NEW RESOURCES

Library of Congress: What’s new online at the Library of Congress – Summer 2022. “The Manuscript Division has recently released the Shippen Family Papers, a collection of 6,500 items (15,666 images) digitized from 15 reels of previously produced microfilm, which document this wealthy and powerful group of Philadelphians connected by blood and marriage who reached the height of their influence in the mid-eighteenth century…. The Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve collection consists of interviews and photographs by Mary Hufford and Tom Tankersley in December 1985 for the American Folklife Center…”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TorrentFreak: Google Received DMCA Takedown Notices For 4 Million Unique Domains. “Google has reached a new milestone. Over the past several years, copyright holders have asked the search engine to remove URLs from four million unique domains. These include some egregious pirate sites but The White House, the FBI, and the Vatican have also been flagged as infringers.”

Washington Post: 4,000 Google cafeteria workers quietly unionized during the pandemic. “Unite Here, a 300,000-member union hotel and food service workers, has been steadily working to unionize Silicon Valley cafeteria workers since 2018, experiencing the most success at Google. Employed by the contract companies Compass and Guckenheimer, those unionized now make up about 90 percent of total food services workers at Google, according to the union. Workers have unionized at 23 Google offices nationwide, including in Seattle and San Jose. Now, the union is tackling new territory: the South.”

USEFUL STUFF

Amateur Photographer: How To Connect Your Camera To Your Smartphone. “If you’ve got a camera with built-in Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth, then you’ll be able to take advantage of this to quickly and easily send your images to your smartphone or tablet. From there you can edit the photos and quickly share on social media. In this guide we’ll show you what you need to connect your camera to your smartphone.”

MakeUseOf: How to Blur Parts of an Image for Free Online: 5 Tools. “If you ever share screenshots or photos online, knowing how to blur parts of your image is a handy skill to have. Whether you need to send a screenshot with confidential information to a colleague or just want to draw focus to a certain part of your image, we’ll show you how to blur the parts that you want to hide.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

NiemanLab: Medium’s new CEO on the company’s journalism mistakes, bundle economics, and life after Ev Williams . “The fate of a blogging platform may have somewhat lower stakes than some of the subjects we usually discuss around here. But a key question at the intersection of tech and democracy is what sort of publishing models the internet will support. How many journalists and other writers will be able to make a living? How will their work find an audience? And will the platforms they operate on ever find long-term stability?”

Marine Corps Times: Military, veterans learn to fight disinformation campaigns. “While much of the conversation about social media and the military recently has focused on the specific concern around extremist radicalization, more garden-variety disinformation is also a growing issue. Disinformation can undermine critical thinking, sow confusion and suspicion, and threaten unit cohesion and force readiness. But the scope and unusual nature of the problem means it is difficult to protect troops.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

News@Northeastern: Now Banned By Tiktok And Others, Andrew Tate Rode Wave Of Online Misogyny, Says Northeastern Expert. “Tate, a British-American social media influencer, is well known for making misogynistic comments in his videos, which have been removed from TikTok but at one point had billions of views. In the videos, Tate referred to women as property, described how he would attack a woman who accused him of cheating, and said he doesn’t believe that depression is real (Tate says his comments were taken out of context). Following a public outcry, last week he was banned from YouTube, TikTok and Facebook. But experts say that Tate is not acting in a silo; in fact, online misogyny has been on the rise for years, and social media platforms are not built to handle it.”

Caltech: Caltech to Study How the Brain Responds to Virtual Environments. “The rise of social media has meant that social and professional interactions are increasingly carried out online. This trend is expected to continue in the coming decades, as the digital world becomes more immersive and realistic. To understand how the human brain might be affected by this shift, Dean Mobbs, professor of cognitive neuroscience, is leading a new project that will use social psychology and neuroscience to explore the relationship between social media use and mental health.”

Artnet: Two Years Ago, Museums Across the U.S. Promised to Address Diversity and Equity. Here’s Exactly What They Have Done So Far. “Museums across the U.S. publicly stated their commitments to work towards dismantling systemic racism, frequently citing intentions to listen to communities, improve hiring practices, support BIPOC staff, re-evaluate workplace culture, offer anti-racism training, and acquire and exhibit work from a more diverse range of artists. Two years on from these calls for action, are museums feeling the same urgency? Or were these promises just platitudes?” Good afternoon, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!