NEW RESOURCES

Associated Press: New tool to track the migration of birds across the world. “The Bird Migration Explorer mapping tool, available free to the public, is an ongoing collaboration between 11 groups that collect and analyze data on bird movements.”

Flinders University: New tech brings our ‘lost’ theatres back to life. “The authors and their research teams have pioneered a new research technique for Visualising Lost Theatres, using archival and archaeological records to reconstruct lost theatres in accurate virtual reality. These VR models provide the visual and immersive feel of a venue, as well as revealing performance logistics for actors and audience alike, enabling the researchers to explore both social histories and theatre practices in which the venues themselves were significant players.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Library of Congress: Chronicling America Reaches 50 States. “NEH recently awarded its first grant award to a National Digital Newspaper Program partner for the state of New Hampshire, ensuring access to significant newspapers from the entire United States. Dartmouth College will serve as the New Hampshire state hub, partnering with the New Hampshire State Library, the New Hampshire Historical Society, and the University of New Hampshire Library to identify historical newspapers that reflect the state’s political, economic, and cultural history for inclusion in Chronicling America.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Compress Large Audio Files: 5 Easy and Effective Ways. “Whether you’re a podcast producer, a musician, or a DJ who creates music mixes, you need to know how to compress audio files to reduce their size. It can also be helpful to know how to compress audio files when you just want them to take up less space on your device. Here are a handful of easy and effective ways to reduce large audio files down to a more manageable size.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: How Russian Trolls Helped Keep the Women’s March Out of Lock Step. “For more than a century, Russia and the Soviet Union sought to weaken their adversaries in the West by inflaming racial and ethnic tensions….Social media now provided an easy way to feed ideas into American discourse, something that, for half a century, the K.G.B. had struggled to do. And the Russian government secretly funneled more than $300 million to political parties in more than two dozen countries in an effort to sway their policies in Moscow’s favor since 2014, according to a U.S. intelligence review made public last week.”

Protocol: Two former Googlers launched an app to keep you on foodtok forever. “Former Google engineer François Chu and Alejandro Oropeza, YouTube’s former global head of creator marketing, launched Flavrs earlier this week with the hopes that users will use the app as a dedicated platform for finding recipes, learning how to cook them and buying the necessary ingredients. The platform has raised $7 million in seed funding from support from Andreessen Horowitz, Wellington Access Ventures and celebrity chefs including Eric Ripert.”

Slashgear: This YouTube Channel Is Tracking The Stunning Miles-Long Queue To See Queen Elizabeth II’s Coffin. “Officials are allowing the line to reach a maximum length of 10 miles. It was around two and a half miles long on Wednesday (September 14) and is currently just under 5 miles long with an estimated waiting time of nine hours.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NBC News: Disinformation via text message is a problem with few answers. “The biggest election disinformation event of the 2022 midterm primaries was not an elaborate Russian troll scheme that played out on Twitter or Facebook. It was some text messages. The night before Kansans were set to vote on a historic statewide referendum last month, voters saw a lie about how to vote pop up on their phone. A blast of old-fashioned text messages falsely told them that a ‘yes’ vote protected abortion access in their state, when the opposite was true — a yes vote would cut abortion protections from the state’s constitution.”

University of Alabama at Birmingham: Staying cyber-aware: New social media scams to watch out for. “Every day, Americans come across scams, whether through email, text or social media. According to the Federal Trade Commission, nearly 2.8 million consumers reported a fraud in 2021, marking it the highest number of reports dating back to 2001. University of Alabama at Birmingham expert Ragib Hasan, Ph.D., associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Computer Science, warns that cybercriminals and scammers are using new techniques that can be very convincing.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WJZY: Pre-teens lose full night of sleep a week to social media, new study. “A study out of Leicester, England with De Montfort University monitored 10- and 11-year-olds participating in social media. Researchers found the subjects were only getting about 8.7 hours of sleep each night. The recommended amount for the age group is nine to 11 hours. Young people cite increased social media usage as a fear of missing out, commonly known as FOMO. They said they didn’t want to miss a post or message from their friends.”

NewScientist: Stop calling it social media – these firms don’t care what we want. “ANOTHER month, another algorithm change on a social media platform that has everybody peeved online. This time it is Instagram, the photo-sharing service owned by Facebook. Instead of showing us the cat photos and wedding pictures we want, the app is clogging up our friend feeds with tons of ‘reels’: autoplaying mini-movies. The problem? Nobody asked for this.”

Ars Technica: Artists begin selling AI-generated artwork on stock photography websites. “Seeking ways to ‘monetize’ AI-generated art, some artists have already begun submitting their AI-generated pieces to stock photography websites like Shutterstock. Searches for ‘AI generated’ or ‘Midjourney’ (a popular image synthesis service) produce thousands of results on the site.” Good morning, Internet…

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