Google Blog: “Google Search was built to provide everyone access to information on the web—and with tens of thousands of web pages, hundreds of hours of video, thousands of tweets and news stories published every minute of the day, our job is to sift through that content and find the most helpful results possible. With… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: September 2019
How deepfakes undermine truth and threaten democracy
TED Talk: “The use of deepfake technology to manipulate video and audio for malicious purposes — whether it’s to stoke violence or defame politicians and journalists — is becoming a real threat. As these tools become more accessible and their products more realistic, how will they shape what we believe about the world? In a… Continue Reading
The Dark Web: A guide for business professionals
“The Dark Web is used to sell stolen data, drugs, and weapons—but it’s also used by legitimate outfits, like news organizations and the UN. This ebook looks at what the Dark Web is and how it affects you. The Dark Web is a network of websites and servers that use encryption to obscure traffic. Dark… Continue Reading
Chicago’s New Tool Library Is Awesome, Exactly What It Sounds Like
InsideHook – That DIY project you’ve been putting off for months just got a whole lot easier – “Need audio equipment to record a podcast? Want to make your own tagliatelle pasta? Lacking the right wire strippers to build your own quadcopter drone? The new Chicago Tool Library has your back, so you can explore your… Continue Reading
Why Angry Librarians Are Going to War With Publishers Over E-Books
Slate – “If I wanted to borrow A Better Man by Louise Penny—the country’s current No. 1 fiction bestseller—from my local library in my preferred format, e-book, I’d be looking at about a 10-week waitlist. And soon, if the book’s publisher, a division of Macmillan, has its way, that already-lengthy wait time could get significantly… Continue Reading
How to display your books when space is tight
Washington Post – “Cruise Instagram or Pinterest, and you’ll find numerous examples of warm, cushy reading areas decked out with twinkling string lights and endless built-in shelves. How do you evoke the feeling of having your own library in a small space with a small budget? We surveyed some experts for advice…” [this article made… Continue Reading
The Crack Squad of Librarians Who Track Down Half-Forgotten Books
Atlas Obscura – Reuniting stumped readers with the books from the edges of their memories. “The carpet was khaki, the lights yellow, the walls a dishwater beige. The basement computer lab in Midtown Manhattan didn’t have much ambience. But 20 librarians from the New York Public Library were seated in the room—and they were there… Continue Reading
Found: A Windfall of Neanderthal Footprints in France
Atlas Obscura – 257 small steps for our human cousins, one giant leap for paleoanthropology. “Of the variety of ancient hominins who have roamed this planet, Neanderthals are among the most recently departed. Long stigmatized as lumbering, backwards versions of us—think “caveman” and all that implies—scholarship is increasingly overwriting this view. Neanderthals, it turns out,… Continue Reading
A space elevator is possible with today’s technology, researchers say
MIT Technology Review – “Perhaps the biggest hurdle to humankind’s expansion throughout the solar system is the prohibitive cost of escaping Earth’s gravitational pull. So say Zephyr Penoyre from the University of Cambridge in the UK and Emily Sandford at Columbia University in New York. The problem is that rocket engines work by jettisoning mass… Continue Reading
One Thing You Can Do: Know Your Tree Facts
The New York Times – “We recently told you about a study that looked at how many more trees could grow on Earth and how much carbon they could absorb from the atmosphere. The answer: The planet has room for about 2.5 billion acres of forest, and all those trees could suck up an additional… Continue Reading
If Computers Are So Smart, How Come They Can’t Read?
Wired – Deep learning excels at learning statistical correlations, but lacks robust ways of understanding how the meanings of sentences relate to their parts. “…drill down into tools like Google Talk to Books (GTB) and you quickly realize we are nowhere near genuine machine reading yet. When we asked GTB, “Where did Harry Potter meet… Continue Reading
Trust and Distrust in America
Pew – Trust and Distrust in America – “Many Americans think declining trust in the government and in each other makes it harder to solve key problems. They have a wealth of ideas about what’s gone wrong and how to fix it. Trust is an essential elixir for public life and neighborly relations, and when… Continue Reading
