UCI News: “Following last year’s successful launch of a global carbon monitor website to track and display greenhouse gas emissions from a variety of sources, an international team led by Earth system scientists from the University of California, Irvine is unveiling this week a new data resource focused on the United States. Near real-time, state-level… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: April 2021
Columbia Launched Democracy Reform and Voting Rights in the United States Web Archive
“Columbia University Libraries is pleased to announce the launch of the Democracy Reform and Voting Rights in the United States Web Archive. The ongoing struggle in the United States between advocates for voting rights and official proponents of voter suppression measures intensified in 2020 during a bitter presidential election campaign conducted amidst the substantial additional… Continue Reading
Ethical Financial Stewardship: One Library’s Examination of Vendors’ Business Practices
In the Library with the Lead Pipe: Katy DiVittorio and Lorelle Gianelli – “The evaluation of library collections rarely digs into the practices or other business ventures of the companies that create or sell library resources. As financial stewards, academic Acquisition Librarians are in a unique position to consider the business philosophy and practices of our… Continue Reading
Consumers now average 4.2 hours per day in apps, up 30% from 2019
Tech Crunch: “The coronavirus pandemic has increased our collective screen time, and that’s particularly true on mobile devices. According to a new report from mobile data and analytics firm App Annie, global consumers are now spending an average of 4.2 hours per day using apps on their smartphones, an increase of 30% from just two… Continue Reading
Sorry, judges, encrypted chat is not like a private thought
Engadget: “A state judge recently ruled that two of the men who plotted to kidnap Michigan’s governor did not make terrorist threats because they used an encrypted chat app to do so. Since federal agencies and lawmakers have been trying to get encrypted comms backdoored by arguing that they are the tool of choice for… Continue Reading
How to Stop Spam Calls
Wirecutter – The research:” When people talk about spam calls, they tend to refer to four types of calls: Telemarketing: These calls originate from a live person who is trying to sell you something from a legally registered business. Such calls are annoying but generally not fraudulent. Legal robocalls: Legal robocalls are automated calls for… Continue Reading
Long Covid isn’t as unique as we thought
Vox: “…The dominant narrative about long Covid has been that it’s a uniquely perplexing feature of Covid-19. Reports of “Covid brain fog” or “Covid dementia,” for example, suggest a disturbing and extraordinary ability of the coronavirus to destroy the lives of survivors. Even a year later, some patients are still struggling to return to work… Continue Reading
Yahoo Answers will be shut down forever on May 4th
The Verge: “Yahoo Answers, one of the longest-running and most storied web Q&A platforms in the history of the internet, is shutting down on May 4th. That’s the day the Yahoo Answers website will start redirecting to the Yahoo homepage, and all of the platform’s archives will apparently cease to exist. The platform has been… Continue Reading
5 Ways to Tap Into Your Smartphone’s Audio Powers
The New York Times – “A virtual assistant is just one tool that lets you use your voice to share your thoughts, capture a moment or just get things done. It has been a decade since Apple integrated Siri right into its iPhone software and mainstreamed the voice-activated assistant. But the assistant is just one… Continue Reading
Data scraped from 500 million LinkedIn users found for sale online
Tech Republic: “A massive trove of LinkedIn account data has been found for sale online, containing 500 million user records including email addresses, phone numbers, links to other social media profiles and professional details Reported by CyberNews researchers, the leak was posted to a forum popular with hackers by a user asking for a “four-digit… Continue Reading
Social Media Use in 2021
Pew Research Center – “A majority of Americans say they use YouTube and Facebook, while use of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok is especially common among adults under 30. Despite a string of controversies and the public’s relatively negative sentiments about aspects of social media, roughly seven-in-ten Americans say they ever use any kind of social… Continue Reading
Americans are super-spreaders of COVID-19 misinformation
“Infodemic pathways: Evaluating the role that traditional and social media play in cross-national information transfer” by Aengus Bridgman, Eric Merkley, Oleg Zhilin, Peter John Loewen, Taylor Owen, and Derek Ruths was published in Frontiers in Political Science. DOI: http://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2021.648646 “Misinformation about COVID-19 is spreading from the United States into Canada, undermining efforts to mitigate the… Continue Reading
