The world of information - in Fun Size!

UMSI's Fun Size digest features tiny, delicious news tidbits relating to information and library topics. Reach us at [email protected].

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Personal security red alert
They tell us and tell us, but we still don’t believe it could happen. We’re talking serious, life-ruining hacking of your online accounts, from social media to banking, through your cellphone. Read this cautionary tale from Endgadget and learn how hard it can be to repair the damage. It’s almost enough to scare you back to landlines. 

Truly fake news
The Washington Post has a very helpful and timely Fact Checkers Guide to manipulated video, and includes some prime examples of how videos can be edited or otherwise altered to misrepresent a situation or an individual. Online, you can’t believe your eyes any more.

Mona Lisa moves her lips
In the continually developing ability of artificial intelligence to make us see things that aren’t really there, a paper from Samsung’s AI center presents a new method for transposing one face onto a target face. World Economic Forum has an example of what that looks like when applied to the Mona Lisa. Maybe, finally, we’ll know why she’s smiling. 

Library of the future
The Research Triangle seems an ideal spot to house an ultra-modern, tech-heavy, robot-staffed library. The sleek five-story Hunt Library on the campus of North Carolina State University has every modern feature, plus some quirky ones, like 80 different kinds of chairs. (The chairs even have their own website.) Quartz.com presents a look at this architectural marvel.

Free food!
Well, free pictures of food. Also, free stock images of animals, people, architecture -- just about anything you can imagine, thanks to this compilation by Hongkiat.com of 50 sites that offer free images (some require attribution), and thanks to the kindness of their creators.

Caught in the crossfire
Mysterious memes and odd pix from strangers popping up on your iPhone? Could be you’re near a crowd of teenagers barraging each other with goofy images via Apple’s file-sharing feature, AirDrop. The Atlantic explains this social networking phenomenon to adults, who probably have better things to do.

Alexa’s selective memory
By now, just about everyone knows that our personal assistants are listening to us and recording what we say–all in the interests of serving us better. And now that we know… we’re not that happy. So Amazon has a new privacy feature that allows us to tell Alexa to delete everything she’s recorded today. Sadly, it’s not quite that simple, as Gizmodo explains.

15 seconds of fame
Bite-size videos are all over social media and MakeUseOf.com has a quick guide to TikTok, a popular app for making 15-second music videos. This month’s reader challenge: click on the stair shuffle video and try to watch just one.

Check it out!
Marian the Librarian isn’t the only one dancing around the stacks in this sassy collection of musical parodies choreographed and performed by librariansfrom coast to coast, courtesy of ElectricLit.

News from UMSI:

What’s in your wallet? Research by UMSI assistant professor Alain Cohn on civic honesty around the globe drew worldwide attention and coverage in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal among over 700 other media outlets. It involved dropping 17,000 wallets in 40 countries to see which got returned. Read more.