NEW RESOURCES

ProPublica: Does Your Local Museum or University Still Have Native American Remains?. “The law, known as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act or NAGPRA, sought to address this human rights issue by giving Indigenous peoples a way to reclaim their dead. But 33 years after the law’s passage, at least half of the remains of more than 210,000 Native Americans have yet to be returned.”

Illinois News Bureau: New website compiles ocean data from landmark 19th-century scientific voyage. “The HMS Challenger began a four-year voyage 150 years ago to explore the deep sea and the creatures that lived in it. The scientists aboard the ship discovered thousands of new species and recorded massive amounts of data about the oceans. The treasure trove of information they gathered is now available online in the first comprehensive database of the Challenger findings.”

Utah State University: USU Libraries Launches Digital Exhibit Exploring Title IX and the 1978 USU Volleyball Team . “A co-curated exhibit between students from the Department of History and USU Libraries exploring women’s sports and the passage of Title IX was published last week. The exhibit, titled ‘National Champions! Title IX and the 1978 USU Volleyball Team,’ explores Utah State University’s first national championship through oral histories of the players.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

UVA Today: Details, But No Big Revelations in Latest Kennedy Assassination Documents. “In December, the National Archives released 13,173 documents containing details on the shooting under terms of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. UVA Today spoke with Steve Gillon, a non-resident senior faculty fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, which studies the U.S. presidency, to see if this document dump shed any new light on the assassination.”

The Verge: Parler’s parent company has laid off a majority of its staff. “Parlement Technologies, the parent company of ‘censorship-free’ social media platform Parler, has laid off a majority of its staff and most of its chief executives over the last few weeks. The sudden purge of staff has thrown the future of Parler, one of the first conservative alternatives to mainstream platforms, into question.”

USEFUL STUFF

The Journalist’s Resource: Visual health misinformation: A primer and research roundup. “It’s important to pay attention to visual health misinformation, because failing to do so may undermine efforts to fully understand health misinformation in general and hamper efforts to develop effective solutions to fight it… Below is a primer on visual health misinformation and a roundup of relevant and noteworthy research.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Royal Mail halts international services after cyberattack. “The Royal Mail, UK’s leading mail delivery service, has stopped its international shipping services due to ‘severe service disruption’ caused by what it described as a ‘cyber incident.’ While delivery and collection services across the UK have been unaffected by the incident, the company advised customers to hold export times while the issues are resolved, as they cannot be dispatched to overseas destinations.”

Financial Times: Twitter hit with legal challenge from former UK staff. “Twitter already faces at least 200 legal complaints in the US — in the form of arbitration demands — and four class action lawsuits from those affected by the lay-offs there, said labour rights attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, whose firm Lichten has filed the disputes. Separately on Monday evening, Mike Clancy, general secretary for the UK trade union Prospect, wrote to Twitter raising the same concerns as Winckworth and urged the platform to “pause the redundancy process” and meet with the union, according to a copy of the letter seen by the FT.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Washington Post: Social media can be polarizing. A new type of algorithm aims to change that.. “In a new working paper, shared with The Technology 202 ahead of its publication today, [Aviv] Ovadya and co-author Luke Thorburn of King’s College London make the case for what they call ‘bridging systems’ — algorithms designed to elevate posts that resonate with diverse audiences. They see the approach as an antidote to today’s toxic Twitter and Facebook feeds, which tend to highlight the most attention-grabbing content, even if it’s polarizing.”

PC World: Hackers stole my personal info from Twitter. Twitter didn’t tell me. “Well, 2023 is off to a rousing start. This morning I learned that my personal information was pilfered as part of the recent Twitter data breach that leaked the email addresses, phone numbers, and other identifying data of over 200 million users. That sucks, but here’s what really sucks: Twitter didn’t tell me about it. So far, the Elon Musk-led social media company hasn’t actively notified users (or at least me) of the worrying situation.”

Carnegie Mellon University: LTI Project Aims To Expand Language Technologies. “Only a fraction of the 7,000 to 8,000 languages spoken around the world benefit from modern language technologies like voice-to-text transcription, automatic captioning, instantaneous translation and voice recognition. Carnegie Mellon University researchers want to expand the number of languages with automatic speech recognition tools available to them from around 200 to potentially 2,000.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

NextShark: History professor makes surprisingly cute discovery on lost roll of film labeled ‘The Philippines 1942’. “‘While working in our archives, I found an old metal box. Inside was a long-forgotten roll of silent 8mm film marked “The Philippines 1942,”‘ [Gregory] Schnakenberg tweeted. ‘Excited at possibly discovering lost WWII footage, I sent it to specialists for care and digitization.’ Schnakenberg received the digitized footage on Jan. 6. In the black-and-white film, puppies are seen playing with one another, tugging on a Filipino broom called a walis tambo and digging in the ground.” Good morning, Internet…

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