NEW RESOURCES

Washington State Department of Health: New interactive mapping tool can pinpoint pollution hotspots in effort to improve health equity. “The Washington State Department of Health (DOH), in collaboration with the University of Washington, announces new interactive mapping tools to help utilities improve environmental health equity as they transition to cleaner energy generation. These tools identify communities in Washington that are disproportionately impacted by fossil fuel pollution and vulnerable to climate change impacts so that these inequities can be addressed.”

The Irish Times: Read all about us: The Dictionary of Irish Biography is now open access . “On March 17th, the most comprehensive and authoritative biographical dictionary yet published for Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB), is moving to an open access model, making its entire corpus of nearly 11,000 biographies, spanning over 1,500 years of Irish history, freely available to all through a new website…”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Mashable: Wikipedia wants to charge Google, Amazon, and Apple for using its content. “A new report by Wired looks into a brand new division under the Wikimedia umbrella called Wikimedia Enterprise. In a first for the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Enterprise will offer a paid service targeting Wikipedia’s biggest users: Big Tech companies. Wikimedia Enterprise, according to the organization, will provide a commercial product that tailors Wikipedia’s content for publication on services provided by Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon — services that millions upon millions of people use every day.”

Tubefilter: YouTube To Exclusively Broadcast 21 Major League Baseball Games This Season. “YouTube is back up to bat with Major League Baseball. The duo’s long-running partnership will see YouTube exclusively air 21 games from the upcoming season.”

The Verge: Facebook will court independent writers to its Substack competitor with paid deals. “Facebook wants to be a part of the newsletter business, and it’s willing to pay for it. Axios reports today that the company will soon start testing its newsletter product, which will integrate with Pages. As part of that test, Facebook will also court writers, some of whom the company will pay.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CNET: Twitter’s ‘Memphis’ moderation misstep gets a fix. “Twitter has fixed a bug that temporarily blocked people who tweeted out the word ‘Memphis.’ Over the weekend, Twitter’s moderation system appeared to automatically hand out a 12-hour suspension to anyone who tweeted out the name of the city in Tennessee.”

NiemanLab: California State University’s student journalists launched a wire service to share their work with each other. Here’s how they did it.. “Cal State Student Newswire launched in March 2020 as a wire service for student publications in the California State University system. Over the last year, it’s evolved from a wire service to an experimental, collaborative initiative to produce journalism across all CSUs.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Register: Smart doorbells on business premises make your property more attractive to burglars, warns researcher. “Installing a smart doorbell on your abode could actually increase your home’s attractiveness to burglars, researchers from Britain’s Cranfield University have said. The defence ‘n’ security-focused institution’s findings fly in the face of heavy marketing from companies such as Amazon’s Ring, whose video-enabled doorbell product has been touted around the world as a security-enhancing gadget.”

GovExec: New Bill Would Increase Transparency of Presidential Records. “Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, will introduce the ‘Presidential Records Preservation Act,’ which would update the ‘1978 Presidential Records Act’ by requiring the president, vice president, and other senior White House officials to ‘make and preserve records’ that document the president’s official activities. The ‘Federal Records Act,’ which oversees record keeping in the executive and legislative agencies, the judiciary and a few executive offices, has a similar provision.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: A.I. Is Not What You Think. “When you hear about artificial intelligence, stop imagining computers that can do everything we can do but better. My colleague Cade Metz, who has a new book about A.I., wants us to understand that the technology is promising but has its downsides: It’s currently less capable than people, and it is being coded with human bias.”

TechCrunch: 4 signs your product is not as accessible as you think. “For too many companies, accessibility wasn’t baked into their products from the start, meaning they now find themselves trying to figure out how to inject it retrospectively. But bringing decades-long legacy code and design into the future isn’t easy (or cheap). Businesses have to overcome the fear and uncertainty about how to do such retrofitting, address the lack of education to launch such projects, and balance the scope of these iterations while still maintaining other production work.”

KMBC: There’s an app that will help track this year’s cicada emergence in many states. “Coming in late April or early May, the largest hoard of 17-year cicadas ever will emerge from their underground homes in dozens of states across the U.S. Researchers are asking you not to ignore the whistling and buzzing mating calls this year, but instead, photograph and identify where they’re found.” Good morning, Internet…

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