NEW RESOURCES

Digital Library of Georgia: Two mid-twentieth-century collections, now digitized and available freely online, recall Atlanta neighborhoods lost to urban renewal, and Georgia’s growing Catholic community. “Two new collections of digitized films and slides documenting the growth of Georgia’s Catholic community between 1938-1979 are now available freely online from the Digital Library of Georgia.”

Illinois News Bureau: Illinois artist’s virtual ‘Museum of Us’ lets everyone tell their stories. “Artist Jorge Lucero recently invited people from around the world to meet via Zoom and share an object that was important in their lives – telling their stories through their belongings and turning the grid of video teleconferencing boxes into a cabinet of curiosities.”

USEFUL STUFF

Hongkiat: 10 Best Accessibility Tools For Designers. “Instead of creating everything from scratch, here’s a list of cool accessibility tools for designers. From creating color combinations according to WCAG standards to adding different reading modes to your website, these tools are a must-haves for every designer. Take a look at the list to know about each tool in detail.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Atlantic: The Internet Is Rotting. “This absence of central control, or even easy central monitoring, has long been celebrated as an instrument of grassroots democracy and freedom. It’s not trivial to censor a network as organic and decentralized as the internet. But more recently, these features have been understood to facilitate vectors for individual harassment and societal destabilization, with no easy gating points through which to remove or label malicious work not under the umbrellas of the major social-media platforms, or to quickly identify their sources. While both assessments have power to them, they each gloss over a key feature of the distributed web and internet: Their designs naturally create gaps of responsibility for maintaining valuable content that others rely on.”

NASA: NASA Invites You to Create Landsat-Inspired Arts and Crafts. “For almost 50 years, Landsat satellites have collected images of Earth from space, representing the longest continuous space-based record of our planet’s surface…. In September, Landsat 9 is scheduled to launch and continue this legacy. In honor of the launch, we invite you to get creative and show us what Landsat means to you! Create art or make a craft that’s inspired by a favorite Landsat image or the satellite itself, and share it with us on social media.”

Ars Technica: Old school: I work in DOS for an entire day. “It’s the July 4 holiday weekend in the US, which means Ars staff gets a well-deserved holiday to catch up on this summer’s Steam sale (or maybe just to rest). As such, we’re resurfacing a few classics from the Ars archives, including this somewhat masochistic experiment. Back in 2014, Ars’ Editor Emeritus Sean Gallagher decided to celebrate the 20th anniversary of MS-DOS’s end-of-life by working in the operating system within a modern context. It… went about as smoothly as you’d expect.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Fast Company: This tool helps anyone with an old marijuana conviction clear it from their record. “Nearly one out of every three American adults has a criminal record—and when thet fill out an application for a job, a new apartment, a loan, or even to attend college, there’s a good chance that their record might mean that they’re rejected. But in many cases, it’s possible to have the record expunged, meaning that it will no longer show up on background checks. However, the process is complicated and expensive, and thus out of reach of most people. A new tool from Checkr, a company that works to make employer background checks more fair, makes those expungements easier.”

Reuters: Google Must Face Voice Assistant Privacy Lawsuit – U.S. Judge. “A federal judge said Google must face much of a lawsuit accusing the company of illegally recording and disseminating private conversations of people who accidentally trigger its voice-activated Voice Assistant on their smartphones.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

News@Northeastern: Who Is At Fault When Autonomous Systems Behave In Unpredictable Ways?. “In Tempe, Arizona, a few years back, a self-driving car failed to identify a woman jaywalking across the street in time to stop, and fatally struck her. The human driver, meant to be supervising the vehicle, had been watching a TV show on her cell phone at the time. And the artificial intelligence system within the car wasn’t designed to slam on the brakes to reduce the severity of an unavoidable accident, the way a human driver would. So, who is at fault for this pedestrian’s death?”

Engadget: Researchers retrofit microscopes to take 3D images of cells in real-time. “There’s a limit to what you can learn about cells from 2D pictures, but creating 3D images is a time-intensive process. Now, scientists from UT Southwestern have developed a new ‘simple and cost-effective’ device capable of capturing multi-angle photos that can be retrofitted onto existing lab microscopes. The team say their solution — which involves inserting a unit of two rotating mirrors in front of a microscope’s camera — is 100 times faster than converting images from 2D to 3D.” Good evening, Internet…

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