NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, via Google Blog: A DJ’s mission to tell Asian American stories, track by track. “The Asian American community has faced erasure from popular American narratives and history, and are largely absent from mainstream American media. Partly because of this, Asians in America are seen as a monolith. ‘When I grew up, being Asian wasn’t something that most of us were told to be proud of,’ Richie says. This is why Richie spent over a year building TRAKTIVIST.com, a discovery platform dedicated to helping people find music made by Asian North Americans. TRAKTIVIST.com’s catalog also allows people to search for music by filtering ethnicity, instrument, genre and playlists.”

Irish Central: Good Friday Agreement: New online resource presents full text with video explainers. “Activist Emma DeSouza, Oxford academic Dr. Jennifer Cassidy, and journalist Susan McKay have teamed up to present GFA Explained, a new online resource that presents the full text of the Good Friday Agreement accompanied by videos of each of the experts discussing ‘the key components of the historic text that shapes the past, present and future of Ireland and the UK.'”

Exact Editions Blog: The complete digital archive of The British Museum Magazine is now available. “Exact Editions is delighted to announce that institutional subscribers to The British Museum Magazine can now access the full archive of back issues as well as its members. The museum’s membership magazine now goes back to its very first issue published in Spring 1990 and includes 30 years of back issues to explore, with its 100th issue soon to be published.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: In iOS 14.5, Apple adds new voices to make Siri sound more like you. “Apple’s new iPhone operating system iOS 14.5, now available for free download (though we recommend waiting a few days before downloading), brings several updated features to the Siri digital assistant, including new, more naturalistic voice options.”

Penn State News: New book highlights Colored Conventions and long history of Black activism. “‘The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century,’ published by the University of North Carolina Press and released in March, is the first to emerge from the award-winning Colored Conventions Project (CCP), an interdisciplinary research hub housed in Penn State’s Center for Black Digital Research (CBDR). The CCP uses digital tools to bring the scattered records of the movement to digital life and make them freely available. Its digital archive has more than quintupled the number of previously available minutes of more than 200 conventions by locating, transcribing, and archiving the records that document this little-known movement.”

AllAfrica: South Africa: Drones Deployed to Assess Cape Fire Losses. “INSURANCE companies are deploying drones to inspect and quantify fire damage at the University of Cape Town (UCT). They have sought the assistance of leading legal operator, UAV Industries, a UCT alumni owned and managed company, to inspect the total value of the loss. Commercial drone pilots are conducting a 3D survey of all damaged structures using HD and thermal photogrammetry, an application whereby drones capture a large number of high-resolution photos over a specific area.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BloombergQuint: Google, Amazon Spent Millions Lobbying While Facing Bipartisan Scrutiny. “Google spent $2.7 million on federal lobbying in the three months ending March 31, according to disclosures filed with Congress. That’s a 49% increase from the same period a year earlier, and comes as the company has been steadily increasing its Washington investments after a two-year decline.”

CNBC: 4chan founder Chris Poole has left Google. “Chris Poole, who founded controversial online community 4chan before joining Google in 2016, has left the search giant after jumping among several groups within the company, CNBC has learned. Poole’s last official day at Google was April 13th, according to an internal repository viewed by CNBC, which described his last role as a product manager.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BBC: Cyber-attack hackers threaten to share US police informant data. “Washington DC’s Metropolitan Police Department has said its computer network has been breached in a targeted cyber-attack, US media report. A ransomware group called Babuk is reportedly threatening to release sensitive data on police informants if it is not contacted within three days. The FBI is investigating the extent of the breach, US media reported, citing the Washington DC police department.”

AP: The big Pentagon internet mystery now partially solved. “A very strange thing happened on the internet the day President Joe Biden was sworn in. A shadowy company residing at a shared workspace above a Florida bank announced to the world’s computer networks that it was now managing a colossal, previously idle chunk of the internet owned by the U.S. Department of Defense. That real estate has since more than quadrupled to 175 million addresses — about 1/25th the size of the current internet.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

BloombergQuint: Google Pressured on Racial Equity Audit After AI Ethics Collapse. “An influential racial justice group called on Google to allow independent auditors to investigate the company’s business for potential discriminatory conduct. Color of Change is urging the internet search giant to undergo a racial equity audit of its operations following the ouster of two women who led the company’s Ethical AI team.”

Wageningen University & Research: New initiative to create global online database with animal production data from all over the world. “The Circular Food Systems (CiFoS) project at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) has decided to take the lead in making this data available for everyone by collecting it through an easily accessible online survey. The goal is to develop a global database that becomes an open resource for researchers, policymakers, farmers, businesses and anyone who is interested in the future of animal production.” Good morning, Internet…

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