NEW RESOURCES

Lethbridge News Now: New tool developed to help preserve the language of Blackfoot. “Eldon Yellowhorn is working hard to preserve the Blackfoot language. Yellowhorn is a professor in the department of Indigenous Studies at Simon Fraser University (SFU). He’s the lead for a team that has developed an online tool to help people learn the language of Blackfoot, as part of the Blackfoot Revitalization Project.”

Vanderbilt School of Engineering: Grad student adds drone imagery to toolbox for post-disaster recovery. “A new online gallery of photos taken in the days, weeks and months following the March 2020 regional tornados is the work of an engineering graduate student who wants to make disaster recovery more equitable. Daniel Perrucci, a Ph.D. candidate in civil engineering, used bird’s eye imagery from drones as well as street-level photography to document pockets of recovery in East Nashville and Mount Juliet, which is about 17 miles of the city. The storms were of the same strength, caused similar damage and the same number of fatalities in each area.”

Digital Library of Georgia: Urban planning, civil rights, and trends in landscape design in Savannah are highlighted in the newest collection available from the Digital Library of Georgia. “The historical significance of the collection may not be obvious at first, but Luciana Spracher, director for the City of Savannah Municipal Archives, describes its importance to contemporary research: ‘While on the surface the Park and Tree Commission Minutes might seem mundane, upon closer inspection they contain important information that reflects the intersections of urban planning and civil rights, trends in landscape design, development of Savannah’s cemeteries (both African American and white, since Savannah’s cemeteries were originally segregated), and details such as the use of convict labor in city infrastructure projects; all topics that draw on current socio-political trends and that are largely underrepresented in scholarship.'”

USEFUL STUFF

Ars Technica: Google Photos is so 2020—welcome to the world of self-hosted photo management. “We take more photos now than ever before. Growth in this segment is explosive, with over 1.4 trillion photos taken last year, according to InfoTrends. That’s up from 1 trillion in 2017. Video is much the same, with YouTube saying in recent years that about 500 hours of video are uploaded to the platform every minute. Finding a solution to organizing and safely storing these precious memories is more important than ever, and it’s becoming an increasingly large problem to solve.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CNN: Frustration and bewilderment: Emails show tension between Facebook and Biden campaign. “People working with Joe Biden’s presidential campaign repeatedly warned Facebook about violent campaign-related rhetoric on its platform during the heat of the 2020 election, but a series of email exchanges reveals how the social media giant sometimes brushed them off.”

AP: Case files on 1964 civil rights worker killings made public. “The 1964 killings of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County sparked national outrage and helped spur passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They later became the subject of the movie ‘Mississippi Burning.'” While the files have been made public, they have not yet been digitized.

SECURITY & LEGAL

BBC: Amazon and Google probed over efforts to stop fake reviews. “Amazon and Google are under investigation over concerns fake five star reviews on their websites could be misleading shoppers. The Competition and Markets Authority is also worried that ‘law-abiding businesses’ who sell over Amazon and Google may be losing out to firms using false recommendations.”

Search Engine Journal: Google Patent Aims to Solve Searchers’ Need for Related Media Content. “There’s a newly granted Google patent out that involves methods, systems, and media for presenting content organized by category. This patent caught my attention as it talks about related entities and describes how they fit together in the world of media. This advances the idea of performing queryless searches, a hallmark of Google Discover, for media content such as TV shows, movies, and more.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Wired: Zillow Taps AI to Improve Its Home Value Estimates. “As the US housing market began to overheat, in February Zillow began making initial cash offers to buy homes based on its price estimate. Now Zillow has updated its algorithm behind those estimates in a way the company says will make them more accurate—and allow Zillow to offer to buy more homes.”

Artnet News: A Painting Fell Off the Wall and Went in for Conservation. Turns Out It’s a Long-Lost Rembrandt Worth Up to $240 Million. “The painting, The Adoration of the Magi, is believed to date from 1632 to 1633. Scholars had long believed that only copies of the picture had survived, including well-known examples in Gothenburg, Sweden, and St. Petersburg, Russia. The work had long been in the collection of a family that had no idea it was a genuine Rembrandt, until 2016, when art restorer Antonella di Francesco took it in for repairs after it fell off a wall.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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