NEW RESOURCES

Georgia Public Library Service: “We Endure” Oral History Collection Documents Stories, Struggles of Cairo, Georgia’s African American Community. “Georgia Public Library Service has digitized over 80 oral history interviews held by the Roddenbery Memorial Library in Cairo, Georgia, and recorded during the early 1980s with African American residents of that area. The collection, titled ‘They Endure: A Chronicle of Courage,’ also includes 50 digitized slides depicting local African American churches and cemeteries in Grady County.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

DigitalNC: Fill-In Batch of The Carolina Indian Voice Now Online. “DigitalNC is happy to announce a new batch of digitized newspaper issues from The Carolina Indian Voice. This round of issues includes most of 1976, all of 1977, and fill-ins for the years 1979-1996. These additions have brought us that much closer to a complete online collection of The Voice. We would like to thank our partners at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for providing the physical issues that made this possible.”

Google Blog: Our all-new TalkBack screen reader. “Screen readers, such as Android’s TalkBack, are the primary interface through which Joshua [Pearson] and many other people who are blind or low vision read, write, send emails, share social media, order delivery and even write music. TalkBack speaks the screen aloud, navigates through apps, and facilitates communication with braille, voice and keyboard input. And today we’re releasing an all-new version of TalkBack that includes some of the most highly requested features from the blind and low vision community.”

USEFUL STUFF

TNW Neural: A beginner’s guide to AI: Ethics in artificial intelligence. “The most obvious solution for a given problem isn’t always the best solution. For example: it’d be much easier for us to dump all of our trash on our neighbors lawn and let them deal with it. But, for a variety of reasons, it’s probably not the optimal solution. At its core, such an action would be unethical because it forces someone else to assume your burdens in addition to their own. Basically: It’s unethical to pass your garbage along to the next person. And that’s pretty much what we need to focus on when we’re trying to understand ethics in the field of artificial intelligence.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

IndyStar: Newfields director job post calling to maintain ‘core, white art audience’ sees criticism. “Newfields, the home of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, was under fire Saturday over its job description for a new director that stated applicants would need to maintain the museum’s ‘traditional, core, white art audience.’ That phrase, ironically, was included in a larger bullet point — under ‘other responsibilities’ — that actually sought to note the need for the museum to reach a more diverse audience.”

CNN: Sorry, millennials. The 😂 emoji isn’t cool anymore. “In recent weeks, two internet-savvy generations have been clashing in videos and comments on TikTok over the hallmarks of millennial culture that are now deemed uncool by Gen Z. The list includes skinny jeans (Gen Z verdict: set them on fire), side parts (Gen Z verdict: middle part or bust) and perhaps most painful of all, the popular laughing crying emoji that some millennials, myself included, use hundreds of times a day, or more.”

The Guardian: How technology unlocked the secretive power of ‘Queen’s consent’. “Have you ever right-clicked on a webpage and pressed the ‘View Page Source’ button? You’ll see the HTML building blocks: the mark-up incantations used to build the page on your screen. The HTML focuses on presentation: what colour that text should be, how big that image should be, and so on. Web scraping is the art of transforming this semi-structured soup back into the structured data that produced it – in this case, who was speaking in which chamber at what time, and what did they say.”

Columbus Dispatch: Columbus entrepreneur launches BLCK Talks platform to facilitate Black education. “Inspired by the Marvel film ‘Black Panther,’ entrepreneur Maurice Womack was motivated to build an educational ecosystem for Black learners. Embracing the mantra ‘knowledge is power,’ Womack, 42, and his wife Erica, 41, developed a communal learning platform called the Wokanda App.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TechCrunch: ‘Orwellian’ AI lie detector project challenged in EU court. “A legal challenge was heard [February 5] in Europe’s Court of Justice in relation to a controversial EU-funded research project using artificial intelligence for facial ‘lie detection’ with the aim of speeding up immigration checks.”

Vice: New Video Shows Beverly Hills Cops Playing Beatles to Trigger Instagram Copyright Filter. “As VICE News reported Tuesday, police in Beverly Hills have repeatedly played copyrighted music while being filmed, seemingly in an attempt to trigger Instagram’s algorithmic copyright filters, which could result in videos of police interactions with the public being taken down. Repeated infractions can result in the suspension of live streamers’ accounts.”

BBC: Omegle: Children expose themselves on video chat site. WARNING: Disturbing content. Even this excerpt is disturbing. “A BBC investigation into the increasingly popular live video chat website Omegle has found what appear to be prepubescent boys explicitly touching themselves in front of strangers.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

ZDNet: AI can write a passing college paper in 20 minutes. “AI can do a lot of things extremely well. One thing that it can do just okay — which, frankly, is still quite extraordinary — is write college term papers. That’s the finding from EduRef, a resource for students and educators, which ran an experiment to determine if a deep learning language prediction model known as GPT-3 could get passing marks in an anonymized trial.” Good morning, Internet…

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