Small Business Computing: “As we approach the one-year anniversary of social distancing restrictions put in place to slow the spread of COVID-19, it’s safe to say the face of the workforce has been permanently altered. Remote work was an emerging trend before 2020, but the last 12 months have proven the benefits of a distributed… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: February 2021
How much internet speed do you really need?
CNET – “Whether you’re moving to a new place or simply shopping around for new options, trying to figure out an internet plan can be more complicated than you might assume. Most plans have you pay for your internet speed and capacity, which prompts the question: How much internet speed do you really need? Most… Continue Reading
Google’s Model Search automatically optimizes and identifies AI models
VentureBeat: “Google today announced the release of Model Search, an open source platform designed to help researchers develop machine learning models efficiently and automatically. Instead of focusing on a specific domain, Google says that Model Search is domain-agnostic, making it capable of finding a model architecture that fits a dataset and problem while minimizing coding… Continue Reading
The Librarian War Against QAnon
The Atlantic – “As “Do the research” becomes a rallying cry for conspiracy theorists, classical information literacy is not enough…For too long now, shared reality has been fracturing before our eyes. Eli Pariser’s concept of the “filter bubble” is already a decade old. Yochai Benkler’s research on propaganda networks finds that the roots of our… Continue Reading
Curating Public Tweets for Academic Research
Center for Data Innovation: “Twitter has released a dataset of historical public tweets available to academic researchers for use. Developers update the dataset on a weekly basis to include up to 10 million monthly tweets. Users can filter by recent searches and mentions on a timeline, applying up to 1,000 concurrent rules. Previously, researchers could… Continue Reading
These 7 new accessible vehicles let people with disabilities access micromobility
Fast Company – “If you live in New York City and use a manual wheelchair, you may soon be able to use the Lime app to order a free rental of an attachment that turns it into a power vehicle. The design is one of seven adaptive vehicles the micromobility company recently developed to make… Continue Reading
Experts Say the ‘New Normal’ in 2025 Will Be Far More Tech-Driven, Presenting More Big Challenges
Pew – “A plurality of experts think sweeping societal change will make life worse for most people as greater inequality, rising authoritarianism and rampant misinformation take hold in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. Still, a portion believe life will be better in a ‘tele-everything’ world where workplaces, health care and social activity improve…Asked to… Continue Reading
Should armed guards be in schools? This JAMA study on shootings may surprise you
Research Letter, Public Health. February 16, 2021. Presence of Armed School Officials and Fatal and Nonfatal Gunshot Injuries During Mass School Shootings, United States, 1980-2019. Jillian Peterson, PhD; James Densley, DPhil; Gina Erickson, PhD. JAMA Network Open. 2021;4(2):e2037394. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.37394 – “..This study examined a total of 133 cases of school shootings and attempted school shootings… Continue Reading
To Avoid a Repeat of Blackouts, Researcher Suggests Diversifying
Medium – Big Idea: Thousands of Californians suffered blackouts this fall, but research offers steps for utilities to prevent similar outages in the future. “In October and November, more than 800,000 Californians lost power, when Pacific Gas & Electric turned off transmission lines to prevent wildfires. In 2011, 54 Japanese nuclear plants were closed, after a… Continue Reading
Giving “Last Chance Books” New Life Through Digitization
Internet Archive Blogs – “Sometimes they arrive tied up in string because their binding is broken. Others are in envelopes to protect the brittle pages from further damage. Aging books are sent from libraries to the Internet Archive for preservation. Thanks to the careful work of the nearly 70 people who scan at digitization centers… Continue Reading
The Coup We Are Not Talking About
The New York Times – We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both. Dr. Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, is the author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” “I have spent exactly 42 years studying the rise of the digital as an economic… Continue Reading
Power Outages in Texas
CRS Insight – Power Outages in Texas, February 17, 2021: “Texas’s power outages, many experts argue, are largely a result of policies for electricity independence that the state has pursued for decades. Texas operates its own independent electrical grid, run by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) that serves most of the state. Texas… Continue Reading
