NEW RESOURCES

Smithsonian: Cooper Hewitt’s Interaction Lab Launches Seven Prototypes to Experience the Smithsonian Open Access Collection. “The Interaction Lab at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum has announced the launch of seven prototypes commissioned under the Activating Smithsonian Open Access program. The selected teams each received $10,000 to create new digital interactions and innovative tools that enable play and discovery with 2D and 3D digitized assets from the Smithsonian’s Open Access collections. The teams retain ownership of the intellectual property developed from the program.”

EVENTS

Esri: Esri Offers Free Online Course That Teaches Cutting-Edge Imagery Capabilities. “Beginning August 11, Esri, the world leader in location intelligence technology, is offering a free six-week online course to explore imagery and remotely sensed data using Esri’s ArcGIS software. Focused on capturing, processing, visualizing, analyzing, and sharing imagery data—gaining insight from the pixels—the course is open to anyone.”

Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas: Learn how to enhance your investigative reporting in platforms: Register for new Knight Center course. “‘Investigative reporting in platforms: How to dig into social accounts, images, ads, and messaging apps’ runs from Sept. 6 to Oct. 10, 2021. Craig Silverman and Jane Lytvynenko, two leading experts on online disinformation, fake news, and digital investigations, will teach the five-week course, which also focuses on workflows and organization for the information you’ll gather.” It’s not free, but $95 for a five-week class like that sounds like a bargain.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Substack is getting into comics. “Substack is trying to put a new spin on webcomics. The newsletter platform announced today that it’s signed a number of comics creators up to use its platform. They’ll email comics out to readers and use Substack’s subscription tools to charge directly for access to their work.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: 10 Time-Saving Features and Settings You Should Be Using on Your iPhone. “Basic tasks can sometimes feel like a chore on your iPhone because it takes a lot of time for something trivial. For example, the Camera app keeps opening to the default photo mode, and you have to keep sliding over to other modes such as portrait or video. Fortunately, it’s possible to save a lot of time by speeding up a lot of basic tasks on your iPhone. We’re going to share our favorite time-saving tips that you might enjoy.” Warning: this is a slideshow.

Bustle: An Extremely Comprehensive Guide To Deleting Snapchat. “Like all of the retail and real estate newsletters you never meant to end up on in the first place, permanently opting out of social media platforms tends to be an intentionally dizzying effort. Snapchat is no exception. While you can log out or delete the app from your home screen, in order to disable your account and get rid of your discoverable content, you have to go to the accounts portal, a mysterious place where you can learn about your data, your privacy, and maybe figure out how to delete your Snapchat account.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

ZDNet: Why is your identity trapped inside a social network?. “The creators of the Internet didn’t finish the job, they didn’t create a personal protocol to give people control of their identities. As a result, humans on the Internet exist not as individuals but as the creation of social media databases that monopolize personal information.”

Ubergizmo: It Looks Like Space Won’t Be Safe From Ads. “Whether you’re driving down the street, reading a newspaper, checking your mail, or browsing the web on your phone, you’re bound to come across an ad or two. However, it seems that even the deep, dark recesses of space won’t be spared by advertisers because that’s what SpaceX and Geometric Energy Corporation are planning to do.” Enjoy your majestic-views-of-space-sans-billboards while they last.

SECURITY & LEGAL

NBC News: Big Tech call center workers face pressure to accept home surveillance. “Six workers based in Colombia for Teleperformance, one of the world’s largest call center companies, which counts Apple, Amazon and Uber among its clients, said that they are concerned about the new contract, first issued in March. The contract allows monitoring by AI-powered cameras in workers’ homes, voice analytics and storage of data collected from the worker’s family members, including minors. Teleperformance employs more than 380,000 workers globally, including 39,000 workers in Colombia.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Phys .org: Scientists meld Twitter and satellite views to understand epic impact. “Scientists are using two bird’s-eye views—remote sensing from satellites and the voices of Twitter—to synthesize the environmental impacts of sprawling infrastructure projects and how the people who live amongst them feel about the changes.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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