NEW RESOURCES

Indiana Environmental Reporter: New IU Tool Maps Green Infrastructure in Hoosier Communities. “A new tool allows Hoosier communities to plan for climate change impacts by showing where crucial green infrastructure exists and where it is needed. Using data collected from a range of sources throughout Indiana, the Indiana Green City Mapper shows the location of six types of green infrastructure, important natural defenses for combatting climate change impacts like flooding and rising temperatures, and other climate change-related data.”

World Health Organization: WHO launches new platform for knowledge exchange on dementia. “The new tool, the Global Dementia Observatory Knowledge Exchange Platform, contains key resources to support the implementation of the Global action plan on the public heath response to dementia 2017-2025 and its seven action areas. It provides a space for stakeholders to share resources, such as policies, guidelines, case studies and examples of good practice, to facilitate mutual learning and promote the exchange of knowledge in the area of dementia.”

Boing Boing: Online archive of e e cummings poetry. “The website aims to republish all of the author’s work as it gradually enters the public domain. Built using open-source software and structured data, it also offers publishers, academics, analysts, fans and artists free and easy access to the poet’s body of work.”

World Economic Forum: This innovative project fuses journalism and music to highlight lawlessness at sea. ” All of that time spent at sea allowed me to build an audio library of field recordings. It featured a variety of textured and rhythmic sounds like machine-gun fire off the coast of Somalia and chanting captive deckhands on the South China Sea. Using the sound archive and inspired by the reporting, over 400 artists from more than 60 countries are producing EPs in their own interpretive musical styles, be it electronic, ambient, classical or hip-hop. Many artists also used the reported footage to make their own videos tied to their song, including Louis Futon, Roger Molls, and De Osos.” This is really good. Major timesink.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Google’s AI photo app uses crowdsourcing to preserve endangered languages. “Google has a new way to preserve endangered languages: give cultures the AI tools they need to protect the languages themselves. The company has launched Woolaroo, an open source photo translation web app (also available through Google Arts & Culture for Android and iOS) that uses machine learning and image recognition to help preserve languages on the brink. As a user, you just have to point your phone’s camera at an object to have the AI recognize and describe it in a given language, complete with pronunciation.”

CNET: Facebook takes on Nextdoor with Neighborhoods tool. “The world’s largest social media website said Wednesday it’s rolling out a feature with its mobile app called Neighborhoods in four US cities and Canada. Facebook users have to be at least 18 years old to use the new tool, which will allow people find neighbors who have common interests, discover local groups and businesses, participate in polls along with receiving and offering help to those in their communities.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

National Library of Israel: Historic Agreement Signed Between National Archives of the UAE and the National Library of Israel. “The National Archives (NA) of the United Arab Emirates in Abu Dhabi and the National Library of Israel (NLI) in Jerusalem have signed an historic memorandum of understanding, which ‘commits the two organizations to work together in support of mutual and separate goals and for the benefit of the international cultural and documentary heritage sector,’ according to the agreement signed by the institutions’ directors.”

City of Detroit: Detroit, Google. org Team Up To Create Tool To Help Detroiters Find Affordable Housing. “Google.org Fellows will work alongside the City’s Housing & Revitalization Department with the mission of addressing housing instability in the city by helping Detroiters find affordable housing, making it easier to rent and stay in the city. The vision is to streamline the process of searching and applying for affordable housing, and having housing opportunities listed in one place and updated frequently.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Meduza: Russia’s censorship agency seeks new fines for Twitter, Google, and Facebook. “Twitter may face another 24 million rubles ($320,880) in fines for failing to remove content prohibited in Russia, while Google and Facebook may face an additional 20 million rubles ($267,400) in fines each for the same violation, the Russian state news agency TASS reported on Wednesday, May 5.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Washington: Arguing on the internet: UW researchers studying how to make online arguments productive. “The internet seems like the place to go to get into fights. Whether they’re with a family member or a complete stranger, these arguments have the potential to destroy important relationships and consume a lot of emotional energy. Researchers at the University of Washington worked with almost 260 people to understand these disagreements and to develop potential design interventions that could make these discussions more productive and centered around relationship-building.”

MIT News: New AI tool calculates materials’ stress and strain based on photos . “MIT researchers have developed a technique to quickly determine certain properties of a material, like stress and strain, based on an image of the material showing its internal structure. The approach could one day eliminate the need for arduous physics-based calculations, instead relying on computer vision and machine learning to generate estimates in real time.”

Brookings Institution: Assessing the social and emotional costs of mass shootings with Twitter data. “A reason for the one-sided debate on guns is that beyond the gruesome body counts, we do not have many tools for assessing the large—but unobservable—effects of this violence on family members, friends, and neighbors of the victims, as well as on society in general. By assessing how emotions evolve over time, real changes can be seen in Twitter messages. Our analysis shows that society is increasingly angered by gun violence, rather than simply adapting to it.” Good morning, Internet…

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