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Monthly Archives: March 2019

Free online course will arm you with tools and skills to navigate misinformation

The Knight Center – “Massive, country-wide protests are planned and it would be impossible to have correspondents placed at each demonstration. Like many newsrooms these days, you plan to comb social media for photo and video evidence that can provide a national picture of what’s going on. But how can you make sure the images… Continue Reading

White Collar Prosecutions Hit All-Time Low in January 2019

“The latest available data from the Justice Department show that during January 2019 the government reported 337 new white collar crime prosecutions – an historic low. According to the case-by-case information analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, this number is down 20.3 percent over the previous month, and continues a… Continue Reading

Specialists from seven countries call for moratorium on gene editing

Nature [no fee or paywall]: Adopt a moratorium on heritable genome editing, Eric Lander, Françoise Baylis, Feng Zhang, Emmanuelle Charpentier, Paul Berg and specialists from seven countries call for an international governance framework. “We call for a global moratorium on all clinical uses of human germline editing — that is, changing heritable DNA (in sperm,… Continue Reading

The Web is missing an essential part of infrastructure: an Open Web Index

The Web is missing an essential part of infrastructure: an Open Web Index – Dirk Lewandowski, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, German. (Submitted on 9 Mar 2019). arXiv:1903.03846 [cs.IR] “A proposal for building an index of the Web that separates the infrastructure part of the search engine—the index—from the services part that will form… Continue Reading

MarineTraffic is the world’s leading provider of ship tracking and maritime intelligence

MarineTraffic: “Monitoring vessel movements is at the core of what we do. Building on a base of data gathered from our network of coastal AIS-receiving stations, supplemented by satellite receivers, we apply algorithms and integrate complementary data sources to provide the shipping, trade and logistics industries with actionable insights into shipping activity. With our main… Continue Reading

Firefox Send – Free File Transfers while Keeping your Personal Information Private

Firefox Send, send.firefox.com. “Send is a free encrypted file transfer service that allows users to safely and simply share files from any browser. Additionally, Send will also be available as an Android app in beta later this week. Now that it’s a keeper, we’ve made it even better, offering higher upload limits and greater control… Continue Reading

Googling Strangers: One Professor’s Lesson On Privacy In Public Spaces

NPR: “Charlotte Lehman could hear the man reading his credit card number out loud from across the Starbucks.He was speaking to a companion, but his voice carried over the music to where Lehman sat. Surrounded by a dozen or so people, the speaker also divulged his phone number a­­nd home address. After that, all it… Continue Reading

How voice computing will transform the way we live, work and think

Will the Siri model for voice computing replace search engines in the near future? Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think, a new book by James Vlahos is excerpted in Wired – Amazon Alexa and the search for the one perfect answer “…the rise of voice computing… Continue Reading

Forensic genealogists using DNA databases to solve cold cases

Topic.com: Forensic genealogists at Parabon NanoLabs are using DNA databases to solve cold cases faster than anyone could have imagined. But how will their techniques hold up in court?…Forensic genealogy can best be described as a still-nascent technique of forensic science that combines DNA analysis and family-tree building. (The TV pitch would be a cross between… Continue Reading

A new way to track Web censorship under Trump: Gov404

Sunlight Foundation Web Integrity Project: “Today, WIP is launching Gov404: The Web Integrity Project’s Censorship Tracker, a new tool to track unjustified removals of online resources and reductions in access to content across the federal government. Why are we aggregating these unjustified removals? As the government itself states in its Office of Management and Budget’s… Continue Reading

The World Wide Web Turns 30. Where Does It Go From Here?

Sir Tim Berners Lee via Wired: “Today, 30 years on from my original proposal for an information management system, half the world is online. It’s a moment to celebrate how far we’ve come, but also an opportunity to reflect on how far we have yet to go. The web has become a public square, a… Continue Reading