HuffPost: CNN’s Brianna Keilar Moved To Tears Remembering 500,000 Victims Of COVID-19. “CNN’s Brianna Keilar on Monday wiped away tears as she remembered the 500,000 people in the United States who have now died of COVID-19. The ‘Newsroom’ host marked the harrowing milestone by sharing stories of just a few of the half a million victims.”
National Law Review: State of California Releases New Employer Portal to Assist With COVID-19 Compliance. “As the state of California approaches one year of being under various shelter-in-place orders, the Labor & Workforce Development Agency and the Department of Industrial Relations have consolidated resources for employers into a new website. The site provides information on how to ensure a safer and healthier workplace. It also has information on handling employees who may be sick or exposed to COVID-19 in the form of an FAQ.”
Plano Magazine: Girl Scout Gives New Life to Plano African American Museum. “Zara Jones, a senior at Plano West Senior High, has been a Girl Scout since she was a Daisy Scout in Kindergarten. She is now working toward earning her Gold Award with a project that spotlights the history and contributions of African Americans in Plano and around the United States. The Gold Award is Girl Scouts’ highest honor, earned by less than six percent of Girl Scouts. On Feb. 20 Zara launched the digital Plano African American Museum.”
Boing Boing: A fascinating website with the source photos for the people on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. “Here’s a guy who, for the last several years, has been trying to track down the source photos of the people who appeared on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), The Beatles’ eighth studio album.”
Nursing Times: Study to dive into stories of nurses and midwives accused of witchcraft. “The team of researchers at Edinburgh Napier University has won funding from the RCN Foundation to investigate more than 100 folk healers and midwives who are listed on the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft online database.”
Carnegie Mellon University: CMU Students Train AI to Write Book of Limericks. “Mitch Fogelson, a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering, said he and his fellow students — Xinkai Chen, who completed the Master of Information Systems Management program in December 2020; Qifei Dong, a master’s degree candidate in electrical and computer engineering; Christopher Dare, a master’s degree candidate in information and communication technology; and Tony Qin, a junior artificial intelligence major — opted to focus their AI on limericks because the form has a fixed AABBA rhyming structure. Also, they had access to a database of 90,000 limericks that they could use to train their AI.”
University of New Mexico: UNM Art Museum offers new virtual exhibit. “‘Hindsight/Insight: Reflecting on the Collection’ highlights over 30 artworks acquired since the museum was founded in 1962. This is the first in an ongoing series of exhibitions and programs celebrating The University of New Mexico Art Museum’s dedication to developing a teaching collection.”
New York Times: A.I. Here, There, Everywhere. “Researchers liken the current state of the technology to cellphones of the 1990s: useful, but crude and cumbersome. They are working on distilling the largest, most powerful machine-learning models into lightweight software that can run on ‘the edge,’ meaning small devices such as kitchen appliances or wearables. Our lives will gradually be interwoven with brilliant threads of A.I.”
Search Engine Journal: WordPress: Bugs Detected in Ninja Forms Plugin, 1M Sites Affected. “Exploits detected in the Ninja Forms plugin for WordPress, installed on over a million sites, can lead to a complete site takeover if not patched.”
NYS Music: The National Jazz Museum In Harlem Announces Online Museum Access Through Google Arts And Culture. “Beginning on February 18, 2021, the National Jazz Museum in Harlem is available for anybody in the world to visit virtually on the Google Arts and Culture platform. The free, virtual tour allows viewers to experience videos and high-resolution pictures of jazz artifacts from the Museum’s collections as a part of the Google Arts & Culture Black History Month project.”
VentureBeat: Rows raises $16 million and launches next-gen spreadsheets with built-in data integrations . “Founded out of Berlin in 2016 as Dashdash before its rebrand just a few months back, Rows is targeting business teams with a new online spreadsheet platform that features native integrations with third-party services such as Salesforce, Slack, Stripe, Google Maps, and LinkedIn, while also making it easy to transform the spreadsheet into a fully functional web app in a single click. Moreover, Rows supports all the familiar Excel functions, such as SUMIFs, that business users are already accustomed to.”
9 News Australia: Facebook set to end ban on Australian news. “Facebook is set to end its ban on Australian news appearing on its platform just six days after the controversial decision was implemented. Facebook has told the Federal Government it intends to restore Australian news pages ‘in the coming days’ following amendments to the News Media and Digital Bargaining Code.”
CNET: Instagram adds resources to support users suffering from eating disorders. “Facebook is adding new resources to Instagram on Monday to offer support to users suffering from negative body image or eating disorders. The social media site, which owns Instagram, also said it’s expanding its work with experts to better inform policies for more positive content.”
New-to-me, from Manila Times: DigiPhiLit: A digital project for Philippine literature. “TWO weeks ago, I wrote an article where I highlighted the importance of preserving sources, documents, books and old imprints. The existence of these should not be taken for granted, as in a nation such as the Philippines, which is prone to floods, typhoons, earthquakes and fires, these are exposed to irremediable loss. … Largely unnoticed is a praiseworthy initiative named DigiPhiLit.”
