NEW RESOURCES

Idaho Mountain Express: ‘Mine spotter’ focuses on hidden underground history. “The Wood River Valley was settled in large part due to a mining boom that took place in the 1880s. Hundreds of miles of underground tunnels and shafts run through hillsides littered with mine tailings and historic construction debris. A new website combines photos, anecdotes and mine resource data to explore and document the history that lies beneath our feet.”

Now available: data dump of puns. From the page: “Open source Puns! We’ve got a data dump of all of our puns on our site. You can check out the Github repository here.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BBC: Google owner sees record profits as lockdown boom continues. “Google owner Alphabet saw its earnings soar in the first quarter as people stuck at home in the pandemic used more of its services. Net profit jumped by 162% to a record $17.9bn in the three months to March as advertising revenue swelled by a third.”

Tom’s Guide: Update Google Chrome now to fix these three urgent security flaws. “Google has updated the desktop version of its Chrome browser for Windows, Mac and Linux yet again, pushing the version number to 90.0.4430.93 and fixing nine security flaws, at least three of which merit the ‘High’ severity rating.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: Feeding Hate With Video: A Former Alt-Right YouTuber Explains His Methods. “Tech companies, regulators and individuals across the globe are struggling to understand and control the enormous power of YouTube and other social media services. In 2019, YouTube made ‘important changes to how we recommend videos and prevent the spread of misinformation and hateful content,’ Farshad Shadloo, a spokesman for the company, said in a statement. It barred Mr. Molyneaux and Mr. Jones. But extreme videos continue to spread.”

BNN Bloomberg: Microsoft’s Brad Smith Renews Attack on Google Over Web Content. “Microsoft Corp. President Brad Smith said Google has hurt the concept of the open web and impaired content creators’ ability to make money, continuing an attack the software maker began earlier this year over whether internet companies need to pay news organizations for content they re-share.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: U.S. antitrust senators query Google over testimony meddling concerns. “U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mike Lee sent a letter to Google on Tuesday saying they were ‘deeply troubled’ by what they called a possible attempt to influence witness testimony following a statement at a congressional hearing by a Match executive.”

AdNews (Australia): Country newspapers get green light to collectively bargain with Facebook, Google . “Members of Country Press Australia (CPA) will be allowed to collectively negotiate with Facebook and Google for payments under the news media bargaining code. CPA members have been given interim authorisation by the Australian Competition and Consumer (ACCC) to collectively bargain with each of the tech giants for payment for their news content that appears on the tech platforms.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

PubMed: Inaccuracies in Google’s Health-Based Knowledge Panels Perpetuate Widespread Misconceptions Involving Infectious Disease Transmission. “Google health-based Knowledge Panels were designed to provide users with high-quality basic medical information on a specific condition. However, any errors contained within Knowledge Panels could result in the widespread distribution of inaccurate health information. We explored the potential for inaccuracies to exist within Google’s health-based Knowledge Panels by focusing on a single well-studied pathogen, Ebola virus (EBOV).”

Becker’s Hospital Review: Popular social media videos on bladder, prostate cancer source of misinformation, study finds . “Top-viewed YouTube videos on bladder and prostate cancer often present inaccurate or low-quality information, according to two recent studies led by researchers at New York City-based NYU Langone Health. The first study, published in the journal of European Urology, evaluated the first 150 of 242,000 YouTube videos that come up when searching bladder cancer. Researchers used validated instruments to evaluate each video’s overall quality.”

Science Magazine: Want other scientists to cite you? Drop the jargon. “If you want your work to be highly cited, here’s one simple tip that might help: Steer clear of discipline-specific jargon in the title and abstract. That’s the conclusion of a new study of roughly 20,000 published papers about cave science, a multidisciplinary field that includes researchers who study the biology, geology, paleontology, and anthropology of caves. The most highly cited papers didn’t use any terms specific to cave science in the title and kept jargon to less than 2% of the text in the abstract; jargon-heavy papers were cited far less often.”

OTHER STUFF I THINK IS COOL

CNET: Yayagram: A 20th century phone switchboard for Telegram instant messages. “If you want to talk to your grandmother on messaging app Telegram and she doesn’t have a smartphone, she’ll need to get one. She’ll need to learn how to use iOS or Android. How to manage notifications. You could teach her all of that — or you could just build her a 1900s telephone switchboard that does nothing but send and receive Telegram messages.” Good morning, Internet…

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