Gizmodo: “Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple move more money than many medium-sized nations. Their extraordinary profits are won through extraordinary reach—this is not a secret. That a few companies are afforded unprecedented and shamefully unregulated access into our homes is now an unremarkable fact of living with tiny computers everywhere. When Gizmodo reporter Kashmir… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: February 2019
Bribery, Kickbacks, and Self-Dealing: An Overview of Honest Services Fraud and Issues for Congress
CRS report via FAS – Bribery, Kickbacks, and Self-Dealing: An Overview of Honest Services Fraud and Issues for Congress, January 30. 2019. “As the trials of Sheldon Silver and Dean Skelos illustrate, corruption among high-profile public officials continues to be a concern in the United States. Likewise, recent examples abound of powerful executives in the… Continue Reading
T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data
and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country – via Motherboard: “…Motherboard’s investigation shows just how exposed mobile networks and the data they generate are, leaving them open to surveillance by ordinary citizens, stalkers, and criminals,… Continue Reading
A bookstore in Atlanta where half of the books aren’t for sale
The New York Times – Where Books Meet Black Mecca “There’s a lot that is not for sale at For Keeps, a little bookstore with brick walls on Auburn Avenue, which for decades had been the center of commerce, culture and spirit for this city people call Black Mecca. That copy of Jet magazine from 1964,… Continue Reading
Sometimes Google Books scans pictures of human hands along with the book pages
Wired: “Google Books contains more than 25 million volumes, disembodied like spirits from their spines. The individual titles are digitized by data entry workers who flip the pages for machines, working so quickly their hands and fingers sometimes get caught by the scans. These glitches, collected in Andrew Norman Wilson’s Scan Ops, reveal the old-school… Continue Reading
U.S. wealth concentration returns to levels last seen during the Roaring Twenties
NBER Working Paper Series: Global Wealth Inequality , Gabriel Zucman, Working Paper 25462, January 2019. “This article reviews the recent literature on the dynamics of global wealth inequality. I first reconcile available estimates of wealth inequality in the United States. Both surveys and tax data show that wealth inequality has increased dramatically since the 1980s,… Continue Reading
Brief and timely explainer – How to do fact checking
Oxford University Press Blog: “The actor Cary Grant once said of acting that, “It takes 500 small details to add up to one favorable impression.” That’s true for writing as well—concrete details can paint a picture for a reader and establish credibility for a writer. Details can be tricky, however, and in the swirl of… Continue Reading
New Library Bill of Rights Provision Recognizes and Defends Library Users’ Privacy
American Library Association – “The Library Bill of Rights — first adopted in 1939 and last amended in 1980 — has been updated to include an article focused on the concept of ensuring privacy and confidentiality for library users.The new article of the Library Bill of Rights, Article VII, states: “All people, regardless of origin, age,… Continue Reading
Think with Google
“We know how important it is for marketers to have their pulse on the latest consumer insights and industry trends. To help you easily stay up-to-date we organized hundreds of Google insights and facts by industry, platform, and theme. Search through to find inspiration, or the perfect insight to power your thinking. Insight cards are shareable and… Continue Reading
How to Use Data to Plan a Targeted Library Campaign
Demco: “…Putting Big Data to Work for Libraries – At EveryLibrary, we build datasets and use targeted messaging to rally support for libraries using a fairly small budget. There are a few great sources of data about supporters, and, undeniably, one of the biggest sources is Facebook. We use the Audience Insights tool on Facebook… Continue Reading
There’s No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology
Opinion – Wired: “…What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure. When that trust turns out to… Continue Reading
Cleveland Museum of Art: 30,000 high quality digital images now available
Creative Commons Blog: “The Cleveland Museum of Art is one of the most visited art museums in the world, and soon it will become one of the most important online collections as well. Today, we are announcing a release of 30,000 high quality, free and open digital images from the museum’s collection under CC0 and… Continue Reading
