NEW RESOURCES

National Library of Scotland: New digital resource on African American revolutionaries . “Struggles for Liberty takes its name from the phrase ‘struggles in the cause of liberty’, written by Lewis Henry Douglass (eldest son of Frederick Douglass) of his mother, Anna Murray Douglass’s tireless, heroic antislavery and social justice activism. The resource is structured by theme: the ‘Story of the Slave’; the History of Black Abolition; the US Civil War; African American activists in Scotland; and the Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass Family. It also includes interactive maps and downloadable learning activities for teachers, including activities mapped to the Curriculum for Excellence.”

PR Newswire: Sesame Workshop Continues Major Commitment to Racial Justice with New “ABCs of Racial Literacy” Content to Help Families Talk to Children About Race and Identity (PRESS RELEASE). “Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization behind Sesame Street, is releasing new resources to support families in talking to their children about race and racism. The ‘ABCs of Racial Literacy’ is part of Coming Together, Sesame Workshop’s ongoing commitment to racial justice.”

Duke Today: Duke, American University Students Publish Tracker For Online Free Speech Legislation. “Reporters covering the complicated yet bipartisan reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act can more easily monitor the legislation through a new tracker designed by students at Duke and American universities and Future Tense.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Illinois News Bureau: Illinois researchers to digitally preserve history of live musical performances, including Krannert Center events. “‘The Internet of Musical Events: Digital Scholarship, Community, and the Archiving of Performances,’ known as InterMusE, aims to preserve access to the record of historical live musical performances through digital archiving of concert ephemera such as programs and posters. It also will collect oral history interviews with concertgoers.”

Gulf News: Google bungles Hindi translation of the word ‘unworried’ sparking social media storm. “What does ‘unworried’ mean in Hindi? For a few hours on Thursday, Google’s answer had Indians on Twitter in splits before the tech giant rushed to correct the Google Translate glitch. With viral memes and jokes on Twitter, Whatsapp, and other social media channels, many pointed out that Google was translating the word ‘unworried’ to ‘avivahit’, which means unmarried in Hindi and ‘ghair shaadi shuda’ in Urdu.”

The Verge: The Mess At Medium. “Medium entered the year with more than 700,000 paid subscriptions, putting it on track for more than $35 million in revenue, according to two people familiar with the matter. That’s a healthy sum for a media company. But it represents a weak outcome for Williams, who previously sold Blogger to Google and co-founded Twitter, which eventually went public and today has a market capitalization of more than $50 billion.”

Washington Post: Preachers and their $5,000 sneakers: Why one man started an Instagram account showing churches’ wealth. “On his feed, [Ben] Kirby has showcased Seattle pastor Judah Smith’s $3,600 Gucci jacket, Dallas pastor T.D. Jakes’s $1,250 Louboutin fanny pack and Miami pastor Guillermo Maldonado’s $2,541 Ricci crocodile belt. And he considers Paula White, former president Donald Trump’s most trusted pastoral adviser who is often photographed in designer items, a PreachersNSneakers ‘content goldmine,’ posting a photo of her wearing $785 Stella McCartney sneakers.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Protocol: Beijing sours on facial recognition, unless it’s the one doing it . “Hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras throughout China have been hoovering up facial recognition data without notifying the people attached to the faces. Now, the companies behind the tech are finally under the microscope after a blistering recent exposé — one carried by a major mouthpiece for Beijing, the same government known for its own untrammeled intrusions into private life.”

Vanity Fair: Cracking the Case of London’s Elusive, Acrobatic Rare-Book Thieves. “‘Impossible,’ said David Ward. The London Metropolitan Police constable looked up. Some 50 feet above him, he saw that someone had carved a gaping hole through a skylight. Standing in the Frontier Forwarding warehouse in Feltham, West London, he could hear the howl of jets from neighboring Heathrow Airport as they roared overhead. At Ward’s feet lay three open trunks, heavy-duty steel cases. They were empty. A few books lay strewn about. Those trunks had previously been full of books. Not just any books. The missing ones, 240 in all, included early versions of some of the most significant printed works of European history.”

AZFamily: Proof of Innocence: New Arizona law opens testing national databases. “For the last 20 years, Arizona inmates have been able to petition the courts to have DNA evidence from their case run through the national database to try and prove their innocence. A new state law passed this week heading for the governor’s desk will expand access to fingerprints, firearms, and all the local and national law enforcement databases detectives use right now to solve cold cases.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Rest of World: TikTok is repeating Facebook’s mistakes in Myanmar. “Activists and experts told Rest of World that TikTok’s failures were distressingly familiar to anyone acquainted with how Facebook was used to help drive an ethnic-cleansing campaign in Myanmar in the 2010s. Members of the Myanmar military, known as the Tatmadaw, spread misinformation across the platform, stoking division, hatred, and, eventually, violence. In 2018, United Nations human rights experts said that unchecked hate speech on Facebook contributed to the genocide against the country’s Rohingya minority.”

CNET: Artificial intelligence: Are we doing it all wrong?. “Jeff Hawkins is co-founder of machine intelligence company Numenta and author of a new book ‘A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence’ that offers a theory of what’s missing in current AI. I don’t normally do author interviews, but Jeff has a history of knowing where things are going in tech, including, in my opinion, being a primary developer of the modern smartphone at Handspring and Palm.” Good morning, Internet…

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