Monthly archives: April, 2021

New U.S. Carbon Monitor website compares emissions among the 50 states

UCI News: “Following last year’s successful launch of a global carbon monitor website to track and display greenhouse gas emissions from a variety of sources, an international team led by Earth system scientists from the University of California, Irvine is unveiling this week a new data resource focused on the United States. Near real-time, state-level …

Subjects: Climate Change, Energy, Environmental Law, Government Documents, Health Care, Transportation

Columbia Launched Democracy Reform and Voting Rights in the United States Web Archive

“Columbia University Libraries is pleased to announce the launch of the Democracy Reform and Voting Rights in the United States Web Archive. The ongoing struggle in the United States between advocates for voting rights and official proponents of voter suppression measures intensified in 2020 during a bitter presidential election campaign conducted amidst the substantial additional …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Congress, Education, Free Speech, Government Documents, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Libraries

Ethical Financial Stewardship: One Library’s Examination of Vendors’ Business Practices

In the Library with the Lead Pipe: Katy DiVittorio and Lorelle Gianelli – “The evaluation of library collections rarely digs into the practices or other business ventures of the companies that create or sell library resources. As financial stewards, academic Acquisition Librarians are in a unique position to consider the business philosophy and practices of our …

Subjects: Economy, Education, Knowledge Management, Libraries

Sorry, judges, encrypted chat is not like a private thought

Engadget: “A state judge recently ruled that two of the men who plotted to kidnap Michigan’s governor did not make terrorist threats because they used an encrypted chat app to do so. Since federal agencies and lawmakers have been trying to get encrypted comms backdoored by arguing that they are the tool of choice for …

Subjects: Courts, Government Documents, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

How to Stop Spam Calls

Wirecutter – The research:” When people talk about spam calls, they tend to refer to four types of calls: Telemarketing: These calls originate from a live person who is trying to sell you something from a legally registered business. Such calls are annoying but generally not fraudulent. Legal robocalls: Legal robocalls are automated calls for …

Subjects: Legal Research, Privacy

Long Covid isn’t as unique as we thought

Vox: “…The dominant narrative about long Covid has been that it’s a uniquely perplexing feature of Covid-19. Reports of “Covid brain fog” or “Covid dementia,” for example, suggest a disturbing and extraordinary ability of the coronavirus to destroy the lives of survivors. Even a year later, some patients are still struggling to return to work …

Subjects: Health Care, Knowledge Management, Medicine

Data scraped from 500 million LinkedIn users found for sale online

Tech Republic: “A massive trove of LinkedIn account data has been found for sale online, containing 500 million user records including email addresses, phone numbers, links to other social media profiles and professional details Reported by CyberNews researchers, the leak was posted to a forum popular with hackers by a user asking for a “four-digit …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Mail, E-Records, Privacy, Social Media

Social Media Use in 2021

Pew Research Center – “A majority of Americans say they use YouTube and Facebook, while use of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok is especially common among adults under 30. Despite a string of controversies and the public’s relatively negative sentiments about aspects of social media, roughly seven-in-ten Americans say they ever use any kind of social …

Subjects: Internet, Knowledge Management, Search Engines, Social Media

Americans are super-spreaders of COVID-19 misinformation

“Infodemic pathways: Evaluating the role that traditional and social media play in cross-national information transfer” by Aengus Bridgman, Eric Merkley, Oleg Zhilin, Peter John Loewen, Taylor Owen, and Derek Ruths was published in Frontiers in Political Science. DOI: http://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2021.648646 “Misinformation about COVID-19 is spreading from the United States into Canada, undermining efforts to mitigate the …

Subjects: Health Care, Internet, Knowledge Management, Social Media