The Washington Post: The National Archives has billions of handwritten documents. With cursive skills declining, how will we read them?. “We all know that cursive has gone out of style. To modern young people, deciphering the wavy old-fashioned script can seem as relevant as dialing a rotary phone or milking a cow. For institutions like the National Archives, this poses a very specific problem.”
The Next Web: AIs should be legally liable for their mistakes soon
The Next Web: AIs should be legally liable for their mistakes soon. “Historically, insurers have had to consider only the human aspect of parties involved in any insurable matter. Today, things are a lot more complex. As AI development has increased in scope, we have been left with programs with the sophistication to be integrated into areas of infrastructure that have effectively given them direct input into life-or-death situations.”
UC Santa Cruz: UC Santa Cruz joins the international effort to make research accessible to all
UC Santa Cruz: UC Santa Cruz joins the international effort to make research accessible to all . “In June, the University of California Santa Cruz joined its sister UC campuses in taking an important step towards the goal of making all scholarly journal literature freely available to the world by endorsing the international open access (OA) initiative, OA2020. Led by the Max Planck Digital Library, OA2020 is a global alliance committed to new models of scholarly publishing that ensure outputs are open and re-usable and that the costs behind their dissemination are transparent and economically sustainable.”
The Verge: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now
The Verge: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now. “When comedian and activist Jon Stewart gave an impassioned speech before Congress to seek ongoing aid for 9/11 first responders, it inspired Internet Archive software curator and digital preservationist Jason Scott to share something timely with the world as well: a newly discovered cache of photos from one of the workers who toiled away at Ground Zero, and who’d saved thousands of those photos on CD-R.”
Globe Newswire: Find a Grief/Bereavement Provider Tool Available Online from NHPCO and LGA (PRESS RELEASE)
Globe Newswire: Find a Grief/Bereavement Provider Tool Available Online from NHPCO and LGA (PRESS RELEASE). “Legal & General America awarded a $25,000 grant to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization to create an online searchable database that will help the public find information and community support services addressing grief and bereavement.” The NHPCO (National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization) already has a database for bereavement services that I guess is its membership, and it’s linked in the first paragraph. I’m putting this in “new resources” because that’s new-to-me. Not sure how much the database will expand because of the grant.
The Global Fatal Landslide Database: full dataset now online (The Landslide Blog)
The Landslide Blog: The Global Fatal Landslide Database: full dataset now online. “Thanks to the hard work of Dr Melanie Froude, my colleague here at the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield, we have now posted the full Global Fatal Landslide Database online. This is the dataset that underpins our paper of last year (Froude and Petley 2018) that explored the human cost of landslides from 2004 to 2016 inclusive. However, this new version adds a further year of data, covering 2004 to 2017 inclusive.”
UnDark: No, You’re Not Addicted to Social Media
UnDark: No, You’re Not Addicted to Social Media. “It has become commonplace for media outlets to talk about this dark side of technology using the language of addiction. In a Washington Post op-ed earlier this year, for instance, psychologist Doreen Dodgen-Magee called on mental health professionals to recognize the bleak reality of ‘tech addiction.’ In his New York Times column, Kevin Roose wrote about his ‘phone problem,’ and how it had broken his brain. Parents and teens often signal their unhappiness with the amount of time spent online by framing the issue as smartphone addiction. But to me, the confession from the girl in the Philadelphia coffee shop did not sound like that of a social media addict. “
