NEW RESOURCES

Bellingcat: Octosuite: A New Tool to Conduct Open Source Investigations on GitHub. “Octosuite is an advanced GitHub framework written in Python that uses GitHub’s Public API to make the process of investigating accounts and repositories on the platform more efficient, while also creating a set of automated and easily reproducible queries.”

New-to-me, from Black Enterprise: Database Makes Black Women With Ph.D.s In Physics More Discoverable. “Out of the 2,000 physics Ph.D.s that are awarded in the U.S. each year, less than 0.5% of those are reportedly given to women of African descent. Doctor of Cosmology and University of New Hampshire professor, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, is tackling the lack of representation in scientific research through Cite Black Women+ in Physics and Astronomy Bibliography, a database that lists professional publications by Black women who hold Ph.D.s in physics-related disciplines.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Indiana Department of Education: Users Can Now View Longitudinal and Disaggregated Data In Just One Click. “The Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) has deployed the first round of enhancements to its new Indiana Graduates Prepared to Succeed Dashboard (Indiana GPS) – a resource that is constantly evolving in response to the needs of Indiana’s students, communities and employers. The most recent enhancements allow users to drill down into longitudinal and disaggregated data, showing data over time by student population.”

Internet Archive: Public Domain Day Film Contest Highlights Works of 1927. “At Internet Archive we love to see how creative people can get with the material we make available online. As part of this year’s Public Domain Day celebration we asked the greater community to submit short films highlighting anything that was going to be made available in the Public Domain in 2023. For the contest, vintage images and sounds were woven into creative films of 2-3 minutes. Many of the films were abstract while others educational, they all showcased the possibility when public domain materials are made openly available and accessible for download.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 5 Fun Map Sites for Cool and Interesting Cartography. “There are portals that preserve old maps and show you how the world has changed, while others let you compare pretty much any two places on the planet. And you’ll be glad to know that there are communities to find like-minded map lovers to share your interests.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Search Engine Land: TikTok has a secret “Heating” (cheating?) button. “Six current and former employees of TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, as well as internal documents and communications reviewed by Forbes, TikTok and ByteDance staff use a practice called ‘heating’ to artificially boost the distribution of certain videos in addition to relying on the algorithm to determine what becomes popular.”

The Guardian: ‘That’s Africa, man’: how a young musician captured the music of Rwanda . “In 2018, [Michael Makembe] decided to travel all around Rwanda, visiting communities in remote places to collect voices, poems, songs and recordings of traditional instruments. In five years Makembe has amassed nearly 1,000 different sounds. He is hoping to open an audio museum this year where people can go and listen to them. He also wants to launch Sounds of Rwanda, an online library for a global audience.”

Deseret News: New genealogy platform unveiling, and connecting, the untold stories of our lives . “[Kendall] Hulet knows a thing or two about genealogy and search services having spent 14 years upgrading the search functions for family history giant Ancestry.com and launching his own mobile browser, Cake, a few years back. Now, Hulet is CEO of Storied, a newly announced rebrand of newspaper and record archive service World Archives which was acquired in 2020 by Charles Thayne Capital.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EdSurge: Before Using Augmented and Virtual Reality Tools, Teachers Should Develop a Plan. “As an early adopter and enthusiast for immersive technology in schools, I’ve had the opportunity to share ways to use augmented and virtual reality to transform learning with educators around the world. I provide staff development and training, and many of the teachers I work with are enthusiastic about trying new tools…. But I’ve seen a lot of teachers dive in too quickly, selecting and using a tool without carving out time to think through how to implement it with fidelity.”

Margins: Google vs. ChatGPT told by aglio e olio. “Yes, Google is still the best search engine for most things, but the fact that many people are comparing OpenAI’s tech demo to Google’s flagship product should be causing alarm bells to go off. For a long time, Google’s claim to fame was to getting the users the answers they want faster than the competition. That doesn’t hold true for many types of queries anymore. More than half the time, I have to add `site:reddit.com` to get anything that is not SEO spam.”

The Hill: We need an open source intelligence center. “A government of multiple small efforts is insufficiently prepared to harness the current open source revolutionary potential. The volume and variety of open and commercial source materials, urgency of the geopolitical rivalry, and continued development of tools to exploit the data all necessitate a systematic effort to harness open and commercial source to support decision making. The answer, we believe, rests on standing up a standalone open source entity.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

WIRED: You Can Use This Silly Game to Do Some Serious Physics. “The game works like this: You start off with a rocket on a very small planet. Click on the rocket to start, then you can use the arrows on your keyboard to turn on the thruster, rotate the spacecraft, and find other planets and a few fun things that are mostly inside What If jokes. That’s it. That’s the game. It’s silly and fun, and I love it. But it turns out that you can use even a simple game to explore some key concepts in physics.” Good morning, Internet…

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