NEW RESOURCES

Maine Government News: Maine State Archives Shares Railroad Accident Report of the Death of Civil Rights Leader James Weldon Johnson. “The original report of the 1938 railroad accident that killed famed Civil Rights leader James Weldon Johnson in Wiscasset, which is held by the Maine State Archives, is now available for viewing on DigitalMaine.com…. James Weldon Johnson was a famous author and Civil Rights activist during the early twentieth century. He is most famous for writing the lyrics to ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ commonly referred to as the Black National Anthem.”

Oklahoma State University: OSU Library project unveiled at White House Tribal Nations Summit. “The new “Tribal Treaties Database” is a free public resource available at treaties.okstate.edu. The first phase of the project focuses on U.S. government treaties with Native Americans from 1778-1883. The treaties are indexed and can be browsed by tribe, treaty or location.”

Eater Portland: This New Portland-Made Database Helps People Find Women and Non-Binary Distillers Across the Country. “Women in Distilling is meant to highlight marginalized voices within the spirits industry, a male-dominated field nationwide.”

Mental Floss: How Many Danny DeVitos High Is Mount Everest? The Omni Calculator Can Tell You That, and Other Weird Measurements. “Mount Everest is officially 29,032 feet tall, but that figure only goes so far to capture the peak’s magnitude. It’s much easier to picture 26 Eiffel Towers stacked on top of one another, or 5696 Danny DeVitos. That’s why the scientists and researchers at the Omni Calculator Project developed the Weird Units Converter. Plug a measurement in a standard unit into the tool and it will tell you what it is in Empire State Buildings, spaghetti strands, blue whales, and more.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TheNextWeb: Give YouTube the finger by restoring dislike counts with this plugin. “YouTube’s decision to hide dislike counts on videos has sparked anger and derision. The company said the move will protect creators from harassment and coordinated attacks, but critics fear it will become harder to find useful and trustworthy content. Some of them have proposed using YouTube comments as an alternative dislike counter, while others are devising technical fixes.”

The Verge: Twitter Makes Big Changes For Devs As It Eyes Decentralized Future. “Twitter has announced that the second version of its application programming interface, or API, is ready to come out of early access and become the default for developers. When Twitter announced API v2 in August 2020, it seemed like a chance to rebuild not only the infrastructure on which developers build their apps and bots, but Twitter’s relationship with the people using its platform as well.”

Engadget: Twitter buys Threader to help develop Twitter Blue features. “Twitter has acquired Threader. It’s one of a few apps that allow you to make threads easier to digest. By tagging Threader’s profile and typing ‘compile,’ the bot will condense a series of tweets into an article-like form.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Furturism: Scammers Are Creating Fake Students on Harvard.edu and Using Them to Shill Brands. “The practice of scammers cooking up fake Harvard students to shill brands on the university’s site appears to be widespread. In response to questions from Futurism, Harvard removed the Mikao John profile as well as about two dozen similar accounts being used for the same purpose. According to emails advertising the scheme obtained by Futurism, a Harvard blog post from a fake student like John can be bought for as little as $300 via PayPal.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Irish Examiner: Irish far-right groups flocking to encrypted and unmoderated social media sites, research finds. “Irish far-right groups have been exploiting online loopholes and using encrypted and largely unmoderated social media sites and messaging apps to mobilise and spread messages of hate throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. That’s according to research carried out by the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an independent global organisation dedicated to powering solutions to extremism, hate, and disinformation.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

NewsWise: Clinician peer networks remove race and gender bias. “Using an experimental design, researchers showed that clinicians who initially exhibited significant race and gender bias in their treatment of a clinical case, could be influenced to change their clinical recommendations to exhibit no bias. ‘We found that by changing the structure of information-sharing networks among clinicians, we could change doctors’ biased perceptions of their patients’ clinical information,’ says [Professor Damon] Centola, who also directs the Network Dynamics Group at the Annenberg School and is a Senior Fellow of Health Economics at the Leonard Davis Institute. ‘Put simply, doctors tend to think differently in networks than they do when they are alone.'”

CBC News: Researcher developing online tool to help find missing Indigenous tuberculosis patients . “A University of Winnipeg researcher is developing an online research tool to help Indigenous communities and families find missing tuberculosis patients who were sent to Manitoba hospitals and sanatoriums but never came home. Anne Lindsay is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Winnipeg and will be working with the university’s Manitoba Indigenous Tuberculosis History Project on the initiative.”

Open Gov: AI Records Data on Species to Monitor Biodiversity. “The U.S. research team from the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Wisconsin–Madison is deploying autonomous recording equipment in natural areas to eavesdrop on the animals. This project aims to help answer important scientific questions, such as which species are present and how their abundance changes over time. Their long-term goal is to characterise natural soundscapes using artificial intelligence and to use that data as a baseline to measure how ecosystems are responding to climate change and other human-induced changes.” Good morning, Internet…

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