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Monthly Archives: October 2020

Introducing the U.S. Election Twitter Network Graph Tool

“This is a blog post co-authored by Emmi Bevensee, a Mozilla Fellow hosted at the Anti-Defamation League. Emmi is co-creator of the recently-launched Social Media Analysis Toolkit (SMAT). Who does Trump most interact with on Twitter? What does sectarianism look like in political social media? Who has the most influence on our politicians online? Today,… Continue Reading

How Long Will Vote Counting Take? Estimates and Deadlines in All 50 States

The New York Times -“Although many winners may quickly be evident on election night, the increase in mail voting because of the pandemic is expected to push back the release of full results in many key states. The New York Times asked officials in every state and the District of Columbia about their reporting processes… Continue Reading

This incredible Google experiment lets you time travel to your hometown 200 years ago

Fast Company – “In the 20 years he’d lived in New York, Raimondas Kiveris had seen the city change immensely. “It was a completely different place, a different town,” says Kiveris, a software engineer at Google Research. This got him wondering what his neighborhood looked like even before that—before he’d lived there, before he’d even… Continue Reading

Maps are a critical weapon in our fight against COVID-19. We can be smarter about how we use them

Fast Company – It’s surprising how little we have applied geography in shaping our knowledge of what determines health. We should start now. “…it’s surprising how little we have applied geography in shaping either our knowledge of what determines health, such as nearness to pollutants or access to care, or our strategies for achieving it,… Continue Reading

6 Major Dangers of Deepfakes and How to Spot Them

Make Use Of – “…A deepfake is the name given to media where a person in the video or image is replaced with someone else’s likeness. The term is a portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake” and uses machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to create realistic-yet-synthetic media. At its most basic, you might find… Continue Reading

Report – The State of Antisemitism in America 2020

“AJC’s first-ever State of Antisemitism in America report, released on October 26, 2020, shows deep anxiety among American Jews and a disturbing lack of awareness among the general public about the severity of antisemitism in the United States. Parallel surveys of American Jews and the U.S. general public reveal widely divergent views regarding Jew-hatred in… Continue Reading

Where Did Trump Get the Idea That Americans Have the Cleanest Water?

Slate – “It was overshadowed among Donald Trump’s other outrageous claims in Thursday’s debate, but once again the president asserted that Americans enjoy the cleanest water in the world. “We have done an incredible job environmentally, we have the cleanest air, the cleanest water, and the best carbon emission standards that we’ve seen in many,… Continue Reading

How politicians target you: 3,000 data points on every voter, including your phone number

Washington Post – “Our quest to find what politicians know about voters uncovered data troves with intimate information about income, debt, family, religion, gun ownership and a whole lot more…I’ve been on a crusade to find out what politicians know about me. So over the past few months, I’ve used California’s new data privacy law… Continue Reading

Report examines roadblocks among women lawyers, offers toolkit for healing dialogue

ABA – A new study and report from the American Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession, “This Talk Isn’t Cheap: Women of Color and White Women Attorneys Find Common Ground,” addresses communication barriers among white women lawyers and women lawyers of color that impede the progress of diversity efforts in the legal profession.… Continue Reading

The fight against fake news and electoral disinformation

Oxford University Press Blog: “Just as COVID-19 is a stress test of every nation’s health system, an election process is a stress test of a nation’s information and communication system. A week away from the US presidential election, the symptoms are not so promising. News reports about the spread of so-called “fake news,” disinformation, and conspiracy theories… Continue Reading