NEW RESOURCES

New York University: Researchers launch database with new classification system for minority-serving institutions in US. “The MSI Data Project, launched in March 2023, offers dashboards with data on MSI eligibility, funding status, institutional characteristics, enrollment, and graduation metrics for MSIs from 2017-2021. MSIs are postsecondary colleges and universities that offer resources and support for racial and ethnic minorities or that have a particular percentage of racial and ethnic minorities enrolled.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

IT World Canada: Mastodon passes the 10 million account milestone. “Mastodon is owned by a German not-for-profit. It cannot be sold, and even if there were some way around this, the protocols that support the federation of servers are open source. In fact, Meta’s rumoured new Twitter replacement will use the same open-source protocols called ActivityPub that supports Mastodon.”

Mashable: Twitter turns off SMS 2FA today if you don’t pay. Here’s why you should act now.. “If you have Twitter’s SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA) method turned on, but you haven’t paid for Twitter Blue, you’ve probably been getting nagging messages from Twitter about it going away. Well, today is the last day to switch to a different 2FA, and it would be wise to do so.”

USEFUL STUFF

Larry Ferlazzo: This Week’s Free & Useful Artificial Intelligence Tools For The Classroom. “At least, for now, I’m going to make this a weekly feature which will highlight additions to THE BEST NEW – & FREE – ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS THAT COULD BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Motherboard: Great, Dating Apps Are Getting More Hellish Thanks to AI Chatbots. “A group claiming to be disenfranchised ex-Tinder employees gone rogue has built an app that uses AI chatbots to talk to women for men on dating apps, in an effort to combat the ‘disadvantages the average man’ faces in online dating.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: More than 1000 artifacts in Metropolitan Museum of Art catalog linked to alleged looting and trafficking figures. “In the antiquities trade, the Met’s reputation has begun to erode. Over the last two years, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and its media partners have reported on the Met’s acquisition practices — often in relation to a trove of items obtained from Cambodia in an era when that country’s cultural heritage was sold off wholesale to the highest bidder.”

Unseen Japan: Scam Website Steals Japanese Cosplayer’s Labor of Love. “A Japanese cosplayer was recently horrified to find that their homemade cosplay of a much-loved character — an outfit still sitting in their own home — was listed for sale on an online outlet under their own photo and some of their own words.”

Associated Press: Here’s how an AI tool may flag parents with disabilities. “The Hackneys, who have developmental disabilities, are struggling to understand how taking their daughter to the hospital when she refused to eat could be seen as so neglectful that she’d need to be taken from her home. They wonder if an artificial intelligence tool that the Allegheny County Department of Human Services uses to predict which children could be at risk of harm singled them out because of their disabilities.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: Algorithms are moulding and shaping our politics. Here’s how to avoid being gamed . “In a recent paper, I coined the term ‘algopopulism’: algorithmically aided politics. The political content in our personal feeds not only represents the world and politics to us. It creates new, sometimes “alternative”, realities. It changes how we encounter and understand politics and even how we understand reality itself.”

MIT News: Where the sidewalk ends. “Most cities don’t map their own pedestrian networks. Now, researchers have built the first open-source tool to let planners do just that.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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