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Stateless Histories, Opioid Industry Documents, Google I/O, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, May 11, 2022

NEW RESOURCES

Penn State: Stateless Histories project brings understudied subject to light. “[Professor Laura] Robson has joined forces with colleague Jennifer Dueck, the Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair in the Modern History of the Middle East and North Africa at the University of Manitoba, to encourage scholarship and awareness about statelessness. Using funds from their endowed professorships, the scholars created ‘Stateless Histories,’ a digital humanities project that includes essays, podcasts, documents, and videos that explore little-known histories of statelessness in the modern era.”

The Hub at Johns Hopkins: Opioid Industry Archive Releases 1.4 Million Documents From Leading Opioid Maker Implicated In Drug Crisis. “The archive, launched by the two research universities in March 2021, is a digital repository of publicly disclosed documents arising from ongoing opioid litigation brought by local and state governments and tribal communities against opioid manufacturers, wholesalers, and pharmacies. The Mallinckrodt company agreed to release documents produced during litigation as part of their settlement in recent legal cases with the plaintiffs.”

EVENTS

WIRED: How to Watch Google I/O 2022 and What to Expect . “I/O is technically a developer event where software programmers attend sessions and learn how to make apps for Google’s platforms. But the company also uses the first day’s keynote address to announce new products. Lots of news has been rumored or leaked already, so we have a decent idea of what’s to come. There’s always room for a few surprises, however.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Reuters: Google paying more than 300 EU publishers for news, more to come. “Alphabet unit Google has signed deals to pay more than 300 publishers in Germany, France and four other EU countries for their news and will roll out a tool to make it easier for others to sign up too, the company told Reuters.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: How to Preserve Your Digital Legacy (and Why You Should). “What’s truly disturbing about our digital legacies is how impermanent they might prove to be. Once you’re no longer here to maintain it, it could be edited or altered—or simply deleted. Twitter is currently littered with the official, verified accounts of celebrities who passed away but somehow keep on posting fresh content, but you don’t have to be a celebrity to want some say in how your online presence gets used after you’re gone.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Junkee: The Australian Electoral Commission Has Gone Rogue On Social Media, And It’s Working. “We’re just over a week out from the federal election, which means you’d be hard pressed to scroll through social media without some form of political advertisement or misinformation crossing your radar. But if you’re lucky, any misinformation has likely already been fact-checked by the Australian Electoral Commission. An unexpected and unsung hero of the 2022 election cycle has been the AEC’s social media team, who have — quite frankly — chosen to go full sicko mode this year and aren’t afraid to call you out if you’re spreading electoral misinformation online.”

USA Today: ‘Kickball Cupid’ banned from Tinder after player uses dating app to find players for her team. “[Gianna] Pecchia of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, is a part of Clubwaka, an adult sports league, originally founded as the World Kickball Association. Pecchia used Tinder to find 25 players this kickball season – 18 for her own team and seven to help fill three other teams in the league. But after a very successful recruiting process, Tinder banned Pecchia indefinitely for violating their promotion or solicitation rules.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BNN Bloomberg: Antitrust Chief Barred From Google Cases Pending Recusal Ruling. “The Justice Department’s top antitrust official has been barred from working on monopoly investigations of Alphabet Inc.’s Google as the department wrestles with whether he must recuse himself because of his previous work for the search giant’s rivals, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Gothamist: NY Appellate Court: Law enforcement agencies can’t use DNA database for familial searches. “Law enforcement agencies can’t use a state DNA database to investigate the possible relatives of people whose genetic material matches those on file, a panel of state appellate judges ruled Thursday. The court found the use of the database can disproportionately target people of color.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Loughborough University: Using Artificial Intelligence to improve the health and wellbeing of people with learning disabilities. “A new study led by Loughborough University and the Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust will use Artificial Intelligence to improve the health and wellbeing of people with learning disabilities.”

London School of Economics: Location-based mobile games like Pokémon Go may help alleviate depression. “Playing location-based games, such as the popular augmented reality game Pokémon Go, may alleviate non-clinical forms of mild depression, a new study from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) has found.”

University of Nevada, Reno: Linguistic/game-theoretic approach detects and explains online propaganda. “In a paper recently published in Expert Systems with Applications, Arash Barfar, assistant professor of information systems in the University’s College of Business, developed and tested a model for the automatic detection and explanation of propagandistic content on the Internet. Barfar constructed a dataset containing nearly 205,000 articles from 39 propagandistic and 30 trustworthy news sources and computed 92 linguistic features for each article. He then built predictive models that detect online propaganda.” Good morning, Internet…

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