NEW RESOURCES

Plano Magazine: Girl Scout Gives New Life to Plano African American Museum. “Zara Jones, a senior at Plano West Senior High, has been a Girl Scout since she was a Daisy Scout in Kindergarten. She is now working toward earning her Gold Award with a project that spotlights the history and contributions of African Americans in Plano and around the United States. The Gold Award is Girl Scouts’ highest honor, earned by less than six percent of Girl Scouts. On Feb. 20 Zara launched the digital Plano African American Museum.”

Missouri Department of Economic Development: Missouri Community Service Commission launches new website to promote volunteerism statewide. “Today, the Missouri Community Service Commission (MCSC) launched its new website. In addition to a fresh design, the website features information on community service opportunities, volunteer spotlights, and background information about MCSC’s programs.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

University of New Mexico: UNM Art Museum offers new virtual exhibit. “‘Hindsight/Insight: Reflecting on the Collection’ highlights over 30 artworks acquired since the museum was founded in 1962. This is the first in an ongoing series of exhibitions and programs celebrating The University of New Mexico Art Museum’s dedication to developing a teaching collection.”

Living with Hearing Loss: Zoom Makes ASR Captioning Free for People with Hearing Loss. “Success! Zoom has heard our community’s voice! Zoom just announced it will provide its high-quality ASR captions (Live Transcript) FREE for people with hearing loss, as well as other groups who require this feature for accessibility reasons. Click here to request access. This feature will be rolled out to all free accounts by Fall 2021.”

Tubefilter: YouTube Shutters 7 Remaining ‘YouTube Spaces’ Globally, Doubling Down On Pop-ups And Virtual Programming. “YouTube announced today that it’s permanently ceasing operations at each of its remaining YouTube Spaces across the globe, bringing a formal end to an initiative it launched nine years ago to operate fixed physical hubs in key markets furnishing studio space, networking events, and video education classes.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Nursing Times: Study to dive into stories of nurses and midwives accused of witchcraft. “The team of researchers at Edinburgh Napier University has won funding from the RCN Foundation to investigate more than 100 folk healers and midwives who are listed on the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft online database.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BBC: Social Media: Should people be allowed to be anonymous online?. “People are suggesting social media platforms should make their users sign in with formal identification such as driving licence or passport to make it easier for the police to identify people who commit hate crimes and also discourage people from posting abuse in the first place. However, there are fears that this would be giving social media companies too much personal data and could also pose a threat to activists, whistleblowers (who are people that reveal information about bad things people or companies have done) and persecuted minorities who need to protect their identity online. So what are the positives and negatives of being anonymous online?”

Moscow Times: Putin Tightens Fines for Protesters, ‘Biased’ Social Media Giants. “Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a handful of new laws Wednesday that impose heavy fines on protesters and ‘foreign agents,’ as well as on social media giants accused of ‘discriminating’ against Russian media. Observers have described legislators’ recent activity as part of the Kremlin’s efforts to tighten restrictions on dissent ahead of this fall’s parliamentary elections, which will take place amid simmering public anger over falling incomes.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: A.I. Here, There, Everywhere. “Researchers liken the current state of the technology to cellphones of the 1990s: useful, but crude and cumbersome. They are working on distilling the largest, most powerful machine-learning models into lightweight software that can run on ‘the edge,’ meaning small devices such as kitchen appliances or wearables. Our lives will gradually be interwoven with brilliant threads of A.I.”

Carnegie Mellon University: CMU Students Train AI to Write Book of Limericks. “Mitch Fogelson, a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering, said he and his fellow students — Xinkai Chen, who completed the Master of Information Systems Management program in December 2020; Qifei Dong, a master’s degree candidate in electrical and computer engineering; Christopher Dare, a master’s degree candidate in information and communication technology; and Tony Qin, a junior artificial intelligence major — opted to focus their AI on limericks because the form has a fixed AABBA rhyming structure. Also, they had access to a database of 90,000 limericks that they could use to train their AI.”

Phys .org: Different social media platforms foster different levels of segregation in online communities. “A team of researchers from Ca’Foscari Univerity of Venice, the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation, the University of Brescia and the Sapienza University of Rome has found that different kinds of social media platforms foster different levels of segregation in online communities. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their study of millions of online posts on several leading social media sites and what they found.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Boing Boing: A fascinating website with the source photos for the people on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. “Here’s a guy who, for the last several years, has been trying to track down the source photos of the people who appeared on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), The Beatles’ eighth studio album.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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