NiemanLab: The year we rebuild the infrastructure of truth. “The next few years will undoubtedly be met with massive efforts to rebuild the infrastructure of truth in the U.S. This will happen; it is a natural and inevitable reaction. Fake news will not dominate our infoscapes forever. It won’t go away completely, but it will […]
MIT Technology Review: The year deepfakes went mainstream. “The vast majority of them are still used for fake pornography. A female investigative journalist was severely harassed and temporarily silenced by such activity, and more recently, a female poet and novelist was frightened and shamed. There’s also the risk that political deepfakes will generate convincing fake […]
TechCrunch: Google AI concocts ‘breakie’ and ‘cakie’ hybrid baked goods. “If, as I suspect many of you have, you have worked your way through baking every type of cookie, bread and cake under the sun over the last year, Google has a surprise for you: a pair of AI-generated hybrid treats, the ‘breakie’ and the […]
ABC News (Australia): Drones count koalas faster and cheaper than manual spotting methods: study. “A team with a drone was able to spot koalas more effectively and cheaply than a team using more traditional methods, such as studying the forest floor for traces of koala scat, or shining spotlights into trees at night to catch […]
Pew Research Center: How lawmakers’ social media activity changed in the days after the U.S. Capitol riot. “Social media activity by members of Congress changed in notable ways following the Jan. 6 rioting at the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of lawmakers’ Facebook and […]
FedTech: Air Force, Google Strike Agreement to Modernize Flight Training. “The Air Force has invested in virtual reality platforms in recent years to train pilots, and now is taking another leap forward in how it uses technology to prepare airmen to fly in actual, multimillion-dollar aircraft. In December, the Air Force, along with the Defense […]
Phys .org: New mangrove forest mapping tool puts conservation in reach of coastal communities. “Approximately 35 percent of global mangrove cover was lost in the 1980s and ’90s. While the rate of loss slowed in the past two decades—to an estimated four percent between 1996 and 2016—many regions remain hotspots for mangrove loss, including Myanmar. […]
EurekAlert: Can we be manipulated into sharing private info online? Yes, says Ben-Gurion U. study. “Online users are more likely to reveal private information based on how website forms are structured to elicit data, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers have determined.”
TechCrunch: Zocdoc founder returns with Shadow, an app that finds lost dogs. “Every year, around 10 million pets go missing in the U.S., and millions of those end up in shelters where they aren’t always reunited with their owners, due to their lack of identification or a microchip. A new mobile app, Shadow, aims to […]
CNET: After Twitter banned Trump, misinformation plummeted, says report. “The week after Twitter banned President Donald Trump from its platform, online misinformation about election fraud fell by a whopping 73%, according to a Saturday report by The Washington Post. Talk around election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions across a selection of […]
Techdirt: A Few More Thoughts On The Total Deplatforming Of Parler & Infrastructure Content Moderation. “I’ve delayed writing deeper thoughts on the total deplatforming of Parler, in part because there was so much else happening (including some more timely posts about Parler’s lawsuit regarding it), but more importantly because for years I’ve been calling for […]
NOAA: The Global Drifter Program Launches a New Interactive Map Tool. “Drifters are deployed in the global ocean to measure sea surface temperature and ocean currents, but most are also equipped to measure other variables. As the drifter moves around, guided by currents, measurements of atmospheric pressure, winds, wave spectra, and salinity can also be […]
Journal of the Medical Library Association: Causality dilemma: creating a twenty-first century university archive. “For its fifteenth anniversary, the Jay Sexter Library at Touro University Nevada (TUN) sought ways to capture its institutional history by founding an archive. Among many challenges, the library struggled to convince the administration of the importance of an archive. To […]
EurekAlert: Researchers deconstruct ancient Jewish parchment using multiple imaging techniques. “A picture may be worth a thousand words, but capturing multiple images of an artifact across the electromagnetic spectrum can tell a rich story about the original creation and degradation of historical objects over time. Researchers recently demonstrated how this was possible using several complementary […]
Science: Scientists ‘program’ living bacteria to store data. “Hard disks and optical drives store gigabits of digital data at the press of a button. But those technologies—like the magnetic tapes and floppy drives before them—are apt to become antiquated and unreadable when they are overtaken by new technology. Now, researchers have come up with a […]