NEW RESOURCES

Carolina Public Press: As NC’s decades-old rape kits are tested, new DNA evidence emerges. “After having the largest backlog of untested kits in the entire country, North Carolina is methodically working through those kits — more than 16,000 of them…. The DNA from another 1,481 kits has already been uploaded to CODIS [Combined DNA Index System], awaiting a hit from a possibly unknown person. That information is now displayed publicly, including down to the law enforcement agency level, on a new website.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Journal: LinkedIn Improves Search Results For Posts. “Search results for posts were previously served by two indexes – one for posts in LinkedIn’s main feed and one for articles. The complex nature made it difficult to build upon, so LinkedIn decided to decouple the two indexes. LinkedIn reveals the entire process in excruciating detail in a new blog post.”

CNBC: YouTube appoints Mary Ellen Coe as Chief Business Officer, following departure of Robert Kyncl. “Long-time YouTube executive Robert Kyncl announced on Monday he’s departing the dominant social video platform in the U.S. after more than 12 years at the company. Google President of global customer solutions Mary Ellen Coe will take over the role of Chief Business Officer at YouTube starting in early October, the company confirmed. Kyncl will temporarily stay at YouTube to help with the transition.”

USEFUL STUFF

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: How to navigate and search ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks Database. “In the first installment of this multi-part video series, ICIJ’s training manager Jelena Cosic walks through the basics of how to search through more than 800,000 offshore entities from the Pandora Papers, Panama Papers and more.”

MakeUseOf: 7 Best YouTube Curators to Find Videos, Movies, and Documentaries Worth Watching. “Finding quality videos on YouTube has become a recurring joke these days, and let’s not even get started on the irrelevant recommendations that YouTube serves you. But that’s why we need video curators. These are the people (or algorithms) that crawl the deep recesses of YouTube’s library to find videos worth watching so that you can spend more time watching and less time searching.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: Twitter labeled factual information about covid-19 as misinformation. “Many of the tweets have since had the misinformation labels removed, and the suspended accounts have been restored. But the episode has shaken many scientific and medical professionals, who say Twitter is a key way they try to publicize the continuing risk of covid to a population that has grown weary of more than two years of shifting claims about the illness.”

Bard College: Bard Graduate Center Faculty Member Aaron Glass Awarded $150,000 NEH Grant to Support Enhanced Accessibility for the Digital Publication of Indigenous Cultural Heritage Materials. “Bard Graduate Center Associate Professor Aaron Glass has been awarded a $150,000 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) to support his collaborative project to create a critical, annotated, digitized edition of anthropologist Franz Boas’s landmark 1897 monograph on the Kwakwaka’wakw culture of the Pacific Northwest Coast.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: Remote Scan of Student’s Room Before Test Violated His Privacy, Judge Rules. “A federal judge said Cleveland State University violated the Fourth Amendment when it used software to scan a student’s bedroom, a practice that has grown during the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Bleeping Computer: FBI: Hackers increasingly exploit DeFi bugs to steal cryptocurrency. “The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is warning investors that cybercriminals are increasingly exploiting security vulnerabilities in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platforms to steal cryptocurrency. ‘The FBI has observed cyber criminals exploiting vulnerabilities in the smart contracts governing DeFi platforms to steal investors’ cryptocurrency,’ the federal law enforcement agency said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: The Animal Translators. “Machine-learning systems, which use algorithms to detect patterns in large collections of data, have excelled at analyzing human language, giving rise to voice assistants that recognize speech, transcription software that converts speech to text and digital tools that translate between human languages. In recent years, scientists have begun deploying this technology to decode animal communication, using machine-learning algorithms to identify when squeaking mice are stressed or why fruit bats are shouting.”

Science Daily: Underwater messaging app for smartphones. “Researchers have developed AquaApp, a mobile app for acoustic-based communication and networking underwater that can be used with existing devices such as smartphones and smartwatches.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

How-To Geek: “An Intense Hobby”: Meet the People Making New Retro Games. “It’s easy to think that consoles like the original NES, Sega Mega Drive, or even the Atari are nothing more than museum pieces, mere footnotes in video gaming history. However, there’s plenty of interest in retro gaming: And people are even making new games for these old consoles. Nowhere was this clearer than at Gamescom 2022 in Cologne, Germany, where a decent-sized section of a massive hall was dedicated to retro gaming.” Good morning, Internet…

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