NEW RESOURCES

USGS: For the first time, national-scale maps of carbon stored in wetland soil across all interior and coastal settings were created from harmonized public datasets. “Scientists created three-dimensional maps of soil carbon stored across the conterminous United States in inland and tidal wetlands of the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Land Cover Database and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coastal Change Analysis Program. The resulting maps identify 1) wetland soil carbon storage at high resolution, and 2) issues of spatial bias among approaches used for different public datasets, and 3) strategic approaches to improve assessment of vulnerability of wetland carbon storage.”

Scientific Data: Building the European Social Innovation Database with Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning . “ESID is based on the idea of large-scale collection of unstructured web site text to classify and characterise social innovation projects from around the world. We use advanced machine learning techniques to extract features such as social innovation dimensions, project locations, summaries, and topics, among others. Our models perform as high as 0.90 F1. ESID currently includes 11,468 projects from 159 countries. ESID data is available freely and also presented in a web-based app.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Numerous social apps see gains in wake of Twitter chaos, new data shows. “The drama at Twitter following Elon Musk’s acquisition has seen some users looking for an exit. In recent days, alternative social apps and microblogging platforms have seen strong gains, including, most notably, the open source decentralized Twitter alternative Mastodon.”

CNBC: Twitter cuts a large number of contract workers without giving internal teams a heads up. “A large number of Twitter’s contract workers discovered they were suddenly terminated this weekend after they lost access to Slack and other work systems, according to internal communications shared with CNBC by full-time Twitter employees. An estimated 4,400 of its 5,500 contract workers were cut, according to Platformer, which first reported on the cuts. CNBC has not confirmed the total number.”

Engadget: Twitter will soon let organizations verify related accounts. “Less than two days after Twitter’s first attempt to charge for account verification ended in disaster, Elon Musk announced the company is working on a new way to authenticate users. On Sunday afternoon, he tweeted the social media website would soon begin rolling out a feature that will allow organizations to identify accounts that are ‘actually’ associated with them.”

USEFUL STUFF

The Conversation: What is Mastodon? A social media expert explains how the ‘federated’ network works and why it won’t be a new Twitter. “Like Twitter, Mastodon allows users to post, follow people and organizations, and like and repost others’ posts. But while Mastodon supports many of the same social networking features as Twitter, it is not a single platform. Instead, it’s a federation of independently operated, interconnected servers.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: Setting a Kahlo Drawing Aflame in Search of an NFT Spark. “It’s tough to profit in the struggling market of blockchain assets right now. Burning a purported drawing from Frida Kahlo’s personal diary didn’t help a businessman’s cause.”

USC Shoah Foundation: Past, Present and Future: Redesigned Visual History Archive to Expand Global Access to Holocaust and Genocide Testimonies . “USC Shoah Foundation today releases a complete redesign of its Visual History Archive (VHA), the world’s largest collection of primary source video testimonies from survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Politico: ‘Serious risk of breach’ at Musk’s Twitter. “Elon Musk’s turbulent Twitter takeover is undercutting the platform’s defenses while introducing new security risks, and cyber security experts fear users and the public will soon suffer the consequences.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Noema Magazine: How Online Mobs Act Like Flocks Of Birds. “A growing body of research suggests that human behavior on social media — coordinated activism, information cascades, harassment mobs — bears striking similarity to this kind of so-called ’emergent behavior’ in nature: occasions when organisms like birds or fish or ants act as a cohesive unit, without hierarchical direction from a designated leader. How that local response is transmitted — how one bird follows another, how I retweet you and you retweet me — is also determined by the structure of the network.”

University of Kansas: New Approach Could Help Protect Consumer Data Exposed In Purchase Transactions. “Whether they are shopping at Costco or watching Netflix, consumers are consistently exposing personal data. Even though companies may be taking reasonable precautions to protect customers (including those provisions required by law), the distinctiveness of purchasing patterns creates a privacy vulnerability.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Laughing Squid: Artist Builds Giant Concrete Sarcophagus for a Bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos for Future Generations to Find. “Seattle artist Sunday Nobody built a giant concrete 3,000 pound sarcophagus for a single bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos that future generations can dig up and look back on to see what kind of junk food was popular in our time. He also added a shiny plaque on top with the ingredients of the popular snack food.” Good morning, Internet…

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