Day archives: March 5th, 2019

Why Conspiracy Theories Work so Well on Facebook

OneZero Medium – Are we all just clicks away from identifying as ‘flat-Earthers’? “…A disturbing investigative report by the Verge last week revealed that some of Facebook’s contract moderators—who are tasked with keeping content like beheadings, bestiality, and racism out of your news feed—have turned to extreme coping mechanisms to get through the workday. Some …

Subjects: Internet, Knowledge Management, Social Media

The Devil in the Details – DH for Small Data and Close Reading

DigitalHumanities: “What connects Open Source Software development, scholarly edition making, Linked Open Data, and Digital Sustainability? All of them rely our human capacity for managing fine detail as much as or more than they rely on technological infrastructure. Although Digital Humanities often tends to focus on the macroscopic, with text mining, visualization, and distant reading, …

Subjects: Education, Internet, Knowledge Management

As More Universities Cancel Elsevier, Sci-Hub Blossoms

TorrentFreak: “The University of California (UC) is the latest institution to cancel its subscription to leading academic publisher Elsevier. UC cites high costs and the lack of open access research among the reasons. This likely means an increase in traffic for Sci-Hub, the site that’s often referred to referred to as ‘The Pirate Bay for …

Subjects: Economy, Education, Knowledge Management, Libraries

OpenAI’s Recent Announcement: What Went Wrong, and How It Could Be Better

EFF: “Earlier this month, OpenAI revealed an impressive language model that can generate paragraphs of believable text. It declined to fully release their research “due to concerns about malicious applications of the technology.” OpenAI released a much smaller model and technical paper, but not the fully-trained model, training code, or full dataset, citing concerns that …

Subjects: AI, Education, Intellectual Property, Knowledge Management

OCLC publishes list of top 100 novels

“OCLC, a leading library technology and research organization, has published The Library 100: Top Novels of All Time, a list of the novels most widely available in libraries today. The list is based on data in WorldCat, the world’s most comprehensive database of information about library collections. Produced and maintained by OCLC and individual member …

Subjects: Education, Knowledge Management, Libraries

Smithsonian posts finalists in global photography contest

“We are excited to announce the finalists of the 16th Annual Smithsonian.com Photo Contest. This year, we received more than 48,000 submissions from photographers in 207 countries and territories. From dynamic portraits to breathtaking landscapes, these 60 images stood out to our photo editors as the most unique and memorable. Readers’ Choice voting is now …

Subjects: Education

Phone numbers are the new Social Security numbers

Axios: “Cellphone numbers have become a primary way for tech companies like Facebook to uniquely identify users and secure accounts, in some ways becoming a proxy for a national ID.Why it matters: That over-reliance on cellphone numbers ironically makes them a less effective and secure authentication method. And the more valuable the phone number becomes …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Government Documents, Internet, Privacy, Social Media

The hype vs the facts about startups using AI

Forbes: “A new report makes the surprising claim that 40% of European firms that are classified as an “AI startup” don’t exploit the field of study in any material way for their business. …Out of 2,830 startups in Europe that were classified as being AI companies, only 1,580 accurately fit that description, according to the …

Subjects: AI, E-Commerce, Internet

Putin Wants His Own Internet

Bloomberg – A new law would create a single command post from which authorities can manage—and halt—information flows across Russian cyberspace. “Russia’s censorship deficit relative to China is about to narrow. Backed by President Vladimir Putin, lawmakers in Moscow are pushing a bill through parliament dubbed “Sovereign Internet” that’s designed to create a single command post …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Internet, Legal Research