friday’s proposal, which is subject to a public consultation, seeks to limit the scope of sensitive information required by a massive new industry trading database, the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT), conceived to help the regulator better police the markets.”

Data Center Knowledge: New Foundation Aims to Tighten Security Across the Open Source Ecosystem. “While proprietary software vendors and security companies still often sow FUD around open source security, the ‘many eyeballs’ theory — formulated by the open source pioneer Eric S. Raymond as, ‘Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow’ — remains true. Open source software is generally as safe, if not safer, than its proprietary counterparts. However, there are problems unique to open source that need addressing, such as underfunded and understaffed projects, and open source development practices like copying and pasting code into new projects. The latter means that even when a security vulnerability is found in one project, it might go undetected within numerous other projects.”

Bleeping Computer: U.S. spirits and wine giant hit by cyberattack, 1TB of data stolen. “Brown-Forman, one of the largest U.S. companies in the spirits and wine business, suffered a cyber attack. The intruders allegedly copied 1TB of confidential data; they plan on selling to the highest bidder the most important info and leak the rest. Headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, the company holds world-known whiskey and scotch brands like Jack Daniel’s, Woodford, Old Forester, Collingwood, Glenglassaugh, and Glendronach; Herradura, El Jimador, and Pepe Lopez tequila; Finlandia vodka, and Sonoma-Cutrer wines.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EurekAlert: KDD 2020 showcases brighest minds in data science and AI. “The Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (ACM SIGKDD) will hold its flagship annual conference, KDD 2020, virtually, August 23-27. The KDD conference series, started in 1989, is the world’s oldest and largest data mining conference, and is the venue where concepts such as big data, data science, predictive analytics and crowdsourcing were first introduced. Continuing this tradition, KDD 2020 will showcase leading-edge research papers in data science, data mining, knowledge discovery, large-scale data analytics and big data.”

ScienceDaily: ‘Selfies’ could be used to detect heart disease. “Sending a ‘selfie’ to the doctor could be a cheap and simple way of detecting heart disease, according to the authors of a new study published today (Friday) in the European Heart Journal. The study is the first to show that it’s possible to use a deep learning computer algorithm to detect coronary artery disease (CAD) by analysing four photographs of a person’s face.” Good morning, Internet…

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