NEW RESOURCES

Washington Post: More than 1,700 congressmen once enslaved Black people. This is who they were, and how they shaped the nation.. “The country is still grappling with the legacy of their embrace of slavery. The link between race and political power in early America echoes in complicated ways, from the racial inequities that persist to this day to the polarizing fights over voting rights and the way history is taught in schools. The Washington Post created a database that shows enslavers in Congress represented 37 states, including not just the South but every state in New England, much of the Midwest, and many Western states.”

EdScoop: Higher ed has a new tool for screening cloud service providers . “As colleges and universities mull what operations to move to the cloud, the higher education technology consortium Internet2 is testing how vendors and higher education institutions respond to the Cloud Scorecard, a vendor assessment tool in the works since 2019.” I’m pretty sure this is completely free but it seems to require institutional affiliation to use, so I can’t test it.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

State Archives of North Carolina: New Year, “New” Microfilm: An Update on County Records Added to Discover Online Catalog (DOC). “We are excited to announce that eleven counties of Search Room microfilm have been completely added to our online searchable database, Discover Online Catalog (DOC)! The completed counties are Albemarle (defunct), Ashe, Avery, Bute (defunct), Cherokee, Chowan, Clay, Dobbs (defunct), Gates, Graham, and Tryon (defunct).”

USEFUL STUFF

HongKiat: 5 Tools to Create Bar Chart Race Without Coding. “Data visualization is all these days – no matter what kind of information you want to present, either for school, work, or high-level corporate demos, it’s always important to present data in a very visual way…. Here are some solutions that you can use to create a bar chart race with or without pre-knowledge of coding.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BBC: The AI software that could turn you in to a music star. “If you have ever dreamed of earning money from a stellar music career but were concerned you had little talent, don’t let that put you off – a man called Alex Mitchell might be able to help. Mr Mitchell is the founder and boss of a website and app called Boomy, which helps its users create their own songs using artificial intelligence (AI) software that does most of the heavy lifting.”

Times of Israel: Masonic archive amassed by Nazis still has secrets to reveal, curators say. “Curators combing through a vast historical archive of Freemasonry in Europe amassed by the Nazis in their wartime anti-Masonic purge say they believe there are still secrets to be unearthed. From insight into women’s Masonic lodges to the musical scores used in closed ceremonies, the trove — housed in an old university library in western Poland — has already shed light on a little-known history.”

Protocol: Eric Schmidt: Social media companies ‘maximize outrage’ for revenue. “Eric Schmidt, welcome to the techlash. In an interview with podcaster and actor Dax Shepard, posted Thursday, the former Google CEO and Alphabet chairman said that social media companies are designed to ‘maximize outrage’ in pursuit of revenue. It was a rare condemnation of the industry from a man who, as head honcho of YouTube’s parent company, directly oversaw one of the most powerful social media companies in the world.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Business Insider: Police are being trained to create fake social-media accounts using AI to generate images of people who don’t exist. “Police departments across the US are being trained to create fake social-media accounts using AI-generated profile images, violating rules enforced by platforms including Facebook and Instagram, according to a document obtained by Insider.”

ThreatPost: Attackers Exploit Flaw in Google Docs’ Comments Feature. “A wave of phishing attacks identified in December targeting mainly Outlook users are difficult for both email scanners and victims to flag, researchers said. Attackers are using the ‘Comments’ feature of Google Docs to send malicious links in a phishing campaign targeted primarily at Outlook users, researchers have discovered.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

I’m seeing the term “digital twin” a lot, so I went looking for a good explainer article. This particular article focuses more physics, but I’ve seen the digital twin concept used for optimizing a ski resort’s busy season and improve business and manufacturing processes. VentureBeat: What 1000-X faster simulation means for digital twins. “A digital twin is a virtual representation of an object or system that spans its lifecycle, is updated from real-time data, and uses simulation, machine learning, and reasoning to help decision-making. Connected sensors on the physical asset collect data that can be mapped onto the virtual model.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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