Penn State News: Digital marketing campaigns focused on auto recalls can improve consumer safety. “Regulator-initiated digital marketing campaigns aimed at urging consumers to comply with automobile recall requests can improve compliance, saving money and possibly even lives, according to a Penn State Smeal College of Business-led research team.”
Aston University: Social media ‘likes’ found to positively influence healthy food choices – new research. “The research, by psychologists from Aston University’s College of Health and Life Sciences, found that study participants who viewed highly liked mock Instagram posts of fruit and vegetables ate a significantly higher proportion of grapes than cookies, with consumption of grapes increasing by 14 per cent more calories, compared to those who viewed highly liked high calorie foods.”
Mashable: 8 online experiences linked to suicide in kids and teens. “When a child or teenager attempts or dies by suicide, it sets off a desperate search to understand why. While that’s the case with many suicide attempts or deaths regardless of the person’s age, a child’s vulnerability and relative innocence creates a particularly heartbreaking contrast with their feelings of hopelessness. A new study aims to better understand one set of risk factors for youth: their online experiences.”
CNET: Facebook, Twitter still the leading social media sites where people get news. “Roughly half of US adults say they get news from social media sites ‘sometimes’ or ‘often,’ according to a new poll from Pew Research Center. Though that number (48%) is slightly lower than it was last year, it could generate concern given social media’s vulnerability to misinformation.”
BioSpectrum Asia: Korea to establish national digital library on health and genome data by 2028. “The second pilot project will analyze the genetic makeup of 12,500 donated DNA samples from Korean patients living with a rare disease. Over the next year, the resulting data will be used by the Illumina-backed consortium to prepare for the main project in analyzing and comparing the genes of 1 million Koreans to advance the country’s medical technology and improve future public health.”
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.”
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.’”
Asahi Shimbun: Social media a boon to finding new animal, plant species. “Satoshi Shimano, a professor of biological taxonomy at Tokyo’s Hosei University, announced the discovery of a new mite species, Choshi hamabe dani, in March. As its scientific name, Ameronothrus twitter, suggests, the arachnid’s existence might not have come to light had it not been for a photo that an amateur photographer posted on Twitter in May 2019. Takamasa Nemoto, a company employee, often snaps photos of mites. But he was unfamiliar with ones he found near a port while out on a fishing trip with his family. His tweet, with the photo of a mite cluster, found its way to Shimano by chance.”
News@Northeastern: ‘Take Breaks, But Don’t Disengage’; The Perils Of ‘Doomscrolling’ When The World Is On Fire. “How to cope with the onslaught? Northeastern experts say it’s a difficult balancing act, especially when the glut of information doesn’t necessarily make us more insightful, and when it’s easy to become numb to injustices at home and in far-flung parts of the world. But it’s also an unprecedentedly connected digital universe, a fact that calls upon those of us with privilege and means to help shoulder more of humanity’s burdens, taking them into our lives in order to help improve conditions for everyone, the experts say.” I see a lot of articles on doomscrolling nowadays and many of them are just “do this” or “don’t do this.” I like this one because it gets into how too much doomscrolling can inhibit your personal development and warp your perspective.
TechRadar: Google has more cross-site trackers than other popular websites. “After Google recently revealed that it had delayed its plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome, pCloud used the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) feature in Safari to collect data on the number of trackers blocked on 88 different websites as well as the number of trackers each company has across all websites to compile its new ‘The Web’s Most Invasive Cookies’ study.”
University of Colorado Colorado Springs: Immersive Global Middle Ages institute will recreate worlds that no longer exist. “The project, called Immersive Global Middle Ages, aims to create new ways of experiencing medieval history on a global scale, even though these societies have faded from existence. Supported by a $250,000 award from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, the project will teach participants to use advanced computer modeling and virtual reality tools to reconstruct global societies from 500-1500 C.E.”
Freedom House: The Global Drive to Control Big Tech. “Global internet freedom declined for the 11th consecutive year. The greatest deteriorations were documented in Myanmar, Belarus, and Uganda, where state forces cracked down amid electoral and constitutional crises. Myanmar’s 14-point score decline is the largest registered since the Freedom on the Net project began.”
Health Information and Libraries Journal: Google is goodish: An information literacy course designed to teach users why google may not always be the best place to search for evidence. “This article describes a course that was developed in response to health sector and local authority workers being reliant on Google and using it for their information needs regardless of whether it was the best place to search. The methodology for developing and structuring the course is explored, including details of the content included. The author concludes by asserting that teaching users about the effective use of Google is an important part of user education.”
