EurekAlert: Blue Brain Project releases first-ever digital 3D brain cell atlas . “The first digital 3D atlas of every cell in the mouse brain provides neuroscientists with previously unavailable information on major cell types, numbers and positions in all 737 brain regions — which will potentially accelerate progress in brain science massively.”
Beijing Institute of Genomics: iDog: An Integrated Resource for Domestic Dogs and Wild Canids. “iDog was developed in the BIG Data Center at Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in cooperation with Kunming Institute of Zoology, and was published online in Nucleic Acids Research. The iDog is the first integrated resource dedicated to domestic dogs and wild canids, providing a variety of data services and online analysis tools to dog researchers around the world.” I browsed iDog very briefly and everything I saw was in English.
Civil Eats: New Archive Reveals How the Food Industry Mimics Big Tobacco to Suppress Science, Shape Public Opinion. “[Dr. Cristen] Kearns’ dogged pursuit of industry materials has yielded thousands of documents that make up the bulk of the new UCSF Food Industry Documents archive, alongside the medical school’s existing archive of Chemical, Drug, and Tobacco Industry collections. Unveiled earlier this month, the food industry archive, which so far contains over 32,000 documents, promises to help reveal industry’s impact on current and future food and beverage policy.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Neowin: Some Facebook users are seeing old messages popping up as new ones. “Some Facebook users are being faced with a strange new bug on the social network’s website, as old messages in their history are being surfaced as if they were new. Reports started popping up on Twitter earlier today, with users mostly complaining about the fact that they were being shown embarrassing or even painful memories.”
CNBC: Former FTC official says Facebook representative made false statements to international leaders about how the company handles personal data. “A former Federal Trade Commission official claimed a Facebook official mislead and international committee of parliamentarians Tuesday in a hearing about the company’s privacy policies. The allegation centers around whether third-party developers had access to information on private Facebook profiles in the early days of the platform.”
From the terrific Larry Ferlazzo: There Are Now Two-thousand (Yes, 2,000) “Best” Lists!. “The publication earlier today of my most recent ‘Best’ list brings their total to an important number – two-thousand of them!”
USEFUL STUFF
Genealogy’s Star: MyHeritage LIVE Lectures now free online. “Videos of the recent MyHeritage.com LIVE Conference in Oslo, Norway are now available for free online.”
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
CNET: A Chinese translation app is censoring politically sensitive terms, report says . “More Chinese tech firms are erring on the side of caution when it comes to policing content on their platforms. iFlytek, a voice recognition technology provider in China, has begun censoring politically sensitive terms from its translation app, South China Morning Post reported citing a tweet by Jane Manchun Wong.”
Undark: A Request to Streamline Federal Document Purges Has Researchers on Edge. “Of course, document archiving — and destruction — is routine at all federal agencies, and only between 1 and 3 percent of federal records are ever retained permanently. Maintenance typically follows a set schedule, whereby records — both digital and paper — are retained for a set period of time before being shredded, mulched, or, in the case of electronic documents, simply erased or made unreadable. In this case, however, the [Department of the Interior] is seeking permission from the National Archives to consolidate pre-existing schedules into what the National Archives calls ‘big buckets,’ meaning requests for eliminating records could be made in larger groups.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
BuzzFeed News: Eight People Are Facing Charges As A Result Of The FBI’s Biggest-Ever Ad Fraud Investigation. “In August 2017, the FBI organized a secret meeting of digital advertising and cybersecurity experts in a secure room in a Manhattan federal building. The roughly 30 people in attendance met to create a coordinated response to a massive ad fraud scheme that posed a risk to the global digital advertising industry and sparked a criminal investigation.”
Ars Technica: I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Why AutoCAD malware keeps chugging on. “Criminal hackers continue to exploit a feature in Autodesk’s widely used AutoCAD program in an attempt to steal valuable computer-assisted designs for bridges, factory buildings, and other projects, researchers said Tuesday.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Poynter: Hyperpartisan Facebook groups are the next big challenge for fact-checkers. “[Jonathan] Albright, director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, spent months digging into the analytics of Facebook posts, political ads and private groups to determine how the platform was influencing the election. The result is a three-part analysis of misinformation on the social media platform, which he published days before the United States midterms earlier this month. Three months and 1,000 screenshots later, he found that, while the technology company has made strides in limiting the spread of misinformation over the past couple of years, there’s still plenty of fakery on the platform.” Good morning, Internet…
