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Daily Archives: March 5, 2019

Billionaires 2019: The Richest People In The World

Forbes – “For only the second year in a decade, both the number of billionaires and their total wealth shrank, proving that even the wealthiest are not immune to economic forces and weak stock markets. Capitalism is taking some lumps—and not just in the headlines. For only the second year in a decade, both the number of billionaires and their total wealth shrank, proving that even the wealthiest are not immune to economic forces and weak stock markets. By our latest count there are 2,153 billionaires, 55 fewer than a year ago. Of those, a record 994, or 46%, are poorer (relatively speaking) than they were last year. In total, the ultra-rich are worth $8.7 trillion, down $400 billion from 2018. Altogether 11% of last year’s list members, or 247 people, dropped out of the ranks, the most since 2009 at the height of the global financial crisis…”

Why Conspiracy Theories Work so Well on Facebook

OneZero Medium – Are we all just clicks away from identifying as ‘flat-Earthers’? “…A disturbing investigative report by the Verge last week revealed that some of Facebook’s contract moderators—who are tasked with keeping content like beheadings, bestiality, and racism out of your news feed—have turned to extreme coping mechanisms to get through the workday. Some… Continue Reading

The Devil in the Details – DH for Small Data and Close Reading

DigitalHumanities: “What connects Open Source Software development, scholarly edition making, Linked Open Data, and Digital Sustainability? All of them rely our human capacity for managing fine detail as much as or more than they rely on technological infrastructure. Although Digital Humanities often tends to focus on the macroscopic, with text mining, visualization, and distant reading,… Continue Reading

As More Universities Cancel Elsevier, Sci-Hub Blossoms

TorrentFreak: “The University of California (UC) is the latest institution to cancel its subscription to leading academic publisher Elsevier. UC cites high costs and the lack of open access research among the reasons. This likely means an increase in traffic for Sci-Hub, the site that’s often referred to referred to as ‘The Pirate Bay for… Continue Reading

OpenAI’s Recent Announcement: What Went Wrong, and How It Could Be Better

EFF: “Earlier this month, OpenAI revealed an impressive language model that can generate paragraphs of believable text. It declined to fully release their research “due to concerns about malicious applications of the technology.” OpenAI released a much smaller model and technical paper, but not the fully-trained model, training code, or full dataset, citing concerns that… Continue Reading

OCLC publishes list of top 100 novels

“OCLC, a leading library technology and research organization, has published The Library 100: Top Novels of All Time, a list of the novels most widely available in libraries today. The list is based on data in WorldCat, the world’s most comprehensive database of information about library collections. Produced and maintained by OCLC and individual member… Continue Reading

Phone numbers are the new Social Security numbers

Axios: “Cellphone numbers have become a primary way for tech companies like Facebook to uniquely identify users and secure accounts, in some ways becoming a proxy for a national ID.Why it matters: That over-reliance on cellphone numbers ironically makes them a less effective and secure authentication method. And the more valuable the phone number becomes… Continue Reading

Putin Wants His Own Internet

Bloomberg – A new law would create a single command post from which authorities can manage—and halt—information flows across Russian cyberspace. “Russia’s censorship deficit relative to China is about to narrow. Backed by President Vladimir Putin, lawmakers in Moscow are pushing a bill through parliament dubbed “Sovereign Internet” that’s designed to create a single command post… Continue Reading