USA Today – “If you think your privacy is at risk when it comes to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, they’re nothing compared to the “people search engines.” We’re talking WhitePages, MyLife.com, BeenVerified and the like. Here’s the deal: States sell their data to brokers, who in turn feed court and criminal records,… Continue Reading
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Author Archives: Sabrina I. Pacifici
Ring’s Hidden Data Let Us Map Amazon’s Sprawling Home Surveillance Network
“Gizmodo has acquired data over the past month connected to nearly 65,800 individual posts shared by users of the Neighbors app. The posts, which reach back 500 days from the point of collection, offer extraordinary insight into the proliferation of Ring video surveillance across American neighborhoods and raise important questions about the privacy trade-offs of… Continue Reading
Merriam-Webster’s Words of the Year 2019
Merriam-Webster – They, plus quid pro quo, crawdad, exculpate, and 7 more of our top lookups of 2019 – “Our Word of the Year for 2019 is they. It reflects a surprising fact: even a basic term—a personal pronoun—can rise to the top of our data. Although our lookups are often driven by events in… Continue Reading
The Fact-Check Industry
Columbia Journalism Review – Has our investment in debunking worked? “…Outside newsrooms, money is pouring in to set up new types of organizations to combat misinformation. There is now a sector of fact-checking philanthropy, fueled by Google, Facebook, and nonprofit foundations. As a result, the Duke count noted, last year forty-one out of forty-seven fact-checking… Continue Reading
Latest Arctic Report Card – melting permafrost emitting billions of tons of carbon into air
“NOAA’s 14th Arctic Report Card recounts the numerous ways that climate change continued to disrupt the polar region during 2019, with near-record high air and ocean temperatures, a massive melt of the Greenland ice sheet, record low sea-ice extents, and major shifts in the distribution of commercially valuable marine species. The Arctic Report Card is… Continue Reading
Responsible Operations: Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI in Libraries
OCLC – Thomas Padilla – “Responsible Operations is intended to help chart library community engagement with data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) and was developed in partnership with an advisory group and a landscape group comprised of more than 70 librarians and professionals from universities, libraries, museums, archives, and other organizations. This research… Continue Reading
Visualizing the Worst Air Pollution Days of 2019
The New York Times – See How the World’s Most Polluted Air Compares With Your City’s – “We visualized the damaging, tiny particles that wreak havoc on human health. From the Bay Area to New Delhi, see how the world’s worst pollution compares with your local air. …Outdoor particulate pollution was responsible for an estimated… Continue Reading
Developing Systems to Summarize Legislation
Center for Data Innovation: “Researchers from FiscalNote Research, a technology firm based in Washington, DC, have released a dataset of U.S. Congressional and California state bills to advance the development of systems that can summarize legislation. The dataset contains more than 22,000 U.S. Congressional bills and summaries from 1993 through 2018 and more than 1,200… Continue Reading
Book burning by Chinese county library sparks fury
The Guardian UK – Blaze complying with ministry directive meant for schools harks back to Qin dynasty and Nazi Germany, critics say – “A county library in north-western China has been criticised for burning books in line with a nationwide cull of “illegal” or “improper” materials used in school libraries. Reports and photos of two women… Continue Reading
Fake ‘Likes’ Remain Just a Few Dollars Away, Researchers Say
The New York Times – Despite Big Tech’s attempts to combat manipulation, companies that sell clicks, likes and followers on social media are easy to find. “Companies like Facebook and Twitter are poorly policing automated bots and other methods for manipulating social media platforms, according to a report released on Friday by researchers from the… Continue Reading
The Best Book Covers of 2019
Book Riot – “It’s the season of best of lists, and with the bonus of this being the end of a decade, we’re being treated to double the number of best of lists this year. What shouldn’t be overlooked among those lists are the incredible book covers that graced shelves this year. Works of art… Continue Reading
Postreproductive killer whale grandmothers improve the survival of their grandoffspring
Postreproductive killer whale grandmothers improve the survival of their grandoffspring [full text – no paywall]. Stuart Nattrass, Darren P. Croft, Samuel Ellis, Michael A. Cant, Michael N. Weiss, Brianna M. Wright, Eva Stredulinsky,Thomas Doniol-Valcroze, John K. B. Ford, Kenneth C. Balcomb, and Daniel W. Franks. PNAS first published December 9, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1903844116 “Why humans and… Continue Reading
