NEW RESOURCES

Village Preservation: Civil Rights and Social Justice Map Revised and Relaunched. “Village Preservation’s acclaimed Civil Rights and Social Justice Map has been revised and relaunched. Containing hundreds of sites connected to civil rights history found in Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo, we’ve streamlined the format, added images and entries, and made it easier and more engaging than ever to learn how the course of history changed and the cause of social justice advanced in our neighborhoods.”

New-to-me, from Tobacco Tactics: STOP adds 25 new organisations to its Tobacco Industry Allies database. “An investigation carried out by global tobacco industry watchdog STOP [Stopping Tobacco Organizations & Products] has resulted in the addition of 25 new organisations to its Tobacco Industry Allies database. The database, launched in 2019, now includes 135 groups across 33 countries. Each of the allies listed in the database is categorised as ‘Third Party’, ‘Front Group’ or ‘Astroturf’ using the definitions outlined by STOP.”

Phys.org: Deconstructing Chile’s colonization: Digital re-edition of Indigenous language textbook. “At first glance, it is merely a printed textbook for religious education in a foreign language. But the genesis of the 1903 edition of ‘Kurze biblische Geschichte für die unteren Schuljahre der katholischen Volksschule’ (short biblical history for the lower years of Catholic elementary school), published in the language of the Indigenous Mapuche, provides special insights into the time of missionary work by the Bavarian Capuchins in Chile.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bloomberg: Brazil’s loudest election deniers are kicked off social media. “Even as Jair Bolsonaro begins to give up power, his staunchest supporters refuse to accept defeat in Brazil’s presidential election, crying foul on the Internet and in the streets. For nearly two weeks they’ve protested President-elect Luiz Inacio da Silva’s Oct. 30 victory, rallying around unproven claims of fraud. And the most social-media savvy are blasting conspiracies about vote rigging to millions of followers. Electoral authorities are hitting back.”

CNET: Twitter Disables Ability To Change Account Names, Remove Blue Checkmarks. “Twitter appears to have disabled the ability for people to change their account names following a rash of impersonation attempts by trolls who paid $8 to the company for a blue check mark verification badge. Twitter had earlier disabled the ability to change user display names too, in response to trolls.”

USEFUL STUFF

ZDNet: How to collaborate on Google Keep lists and why you should. “Google Keep has been my note-taking app for some time now. It’s simple, effective, and works with both web browsers and mobile devices. With Google Keep, I can save quick thoughts, add lists, add images, format text, pin notes to the top, and even collaborate with notes.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Big Technology: Twitter’s Turbulent Year, As Seen Through One Fired Employee’s Cartoons. “With dozens of cartoons, [Manu] Cornet depicted the feeling inside as Musk acquired the company. As the person behind some of the tech world’s best-known cartoons — including an all-timer on big tech org charts — Cornet was perfectly placed to document the wild 2022 Twitter experience. Now suing Twitter, Cornet isn’t speaking publicly, but he did give Big Technology permission to reprint his Twitter cartoons (which he calls ‘twittoons’) with attribution.”

Yorkshire Bylines: Musk’s reader suppression about voter suppression. “In the latest twist of logic for Elon Musk, his chaotic version of Twitter has now decided to flag Byline Times as an ‘unsafe’ site. Worse still, the article selected as ‘potentially spammy or unsafe’ is an article by Josiah Mortimer on voter suppression, entitled ‘VOTER ID “It’s Far Worse than Any US State”‘. Mortimer’s article examines the rushed roll out of mandatory voter ID for next May’s local elections, which have been widely condemned as voter suppression, particularly when it comes to young people.”

Nikkei Asia: Vinyl production finds groove in Japan, thanks to social media . “As ‘city pop,’ a type of Japanese pop music produced in the 1970s and ’80s, wins a new generation of fans around the world, production of phonograph records, the principal medium for recorded music at the time, has more than quadrupled over the past decade in Japan. As city pop gains more exposure through TikTok and other video hosting apps, it has drawn young people to vinyl records, which offer a listening experience that differs from digital music. More artists these days are also releasing new music on records.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Georgia Tech: New Research Gives Users Another Reason to Hate Unwanted Ads. “New research released this week reveals the process used by third party advertisers to target online users can be viewed or manipulated by online adversaries using only their target’s email address.”

New York Times: Internal Documents Show How Close the F.B.I. Came to Deploying Spyware. “During a closed-door session with lawmakers last December, Christopher A. Wray, the director of the F.B.I., was asked whether the bureau had ever purchased and used Pegasus, the hacking tool that penetrates mobile phones and extracts their contents. Mr. Wray acknowledged that the F.B.I. had bought a license for Pegasus, but only for research and development.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Imperial College London: Smartphone users to help simulate cyclones and predict effects of climate change. “The Vodafone Foundation’s DreamLab app harnesses the computing power of smartphones while their users sleep. With over two million downloads across 17 countries to date, the network of smartphones created by DreamLab is equivalent to a virtual supercomputer capable of processing billions of calculations, without collecting or disclosing any user data. In the first phase of the project, the Imperial College Storm Model (IRIS) will be fed with existing historical data on cyclones in different regions of the world.”

Stanford University: Is This a Deer I See? Socially Aware AI Adapts by Asking Questions of Humans. “… artificial intelligence agents are still largely only as good as the data upon which they were trained. They don’t know what they don’t know. In the real world, people faced with unfamiliar situations and surroundings adapt by watching what others around them are doing and by asking questions… Experts in educational psychology call this ‘socially situated learning.’ Until now, AI agents have lacked this ability to learn on the fly, but researchers at Stanford University recently announced that they have developed artificially intelligent agents with the ability to seek out new knowledge by asking people questions.” Good morning, Internet…

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