NEW RESOURCES

Brigham Young University: BYU professor highlights unsung stories from Utah’s rich pioneer history with Intermountain Histories website. “Immigrant communities such as a Jewish settlement in Clarion and a Thai community in Layton may not be as well-known or remembered but still play an important part of Utah’s history — a history rich with diverse stories of faith and perseverance. With the passage of time, however, many of the stories of Utah’s immigrants are on the verge of being lost. BYU history professor and Associate Director of the BYU Redd Center, Brenden W. Rensink, hopes to change that through a new website and mobile app called Intermountain Histories — a platform dedicated to highlighting significant places and people who helped shape the history of the Intermountain West.”

NEXT Pittsburgh: Robotics Project traces the roots of today’s robots to CMU. “When the definitive history of the robotics revolution is written, researchers will have to contend with the massive amount of groundbreaking work done at Carnegie Mellon University. The Robotics Project at CMU will be ready for them. Launched this summer, the project is presenting its first online exhibit, Building the Robot Archive, which shows how a group of determined researchers started the world’s first academic robotics department in the 1970s, creating a legacy of cutting-edge robotics research that continues to this day and is transforming Pittsburgh into the robotics capital of the world.”

Morgridge Institute for Research: Navigating the unCHARTed: web tool explores public sequencing data for cancer research. “In the past, traditional RNA sequencing methods were limited to bulk gene expression profiles averaging thousands of cells; but the development of single-cell RNA sequencing technology has helped cancer biologists better understand the specific mechanisms that lead to tumor heterogeneity and drug resistance. However, these large, complex datasets are often difficult to navigate. Morgridge Postdoctoral Fellow Matthew Bernstein developed a web tool to explore these public datasets and facilitate analysis for cancer researchers.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNBC: Twitter posts fastest revenue growth since 2014 in pandemic rebound. “Twitter shares rose as much as 9% in extended trading on Thursday after the social media company announced second-quarter earnings that came in stronger than analysts had anticipated.”

TechCrunch: Facebook onboards another 31 newsletter writers on Bulletin. “Late last month, Facebook announced Bulletin, its newsletter platform. Unlike Substack, Medium and other competitors, Bulletin hand-picks its writers to curate a more controlled platform, with stars ranging from Mitch Albom, whose book ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’ continues to break hearts in seventh grade English classes, to Queer Eye’s Tan France, who taught a generation of young people how to perfect their French tuck. Today, Facebook announced its first new wave of newsletter writers after its initial beta launch.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Digiday: Recruitment tool TikTok Resumes risks magnifying unconscious biases, execs warn. “TikTok Resumes could become a recruitment tool that inadvertently encourages discrimination, especially in the wake of companies like Target and Chipotle signing on to the new initiative, senior executives in technology, HR and social responsibility roles told Digiday.”

FreshWater Cleveland: The big idea: City Club’s archives inspire one artist to create a video series on important moments . “Theater artist Chris Szajbert found herself without a gig in 2020. She turned to an unlikely source for inspiration—the City Club of Cleveland archives, which feature racial justice activist Rosa Parks reflecting on why she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger at the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955; Cesar Chavez explaining how he united Latinx farm workers in a strike and 300-mile march against poor working conditions in California in 1965; Then-Senator Joseph R. Biden discussing campaign finance reform; and transgender activist Paula Stone Williams advancing transgender rights in the 2019.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Motherboard: A Defunct Video Hosting Site Is Flooding Normal Websites With Hardcore Porn. “As pointed out by Twitter user @dox_gay, hardcore porn is now embedded on the pages of the Huffington Post, New York magazine, The Washington Post, and a host of other websites. This is because a porn site called 5 Star Porn HD bought the domain for Vidme, a brief YouTube competitor founded in 2014 and shuttered in 2017. Its Twitter account is still up, but the domain lapsed.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Verge: The Day the Good Internet Died. “Logging on feels like participating in the setup to a Yogi Berra 2.0 ‘terrible food, and such small portions!’–style joke—except that the punch line is about, like, public health statistics instead of prime rib. In the past week alone, the president of the United States and Facebook, each citing the tech company’s handling of pandemic info, have bickered publicly about, oh, just Facebook’s ratio of murderousness to societal benefit. (In other news, there’s a new Space Jam movie out with a villain who is an evil computer named ‘Al-G Rhythm.’)”

Tech Policy Press: Facebook, Google political ad bans not effective, researchers say. “Two researchers at the Duke University Center on Science and Technology Policy conclude that bans on political advertising put in place by the tech platforms just before and in the period after the November 2020 U.S. elections were not necessarily effective, and had a number of negative side effects.” Good evening, Internet…

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