NEW RESOURCES

EPA: EPA Marks National Pollinator Week by Launching Pilot Projects and Resources Portal to Help Protect Vulnerable Species from Pesticides. “To enhance access to pollinator protection resources, EPA launched a webpage that provides information on best pest management practices, state managed pollinator protection plans, and mitigations, from EPA, federal partners, and scientific journals that offer lessons on protecting pollinators and their habitat. These resources will help empower farmers and others interested in pollinator protection to learn about and address the challenges facing pollinators.”

Poz: Viewing the History of HIV Through AIDS Posters . “Three recent art exhibitions emphasize the pivotal role played by HIV and AIDS posters since the virus emerged in the early ’80s. Donald Albrecht drew from the poster collection of the University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries’ Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation to curate Up Against the Wall: Art, Activism, and the AIDS Poster, which was presented at the University’s Memorial Art Gallery. Andy Campbell worked with the ONE Archives and ONE Archives Foundation to curate Days of Rage, a multimedia online exhibition featuring activists and designers discussing their work. Theodore (ted) Kerr organized the online exhibition AIDS, Posters & Stories of Public Health: A People’s History of a Pandemic for the National Library of Medicine (NLM).”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

WIRED: Brave Now Lets You Customize Search Results—for Better or Worse. “For instance, a Goggle (not to be confused with Google) can strip Pinterest pages from your search results; it can show only results from tech blogs or boost articles from either left- or right-leaning political news sources. Essentially, they put you in charge of the search results you see. The move is the first for a search engine.” I just spent a little time looking at this and oh boy, am I going to have some fun.

The Register: GitHub’s AI code assistant Copilot takes flight. And that’ll be $10 a month, please. “Microsoft’s GitHub on Tuesday released its Copilot AI programming assistance tool into the wild after a year-long free technical trial. And now that GitHub Copilot is generally available, developers will have to start paying for it. Or most of them will. Verified students and maintainers of popular open-source projects may continue using Copilot at no charge.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

University of Mississippi News: Professor Works to Make Theologian’s Historical Records Accessible. “University of Mississippi historian Jeffrey R. Watt has been working for 35 years to transcribe records kept by 16th century theologian John Calvin concerning the Consistory of Geneva. And thanks to two major grants to fund the painstaking work, he is closing in on the project’s completion.”

University of Vermont: University of Vermont Launches National Center for Community News. “The new Center for Community News is supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and UVM College of Arts & Sciences (CAS) donors. The $400,000 initiative builds on the successful Community News model in Vermont, which brings students together with professional editors to provide news reporting at no cost to local news outlets.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: Social Security Numbers Stolen in Flagstar Bank Data Breach. “The personal information, including Social Security numbers, of more than 1.5 million Flagstar Bank customers was compromised in a data breach late last year, the company said. The Michigan-based bank, which operates 150 branches and is one of the country’s largest mortgage lenders, said in a disclosure to the state of Maine that its systems were hacked between Dec. 3 and 4 of last year but that the breach wasn’t discovered until earlier this month.”

RNZ: NZME makes final deal with Google about supplying news. “The pair have agreed on the terms for the supply of content to Google’s News Showcase, which they started in March. Chief executive Michael Boggs said the deal would support its digital development and journalism in the country.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Phys .org: Local economic data encourages legislators to open emails—but only Democrats. “Personalizing outreach to legislators to include the local economic impact of an issue can increase engagement with research among Democratic, but not Republican, legislators. The findings, published in the journal Implementation Science, support including economic evidence when communicating with legislators, but also signal the value of tailoring communication by political party.”

MIT News: Researchers release open-source photorealistic simulator for autonomous driving. “…scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) created ‘VISTA 2.0,’ a data-driven simulation engine where vehicles can learn to drive in the real world and recover from near-crash scenarios. What’s more, all of the code is being open-sourced to the public.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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