NEW RESOURCES

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: FAO unveils new public tool based on agricultural census data. “The new domain allows rapid access to knowing how many farms exist in a given country, what their sizes are, the tenure typology determining its ownership, the farmer’s gender, and how many people live and work on them, all sourced to national Agricultural Censuses.”

World Economic Forum: Digital Inclusion Navigator: A platform to help bridge digital divide for billions. “The Forum’s EDISON Alliance has launched a new tool to share best practices in expanding digital inclusion: the Digital Inclusion Navigator. The Navigator is open to all, and will ultimately convene and share the best ideas and practices of the digital inclusion policymaking community the world over.”

PR Newswire: Employers’ Forum of Indiana Introduces Sage Transparency, Built Using New RAND Hospital Price Study (PRESS RELEASE). “Using data from the upcoming RAND 4.0 Hospital Price Transparency Study, Employers’ Forum of Indiana today launched Sage Transparency, a publicly accessible and customizable dashboard to demonstrate hospital value…. Sage Transparency is a free-to-use, customizable dashboard which allows the user to compare metrics of hospital price and quality across states, health systems, and facilities.” The fact that Employers’ Forum of Indiana did it makes you think it might be Indiana-only, but I was able to look up hospital information all over America.

City of Philadelphia: New Online Tool Helps Navigate City Health Trends. “Lots of different things can determine just how healthy we are. For instance, where we were born or where we live now can impact our overall health…. A new online tool called PhilaStats is ready to help users compare these various factors – sometimes referred to as social determinants of health – across different areas of Philadelphia. The interactive dashboard highlights trends in population, along with information about births and deaths in the city between 2011 and 2019. It will be updated as additional years of data become available.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Search for YouTube Comments. “Looking for a specific comment on YouTube can be tricky if you don’t know how to search properly. It gets worse when you have to search through a thread of comments that goes on for pages. This can be frustrating, but there is a way to search through YouTube comments more effectively. In this article, we will show you how to search through YouTube comments, so you can find what you’re looking for.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

It’s Nice That: Dive into the random, genius, alphabetically-organised world of HejHelloHalloAnnyeong’s web design experiments. “Since the pandemic the collective have been meeting every fortnight to create innovative web-based experiments inspired by their random word selector.”

Input Magazine: Meet the amateur archivists streaming old VHS tapes online. “The tape collectors have different approaches. [Pete] Dillon-Trenchard provides a wry, Beavis and Butthead-style director’s commentary to whatever’s going on in the tapes in front of him. He typically focuses on advertisements rather than movies and TV shows — a decision taken to avoid any copyright issues, he says. [Jackson] Bedenbaugh doesn’t do much beyond clipping key moments from the tapes he finds, the equivalent of panning for gold within his analog tape mines. Meanwhile, FORGOTTEN_VCR — a Twitch streamer who asked to remain anonymous because he wants his work to speak for him — does something slightly different.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CBS News: Debt firms used social media to “smear” and harass people, feds say. “A group of debt collectors in upstate New York went after their targets by calling friends, family and employers and orchestrating ‘smear campaigns’ against people they claimed owed money, federal regulators said. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the New York Attorney General on Monday said they shut down a ring of debt collection firms who were going after debtors using illegal techniques.”

The Verge: Florida’s social media moderation ban is probably unconstitutional, says court. “A US appeals court says Florida’s ban on much social media moderation likely violates the First Amendment, setting up a legal showdown over social networks’ speech rights. Today, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld most of an earlier court order blocking Florida’s SB 7072 while a lawsuit proceeds. It directly contradicts a recent ruling over Texas’ similar moderation ban, setting up a split that the Supreme Court could step in to resolve.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: Elephants in Mourning Spotted on YouTube by Scientists. “For a paper published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the scientists used YouTube to crowdsource videos of Asian elephants responding to death.”

Stat News: Are smartphones making us miserable? A Google-backed study aims to find out. “Like a similar program run by its competitor Apple, Google Health Studies aims to beef up the company’s health bona fides among consumers, researchers, and care providers. In this case, Google has chosen to tackle a question that’s been the subject of great public concern as well as increasing academic study: Are smartphones really making us miserable?”

Smart Energy International: Google and UK Power Networks chart AI-driven electric cable maps. “Google’s DeepMind engineers have partnered with UK Power Networks, which delivers electricity across London, the East and South East, to create digital versions of maps covering more than 180,000km of electricity cables in the UK. The work involves new image recognition software scanning thousands of maps – some of which date back decades – and using artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically remaster them into a digital format for future use.” Good morning, Internet…

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