Seattle Times: Sale of National Archives in Seattle halted by Biden administration. “The impending sale of the National Archives at Seattle has been stopped by the Biden administration. On Thursday, the Office of Management and Budget, which administers the federal budget and had approved the sale of the 10-acre Sand Point facility during the Trump administration, reversed course.”

NEW RESOURCES

PubMed: #Election2020: the first public Twitter dataset on the 2020 US Presidential election. “The study of online chatter is paramount, especially in the wake of important voting events like the recent November 3, 2020 U.S. Presidential election and the inauguration on January 21, 2021. Limited access to social media data is often the primary obstacle that limits our abilities to study and understand online political discourse. To mitigate this impediment and empower the Computational Social Science research community, we are publicly releasing a massive-scale, longitudinal dataset of U.S. politics- and election-related tweets. This multilingual dataset encompasses over 1.2 billion tweets and tracks all salient U.S. political trends, actors, and events from 2019 to the time of this writing.”

Mashable: 25 Stephen King short films are being shown at this virtual festival. Some have never been released.. “The Stephen King Rules Dollar Baby Film Festival, a virtual event which will stream a number of short film adaptations based on the author’s work (including some which haven’t previously been released), is set to run from April 23 to 25 — and the best part is, the whole thing is free to join. 25 adaptations will be shown in total, each based on King short stories like Popsy, The Woman in the Room, and The Last Rung on the Ladder.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Politico: National Archives can’t resurrect Trump’s tweets, Twitter says. “Twitter will not allow the National Archives to make former President Donald Trump’s past tweets from his @realDonaldTrump account available on the social media platform, the company told POLITICO on Wednesday, in the latest display of Silicon Valley’s power over communications channels used by the U.S. government.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Daily Beast: Inside the Awful World of Young Landlords on TikTok. “Left unstated in the get-rich-quick strategies outlined on social media: these investment schemes require someone to be the underdog. Someone has to lose their home to eviction, or rent out a ‘home hacked’ property and support their lifestyle. And the country’s poorest are unlikely to afford down payments on massive, multi-family buildings. Nevertheless, some TikTok users suggest otherwise.”

The Cut: An Interview With the Man Who Keeps Uploading My Feet to WikiFeet. “To be clear, I am not a celebrity. I have decent Twitter following from having reported on politics for over a decade, from tweeting jokes about politics and appearing on cable news sometimes. But I was pretty shocked to be looking at my own wikiFeet profile, which included my full name, birthday, and photos of me and my exposed feet, dating back to a family vacation in 2013. The images seemed to have been lifted from my Instagram page, which I keep public because I share my work and media appearances there sometimes. My feet had a very sad 3.5 out of 5 stars rating, which categorized them as ‘okay.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Politico: Letter: Top federal watchdog probing State Department following hacks. “The Government Accountability Office is conducting a wide-ranging probe into the department’s cybersecurity practices following several hacks on the department’s email system over the last decade, according to the documents and people familiar with the matter. Just last week, POLITICO revealed that suspected Russian hackers stole thousands of emails from the department in recent months.”

TechRepublic: Money laundering is a real issue in tech: Here’s what is being done to stop it. “Money laundering and technology go hand in hand, sadly, and I discussed the topic with industry experts Gudmundur Kristjansson, founder and CEO at Lucinity, an artificial intelligence-based anti-money-laundering solutions provider, and and Zac Cohen, COO at Trulioo, an online identity verification service.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EurekAlert: ResearchGate and Wiley deepen partnership with content pilot to deliver new value for researchers. “The first stage of the pilot, which launched today, will make articles from 17 of Wiley’s gold open access (OA) journals available on ResearchGate. The pilot will apply to new articles as they are published in these journals, as well as existing articles published from 2019 onwards. Journals in this first phase include AGU Advances, published on behalf of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), Advanced Science, and Brain and Behavior.”

ZDNet: Bad broadband, no problem: Google’s open-source speech codec works on even low-quality networks. “In a bid to put an end to the all-too-familiar choppy, robotic voice calls that come with low bandwidth, Google is open-sourcing Lyra, a new audio codec that taps machine learning to produce high-quality calls even when faced with a dodgy internet connection.” Good evening, Internet…

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