NEW RESOURCES

Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Romania’s ornate and sometimes crumbling synagogues get new access via virtual tours. “Launched by Romanian NGO Pantograf in collaboration with Jewish local communities and activists, the website Povestile Sinagogilor, or Stories of the Synagogues, invites visitors to a virtual tour of eight historic sites in Romania, including Timisoara’s main synagogue, which has been recently renovated.”

Wisconsin Department of Health Services: State Health Department Introduces New Flu Vaccine Data Dashboard and Report on Vaccine Coverage in Wisconsin . “The Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) today released its Influenza Vaccine Update and launched a new online flu vaccine data dashboard. Together, the report and data dashboard provide a look at previous and current flu vaccine rates statewide, and highlight communities and areas of the state more vulnerable to the seasonal flu.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Zapier extends its automation service with first-party database and UI tools. “For the longest time, Zapier, which launched in 2011, was content with helping its users automate simple workflows and build integrations between various business-critical tools…. Today, at its ZapConnect conference, it’s taking the next step in this journey with the launch of Zapier Tables and Interfaces, a database service and a UI builder for allowing end users to interact with existing Zapier workflows.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: How Disinformation Splintered and Became More Intractable. “Ahead of the midterm elections, the proliferation of alternative social media sites has helped cement false and misleading information as a defining feature of American politics.”

CNBC: Snap plunges more than 25% on third-quarter revenue miss . “Snap shares plummeted more than 25% in extended trading on Thursday after the social media company reported weaker-than-expected revenue for the third quarter. It’s Wall Street’s first peak into the current state of the struggling online ad market.”

Brookings Institution: Video game censorship is authoritarians’ latest tool to muzzle speech. “In October of 2019, the professional esports player known as ‘Blitzchung’ was being interviewed on a livestream discussing a match he had just won in Taiwan as part of a tournament for the game Hearthstone. Wearing a gas mask and goggles and speaking to the official Taiwanese Hearthstone stream, Blitzchung repeated a popular slogan of protesters in Hong Kong who had recently taken to the streets to protest China undermining the island’s independence: ‘Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our time.’ Blitzchung, whose real name is Ng Wai Chung and who hails from Hong Kong, quickly found himself in the crosshairs of Activision Blizzard, the company behind Hearthstone.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: Elon Musk’s Deals May Face National Security Reviews. “The Biden administration is uncomfortable with tweets the SpaceX CEO has made about Russia’s war with Ukraine and his uncompensated support of Starlink in the region, Bloomberg reports.”

Philadelphia Inquirer: After 20 years, longtime N.J. marijuana activist officially changes his name . “NJWeedman.com began actively protesting marijuana laws in Trenton after spending 17 months in prison in the late 90s. He said he purchased the website in 1998.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EurekAlert: Social media damages appearance satisfaction. “New research has discovered that social media engagement is associated with lower appearance satisfaction, and engaging with posts by friends and family is more damaging than engaging with content posted by celebrities.”

Axios: How AI could help translate extreme weather alerts. “Gaps in language access to emergency alerts during extreme weather events have led to missed evacuations, injuries and loss of life for non-English speakers. Machine learning could mitigate that.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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