The Daily Star (Bangladesh): World Cup revealed our media’s vulnerability to fake news. “In the first two weeks since the World Cup kicked off in Qatar, fact-checkers in Bangladesh debunked at least 10 different fake or misleading news stories, eight of which are related to the football tournament, in top newspapers and TV channels…. Why is our media so vulnerable?”
Johns Hopkins University: Citizen Scientists In Bloom. “Recent PhD graduate Ikbal Choudhury’s nonprofit Open Field Collective uses low-cost, low-resource tools to teach children about environmental science. The collective’s flagship algal bloom monitoring program is now tracking ecosystem health in the U.S., India, and Bangladesh.”
AFP: Tuneless Bangladeshi social media star grilled by police. “An out-of-tune Bangladeshi singer with a huge internet following was hauled in by police at dawn and told to cease his painful renditions of classical songs, sparking a furore on social media.”
Newswise: Where COVID-19’s death grip slipped (briefly). “[Lex] Van Geen and his colleagues wanted to find out if the relatively low number of officially reported COVID-19 deaths in rural Bangladesh in 2020 could have been the result of massive under-counting. To find out, his team, working remotely, called each home and family to ask a series of survey questions that allowed them to find out if and how the pandemic had touched these households. In order to contact so many households, the survey team ran the equivalent of a call center with 50-plus enumerators. What they found, as just reported in the American Medical Association journal JAMA Network Open, was surprising.”
Deutsche Welle: Bangladesh arrests social media star over dance video at mosque. “Police in Bangladesh on Monday announced the arrest of a 20-year-old for his role in filming, starring in, and distributing, a video of himself dancing with a woman on the steps of a mosque in Cumilla, just east of the capital Dhaka. Authorities say they arrested social media personality Yasin at his home in nearby Devidwar on charges that he hurt Muslim religious sentiment as defined under Bangladesh’s 2018 Digital Security Act.”
Atlas Obscura: The Quest to Collect the Stories of Bengalis in Harlem . “ALAUDIN ULLAH HAS SPENT MORE than 20 years collecting untold or overlooked stories of the earliest South Asian immigrants to America, their Black and Hispanic wives, and their descendants, particularly in New York. It’s a research project, but also a personal one: The project has been a way for him to understand his own story, too—and his father’s.”
Voice of America: Global TB Fight Set Back 12 Years by COVID Pandemic, Doctors Warn. “In nine countries with a high prevalence of TB — including Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Philippines, South Africa, Tajikistan and Ukraine — diagnosis and treatment fell by an average of 23%, according to analysis by the Stop TB Partnership, a non-profit hosted by the United Nations in Geneva.”
Scroll .in: How Bangladesh agencies are suspected of taking down websites, YouTube channels of dissidents abroad . “On December 8, Oliullah Noman, the executive editor of the newly established online Bengali news website, Amar Desh UK, received an email from its host DigitalOcean. It started friendly enough – ‘Hi there’ – but its contents were far from it. The email was a notice stating that an article on the website was “the subject of a notification of claimed copyright infringement” under the US law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. DigitalOcean requested Amar Desh UK to take down the offending article from its website within three days or they “may disable access” to the website.”
New York Times: Bangladeshi Writer, Detained Over Social Media Posts, Dies in Jail. “The writer, Mushtaq Ahmed, was among 11 people charged early last year over the spread of social media content, including cartoons, that alleged mismanagement and corruption in Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s response to the pandemic.”
New Age Bangladesh: Government launches digital archive. “The government has launched digital archive for preserving works of artistes. A website… featuring the late legendary rocker Ayub Bachchu’s songs was launched under the initiative through an online programme held in hybrid format at the conference room of Bangladesh Copyright Office on Sunday evening.” When I visited the site, it was in English and I jumped right in.
CanIndia News: Google expands AI-driven flood forecast to all of India, Bangladesh. “As floods wreak havoc in South Asian countries, Google on Tuesday said it is expanding its Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered flood forecasting to all of India and Bangladesh that will provide greater details on timing and water depths in alerts in nine new local languages.”
New Age Business (Bangladesh): Telcos asked to stop free, cheap social media offers. “The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission has asked the mobile phone operators to stop all the offers that allow mobile phone users to connect with the social media sites, including Facebook, free of cost or at cheap rates. The telecom regulator on July 14 issued a letter to the telecom operators asking them to implement the directive from July 15.”
Human Rights Watch: Bangladesh: Online Surveillance, Control. “Bangladesh authorities are blocking access to online news sites in violation of the right to free speech and access to information, Human Rights Watch said today. The government has also adopted advanced methods to block or conduct surveillance on internet traffic and regulate online news sites without a sufficient legal framework to protect rights to privacy, expression, and access to information.”
Bangladesh Post: Govt to set up digital archive on Bangabandhu. “The government will set up a digital archive on Bangabandhu to inform the new generation about different aspects of the life and ideology of Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, reports BSS. The information was revealed on Thursday in a meeting of Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Birth Centenary Celebration National Implementation Committee in the capital, said a press release. “
News Central: Bangladeshis Use Social Media to Tackle a Dengue Outbreak. “As government resources are seemingly overwhelmed by the severity of this recent spike in dengue cases, people are turning to social media to voice their complaints, share information about the spread of the virus, and to spread awareness about how people can protect themselves.”
The ResearchBuzz Firehose is regular RB content presented as individual posts.
For digest-type posts a couple of times a day, please visit ResearchBuzz.
Want to know how to best use the Firehose for content discovery?
Check out this handy article.