The Verge: Facebook names a new CTO with a major focus on hardware. “Facebook is serious about being a long-term player in hardware. On Wednesday, the company promoted Andrew Bosworth, the current head of its hardware division that makes Oculus and other consumer devices, to the role of chief technology officer, replacing outgoing CTO Mike Schroepfer when he becomes a senior fellow next year.”
Museums Association: AHRC unveils digital collections research plan. “The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has announced details of five projects that will explore the digital future of the UK’s cultural and heritage collections. The projects, which have been awarded a total of £14.5m, are part of Towards a National Collection, a five-year research programme that is funded through an £18.9m investment by UK Research and Innovation’s Strategic Priorities Fund and delivered by the AHRC.”
Popular Science: Slack’s new video tool is @here—and you might already be able to use it. “Video updates and cross-company digital chats in the place of meetings are part of the vision Slack has for the future of hybrid working. The messaging platform announced these new features, among others, on Tuesday at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference.”
University of Connecticut: History Professor Uncovers Missing Parts of a Prominent Life. “Cornelia Dayton, a professor of history at UConn, has helped uncover some missing pieces in the life story of Phillis Wheatley, author of the first volume of poetry published by an African American. In a prize-winning research paper recently published in the New England Quarterly, Dayton describes her findings on the later parts of Wheatley’s life.” A Web site showcasing the research is underway.
Washington University in St. Louis: $11.8 million award renews planetary geosciences data effort. “Washington University in St. Louis will continue to archive and distribute digital data related to the study of the surfaces and interiors of terrestrial planetary bodies under a five-year cooperative agreement notice with NASA, with a value to the university projected at $11.8 million. The space agency recently renewed its agreement with scientists in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences.”
Google Blog: Giving users more transparency into their Google ad experience. “To give users of our products even more transparency, we are enhancing ad disclosures with new advertiser pages. Users can access these disclosures in our new ‘About this ad’ menu to see the ads a specific verified advertiser has run over the past 30 days. For example, imagine you’re seeing an ad for a coat you’re interested in, but you don’t recognize the brand. With advertiser pages, you can learn more about that advertiser before visiting their site or making a purchase.”
Advanced Television: BBC opening digital archive for formal education. “Next year, the entire digitised BBC broadcast archive is being made available to students in formal education in the UK. It includes millions of TV and Radio programmes, including interviews and features with almost every major cultural, artistic, political and sporting figure of the last 100 years, as well as iconic dramas and landmark comedy programmes.”
FedTech: CDC Launches Forecasting Center to Help Predict Emerging Diseases. “The agency, which has been criticized by some for how slowly it has sometimes analyzed and shared data during the pandemic, said the new center will ‘accelerate access to and use of data for public health decision-makers who need information to mitigate the effects of disease threats, such as social and economic disruption’ and will ‘prioritize equity and accessibility, while serving as a hub for innovation and research on disease modeling.’”
Roll Call: Breakthrough COVID-19 cases expected to become more common in coming months. “COVID-19 cases are up to five times more common in unvaccinated individuals compared with the vaccinated, according to the CDC. But state-level data shows that milder breakthrough cases that do not result in hospitalization are on the rise among the fully vaccinated as virus transmission increases and vaccine efficacy decreases. And they’re expected to keep increasing.”
Washington Post: Senate hearing on ‘big data’ morphs into grilling over how Facebook harms teens. “Few things unite U.S. lawmakers in anger like a massive corporation hurting kids. That became abundantly clear at an antitrust hearing Tuesday, as senators took a major detour from its focus — ostensibly about how tech giants’ troves of data hurt competition — to lay into Facebook over explosive reporting suggesting it downplayed Instagram’s toxic impact on teen girls.”
Seacoastonline: ‘Wonderful asset’: York Public Library begins digitizing full archive of The York Weekly. “The public’s access to local newspaper archives will soon improve dramatically, [Joel] Lefever said, thanks to a major project initiated by York Public Library Executive Director Michelle Sampson. Lefever hand-delivered two boxes of microfilm to Sampson on Thursday, Sept. 16, so YPL can have the microfilm records digitized, converted into a searchable format and made publicly available online.”
WRAL: NC’s COVID-19 hospitalization rate is declining, but there still aren’t enough rooms. “Dr. David Wohl with UNC Health told WRAL News the vaccine is the best tool to fight the virus, saying hospitals will continue to face capacity problems until more people get vaccinated. According to Wohl, beds are still nearly full in many local hospitals, and ICU capacity is maxing out, with over 90% of those patients unvaccinated.”
BBC: Covid: Immune therapy from llamas shows promise. “A Covid therapy derived from a llama named Fifi has shown ‘significant potential’ in early trials. It is a treatment made of ‘nanobodies’, small, simpler versions of antibodies, which llamas and camels produce naturally in response to infection.”
NBC News: The battle between the U.S. and ransomware hackers is escalating. “The White House is taking additional steps to encourage ransomware victims to alert the federal government, just as the hackers behind those attacks are threatening victims from doing so. The moves mark an escalation between the Biden administration, which has vowed to crack down on criminal hackers who try to extort Americans, and ransomware gangs, which have proven resilient to efforts to stop them.”
BBC: German cashier shooting linked to Covid-19 conspiracies. “A man suspected of shooting dead a cashier at a German petrol station has been linked to Covid-19 conspiracy theorists and the far right. The 20-year-old student employee was shot after a row over face masks, in what is thought to be the first killing linked to German Covid rules. Researchers believe the suspect, named only as Mario N, was a far-right supporter and Covid-denier.”
