NEW RESOURCES

WLBT: New website launched to connect Mississippi mothers to resources. “The newly launched Mississippi Access to Maternal Assistance or MAMA site pulls the public and private resources together, allowing women to learn where to go for a wide range of needs, from during pregnancy to after the birth of their child.”

Government Technology: Library Nonprofit Counters Censorship With Banned Books List. “Ahead of Banned Books Week this week, the nonprofit EveryLibrary Institute published a spreadsheet of book titles and authors that have been targeted by parents across the U.S. trying to get them banned from schools.”

EVENTS

BusinessWire: Esri Launches Online GIS Course for Climate Action (PRESS RELEASE). “To support the individuals working toward this goal, Esri, the global leader in geographic information system (GIS) technology, today announced it will offer a new massive open online course (MOOC) exploring the application of its software to address climate change impacts. The complimentary course will be available this fall for six weeks on the Esri Academy website and includes full access to ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Network Analyst, ArcGIS Online, and other ArcGIS software that uses science-based tools and authoritative data.”

USEFUL STUFF

Hongkiat: 7 Best Video Tools for Novice Users (2023). “Whether you need to create animated videos to pitch your business or want to compile a video montage for your friend’s wedding, there’s no need to hire a professional – as long as you have the right video creation tools at your disposal. There are tools available that can transform your photos and movie clips into engaging videos. In this post, I’ve selected the best video creation tools that are feature-rich and user-friendly. Let’s take a look.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

NiemanLab: Journalists can be TikTokers too. Three journalists explain how to use the platform for news . “We’ve reached ‘peak news explainer’ on TikTok, Sophia Smith Galer said last week at the IMEDD International Journalism Forum in Athens, Greece. To break through on the platform, news outlets and journalists can’t rely exclusively on explainers and reworking existing articles. Smith Galer was one of three TikTok-focused journalists who spoke about how journalists are experimenting on the platform.”

Technical.ly: With its new archivist at the head, here’s how NARA is digitalizing America’s documents. “How do you turn a piece of onionskin paper into an online archive? Or a huge map? Or a piece of paper almost completely torn up? Or all of that combined, times a billion?
A few months into her tenure, Colleen Shogan, the current Archivist of the United States, already has plenty on her plate. But it’s a little more complicated than just placing a document on a scanner.”

Ars Technica: Dead grandma locket request tricks Bing Chat’s AI into solving security puzzle. “Bing Chat, an AI chatbot from Microsoft similar to ChatGPT, allows users to upload images for the AI model to examine or discuss. Normally, Bing Chat refuses to solve CAPTCHAs, which are visual puzzles designed to prevent automated programs (bots) from filling out forms on the web. On Saturday, X-user Denis Shiryaev devised a visual jailbreak that circumvents Bing Chat’s CAPTCHA filter by tricking it into reading the inscription on his imaginary deceased grandmother’s locket.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bloomberg: Google Search Is Like ‘Cigarettes or Drugs,’ Executive Said. “A senior Google executive once likened the company’s search advertising business to selling drugs, calling it ‘one of the world’s greatest business models ever created’ since the company can ‘ignore’ users and focus on generating revenue from advertising. Michael Roszak, vice president for finance at Alphabet Inc.’s Google, wrote the notes during a July 2017 training Google offered on communications.”

Foreign Policy: Attention-Seekers and Autocrats Are a Combustible Mix. “If you have the mindset of a Rasmus Paludan, you’re willing to cause harm simply to gain fame or notoriety. And you can gain even more fame by taking your stunts to a dangerous realm, all in the safe knowledge that your home country will move mountains to rescue you if you get into trouble. China’s planned legislative amendment, in fact, creates a new and tantalizing opportunity for thrill-seekers to expose themselves to a bit of geopolitically infused harm without having to be very creative.”

New York Times: Tom Hanks Warns of Dental Ad Using A.I. Version of Him. “Mr. Hanks and the CBS anchor Gayle King both said their likenesses were used in unauthorized advertisements, as worries have grown over the unregulated use of artificial intelligence.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Columbia University: An Archive of the Stars Is Born. “Like other NASA-curated extraterrestrial materials including meteorites, Moon rocks and cosmic dust, the Bennu samples will generate huge amounts of data. But in recent years, NASA has recognized a big problem: for a long time, there was no central home for all this data, with the results of analyses scattered across the globe at labs, universities and institutes that did the testing. Much of this data has not been easily accessible, and in some cases, has been lost. So the agency decided to create such a home, at the Astromaterials Data System, based at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Boing Boing: Go full 80s bedroom coder with a site full of virtual 8-bit computers. “Virtual Consoles recreates the 80s experience of turning on a computer and instantly getting a BASIC interpreter: the perfect environment to learn coding or just poke computers into doing odd and fun things. There’s a Commodore 64, a ZX Spectrum, an Apple II, and a few others—though not, sadly, the Amstrad CPC with its exemplary Locomotive BASIC.” Good morning, Internet…

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