NEW RESOURCES

AGDAILY: USDA launches new website for science-minded students. “Geared toward K-12 students with an interest in food and science, AgLab offers a variety of content to promote a greater understanding of how agricultural research is helping meet the food, fiber, feed and fuel needs of a growing world population while also safeguarding our environment and natural resources.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Sydney Morning Herald: ABC terminates New Daily contract, focuses on Google and Facebook. “The [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] will terminate its commercial agreements with several news websites, including industry superannuation fund-backed website, The New Daily, in a strategic shift that will focus on agreements with aggregation platforms like Facebook and Google.”

USEFUL STUFF

BetaNews: iFun Screen Recorder 1.0 gives Windows users a fully-featured screencast tool with no strings attached. “There are plenty of screencast tools out there, but while many offer cut-down free versions, they’re often more crippleware than freeware. Eyeing a spot in this market is IObit, which claims — with some justification — to provide a genuinely usable free screen-recording tool with its latest new release: iFun Screen Recorder 1.0.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Yale University Library: First endowment for digital preservation spotlights a rising need—and Yale Library expertise. “Library leaders hope the new fund will also draw attention to digital preservation as an area of ongoing need and rising importance. Increasingly, Yale Library collections extend far beyond print books, physical manuscripts and other tangible objects to ‘born-digital’ content created and existing only in digital form. Yet, even as digital content proliferates, its existence is threatened by obsolescent technologies, expensive data storage, and degradation of hardware and software.”

Mashable: Parler is trying to throw Facebook under the bus for the U.S. Capitol riots. “In early February, the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform asked social media platform Parler to produce information regarding its finances and potential ties to foreign entities. The request came in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, which allegedly involved numerous Parler users. Now Parler has responded, mounting a defense that essentially boils down to: ‘We aren’t bad because Facebook is worse.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Route Fifty: Lawmakers Urge Internet Companies to Join New Discount Broadband Program. “The $3.2 billion Emergency Broadband Benefit Program, approved in December, will offer a $50-a-month discount to eligible households. The Federal Communications Commission is working to get the program up and running by the end of April, and lawmakers said providers should do their part to let consumers across the country know about it.”

University of Michigan: U-M computer chip pitted against 500+ hackers. The chip won.. “An ‘unhackable’ computer chip lived up to its name in its first bug bounty competition, foiling over 500 cybersecurity researchers who were offered tens of thousands of dollars to analyze it and three other secure processor technologies for vulnerabilities.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TIME: Facebook Acted Too Late to Tackle Misinformation on 2020 Election, Report Finds. “The report, by the online advocacy group Avaaz, found that if Facebook had not waited until October to tweak its algorithms to stem false and toxic content amplified on the platform, the company could have prevented an estimated 10.1 billion views on the 100 most prominent pages that repeatedly shared misinformation on the platform ahead of the election.”

Arab News: A digital library offers Saudis affordable access to scholarly research. “Academic literature is usually hidden behind expensive paywalls or restricted to those who are affiliated with big organizations. Now Zendy, developed by Knowledge E, is offering users affordable access to scholarly works from around the world. In step with the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 development agenda and its efforts to foster a culture of research, innovation and entrepreneurship, Zendy will give students, professionals and hobbyists access to thousands of articles, e-books and scholarly resources.”

Phys .org: New tool can help predict the next financial bubble. “An international team of interdisciplinary researchers has identified mathematical metrics to characterize the fragility of financial markets. Their paper ‘Network geometry and market instability’ sheds light on the higher-order architecture of financial systems and allows analysts to identify systemic risks like market bubbles or crashes.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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