NEW RESOURCES

Kiowa County Press: Colorado website spotlights neighborhood-level risks of climate change. “Pegah Jalali, environmental policy analyst with the Colorado Fiscal Institute, said their new website allows Coloradans to see, for example, how air pollution – from highways, power plants and refineries, and wildfires – is impacting their neighborhoods.”

PR Newswire: Celebrity Cruises Launches All-inclusive Campaign Featuring Work by World-renowned Photographer Annie Leibovitz and Others to Change the Faces in Travel Marketing (PRESS RELEASE). “Recognizing the need to improve the representation of all people who travel in marketing materials, the new-luxury cruise line has created both a new campaign and the world’s first free to use, ‘open source’ travel image library. The campaign and collection – ‘The All-Inclusive Photo Project’ (AIPP) – aims to start a movement, calling on travel companies to help address the lack of diversity in travel marketing imagery.”

EVENTS

Smithsonian: Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute and National Head Start Association Partner to Reach Children Nationwide About Animals and Conservation. “The Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (SNZCBI) and National Head Start Association (NHSA) have announced today, March 31, a yearlong partnership to provide free nature- and conservation-based learning opportunities about SNZCBI animals to young children in Head Start programs across the country.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Public Domain Review: 5.2 Million Book Illustrations Deleted from Flickr — Help Get Them Back. “Imagine a corner of the internet, free to all, where you could search, browse, and download from an archive of more than 5 million illustrations extracted from public domain books? And more than that, improve metadata by tagging and commenting, and contribute to findability by favouriting and saving images to your own publicly-accessible galleries? This very special space was the Internet Archive Book Images account on Flickr: The Commons. I write was because a couple of weeks ago it was deleted.”

Reuters: Two key tech execs quit Truth Social after troubled app launch. “Josh Adams and Billy Boozer – the company’s chiefs of technology and product development – joined the venture last year and quickly became central players in its bid to build a social-media empire, backed by Trump’s powerful brand, to counter what many conservatives deride as ‘cancel culture’ censorship from the left. Less than a year later, both have resigned their senior posts at a critical juncture for the company’s smartphone-app release plans, according to two sources familiar with the venture.” The chief legal officer has apparently also left.

Arab News: Sri Lanka lifts short-lived social media ban as protesters defy curfew. “Ordinary citizens and the opposition in Sri Lanka on Sunday defied a weekend curfew to demand President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s resignation over his handling of the economic crisis, as authorities lifted a short-lived social media shutdown intended to contain growing public dissent.”

USEFUL STUFF

My Ancestors and Me: Until There’s an Every-Name Index for the 1950 U.S. Census. “Without an every-name census index it might be harder to find your people, but it’s still possible. These are my suggestions for the steps that will make it easier.” Let me add one because it tripped me up: search by county AND by city if you have an address. I searched by county and couldn’t find the people I was looking for until I searched by city. There were two separate sets of records.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Deutsche Welle: Increased social media use puts African leaders on edge. “In the latest example of an African nation threatening a social media shutdown, South Sudan said last week it may be forced to close down Facebook and Twitter as users were abusing social media by creating panic. Estimated at around 4% in January 2022, the number of social media users in South Sudan is low. But those who do have social media access, mainly urban youth, are turning to social media to criticize the government of President Salva Kiir and First Vice President Riek Machar.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: Your Digital Footprint: It’s Bigger Than You Realize. “Today, your digital self includes your social media accounts, biometric identifiers, usernames and passwords. Possibly most creepy: Your smartphone records the location data of your daily life as you tote it around. The data collection doesn’t stop there. Your Yelp review of a pizza parlor or a comment you posted on your local newspaper’s website all become part of your digital profile. They’re used by marketers trying to get you to buy something, to support a policy or to vote for a candidate. There are oodles of data about you. Most of that info is largely free for the taking.”

The Markup: Can Chatrooms Replace Courtrooms?. “Online dispute resolution, as it’s known, had already been growing in popularity as a means to make often costly, slow-moving court processes more efficient. The tools, pioneered by eBay and PayPal, were designed to settle millions of disputes in their own businesses quickly and with as little need for human oversight as possible. But, it turns out, taking an e-commerce dispute platform and imbuing it with legal authority over everything from small claims cases to medical debt suits, child custody negotiations and eviction proceedings has its downsides.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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