NEW RESOURCES

BusinessWire: Colourise. com Releases Online AI Colorization Service, Allowing Users to Colorize Photos in One Click (PRESS RELEASE). “If you are one of the techies curious about AI, you might have heard of Convolutional Neural Network in deep learning, a type of network for visual imagery analysis. That is exactly what makes AI colorization possible. Colourise.com has trained its deep neural networks with tens of thousands of old black and white photos and modern color images that have complex or simple scenes. All you need to do is upload black and white photos and let AI take care of the rest.” I tried this with two photos. One was only partially colorized and the other looked like it got fruit punch spilled on it. YMMV but I probably won’t be coming back to this one.

Bangor Daily News: A searchable database of 5 years of punishments for county officers in Maine. “Now, the public can see five years of discipline for the worst patrol and corrections officer misconduct at the county level. In these public records, you can see which sheriff’s offices have been open about their misconduct and which have opted to share as little detail as possible. In total, a third of records for serious discipline, where someone was suspended, terminated, demoted or resigned in lieu of discipline, did not provide enough information to determine what actually happened.”

The Gamer: Nintendo’s Camp Hyrule Games Are Now Available On The Internet Archives. “If summer camp was your way of escaping the school routine, and you also loved The Legend of Zelda, then Nintendo’s Camp Hyrule must have been the event for you. What stands as Nintendo’s biggest online event now has its collection of games available on the Internet Archive. First appearing in 1995, Camp Hyrule was the virtual place to be in August, where a host of online games were available to play within its summer camp simulation. The catalogue of games included trivia challenges, sports games, rhythm minigames, and more.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Facebook’s oversight board unveils its first slate of cases. “Facebook’s content oversight board on Tuesday chose its first slate of cases for review, selecting six from more than 20,000 brought to the independent body since it opened its doors in late October. Three of the cases involve hate speech, which the social network restricts as part of its community guidelines. Five of the cases were brought by users, while one was brought by the company itself.”

Google Blog: A new way to discover what’s happening with Google Maps. “If there’s anyone that can keep you in-the-know, it’s the Google Maps community. Every day, people submit more than 20 million contributions—including recommendations for their favorite spots, updates to business services, fresh reviews and ratings, photos, answers to other people’s questions, updated addresses and more. Now, we’re making it easier to find updates and recommendations from trusted local sources with a new community feed in the Explore tab of Google Maps.”

USEFUL STUFF

Popular Science: Social media can be toxic. Here’s how to make sure your feeds aren’t.. “There are dozens of guides out there on how to curate your feed by unfollowing and blocking the toxic people in your life, and you can even use third-party tools to remove posts with certain words. That can do a lot of good, but with cultural strife at 2020 levels, bickering will undoubtedly infect your feed no matter how many words you mute and people you unfollow. To avoid this, I’ve taken a more nuclear approach—I’ve unfollowed almost everybody.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Art Newspaper: Jewish collections looted by the Nazis to be examined and traced in new database . “A new database that aims to provide a comprehensive registry of all the Jewish collections looted by the Nazis has announced a pilot project focussing on the fate of the collection of Adolphe Schloss, whose store of Dutch Old Masters was seized by the Gestapo from the French chateau where they had been hidden for safekeeping. One third of the collection is still missing.”

NiemanLab: Beyond “yellow banners on websites”: How to restore moral and technical order in a time of misinformation. “With just four (!) weeks left in 2020, Dr. Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center, says that now is the time to think about what we can do to ‘restore moral and technical order’ at time when so many people — from journalists, public servants, and civil society leaders to public health professionals — are paying the price (and consequences) of misinformation.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Gizmodo: Massachusetts Lawmakers Voted To Ban Police From Using Facial Recognition Tech. “Massachusetts lawmakers voted on Monday to pass a police reform bill that would outlaw the use of facial recognition technology by police departments and other public agencies in the state. The bill now heads to Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker for his signature.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: How Archaeologists Are Using Deep Learning to Dig Deeper. “Finding the tomb of an ancient king full of golden artifacts, weapons and elaborate clothing seems like any archaeologist’s fantasy. But searching for them, Gino Caspari can tell you, is incredibly tedious.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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