The US Army Field Artillery School has new online finding aids for its archival collections.

Interesting: Using Facebook to predict and map obesity in the United States: “The higher the percentage of people in a city, town or neighborhood with Facebook interests suggesting a healthy, active lifestyle, the lower that area’s obesity rate. At the same time, areas with a large percentage of Facebook users with television-related interests tend to have higher rates of obesity. Such are the conclusions of a study by Boston Children’s Hospital researchers comparing geotagged Facebook user data with data from national and New York City-focused health surveys.”

The Arkansas History Commission has launched an online index of Arkansas deaths, 1819-1920. “Designed to supplement Arkansas’s vital records service which began in 1914, In Remembrance provides researchers with the location of death records in early Arkansas. The data have been collected from numerous sources including church publications, cemetery records, mortality censuses, newspaper obituaries, or county and local records from the AHC’s extensive holdings.”

Also Arkansas: Arkansas.gov has announced a redesign.

While going through my (extremely neglected) personal e-mail, I found out about a charming Tumblr from Erik Kwakkel, a Medieval book historian at Leiden University, The Netherlands. One recent post discusses a discovery of 132 notes and small bits of paper which were recycled as book boards. Other entries look at doodles in medieval margins, a chained library, and letters with faces. A great Tumblr.

David Rumsey’s huge, amazing historical map collection will now be available via the Digital Public Library of America — and the DPLA’s API.

Oooh, ScraperWiki is now offering free community accounts! Rarely have I regretted so much the lack of 48 hours in a day. (If you want some background on ScraperWiki, here’s a good article.)

There is a new database available that tracks pending energy-related legislation in all 50 US states. “The database, called the Advanced Energy Legislation Tracker, was co-created by the Advanced Energy Economy (AEE) and the Center for the New Energy Economy (CNEE) at Colorado State University…. The database not only is tracking more than 2,000 bills across the country that could impact how consumers produce, buy and use energy, but it also conducts analysis of policy trends…”

WordPress 3.6 beta 3 is now available.

Mmmkay. Bing is going to add Klingon to its translator. “The Bing service will translate text written in any one of 41 supported languages — including English, French, Hebrew and Urdu — into Klingon. Fear not, native Klingon speakers: words or phrases written in that language can be translated into the more than three dozen available tongues.”

Meanwhile, Google Translate has passed 70 languages with the addition of another five.

More Google: Google has aggregated its storage offerings. Now you get 15GB of space to use between GMail, Drive, and Google Plus Photos. Pardon me if I don’t sound too excited about this; I have 25GB for Gmail as part of my Google Apps account and it’s already 48% full — 15GB feels cramped.

Because I know how much you hate being productive, here’s a story about a Breakout Easter egg hidden inside Google’s image search. Hey Google, do Tempest, that was my favorite back in the day. Good morning, Internet…

I’m undergoing some extremely stressful things in my life right now and I just need to focus all my energies on them. My health is fine (aside from the stress) so please don’t be concerned. This is just reality.

Can I get sappy on you for a minute?

As some of you know I live in North Carolina. I have ancestors here going back over 200 years (who were mostly piss-poor tobacco farmers, so don’t think I’m claiming any kind of merit badge.) I have lived here most of my life and I can’t imagine moving away, because of how much and how helplessly I love this state.

It would take me ages to explain to you why. A streaky dawn sky over a stand of pine trees. A warm evening, sitting on the porch, smelling the wisteria and watching the bats zoom around. Sometimes I’ll get up early and go for a walk, and I’ll hear the hawks going kyahh kyahh kyahh as they look for their breakfast, and I’ll see the crepe myrtles scattering their petals over the grass. And my heart will just clutch, because I am in the middle — this is my landscape and the context of my history — and I have given my soul to it in some vast, inexpressible way. And though it, in its totality, may love me back (who knows?), it is in a way that I do not have the capacity to truly understand and appreciate.

ResearchBuzz is the context of my intellectual existance. Not just the Web site, but every thing that makes it possible. The people who care enough to create the resources and share them. The people who teach and grow and make more from what has come before. There is so much to despair of in this world, but there is so much hope in those everywhere who choose to move forward and build and share and learn.

ResearchBuzz is only a drop in that vast ocean. But the ocean has been so welcoming and accepting to a life which in some ways has not had much of that kindness. I feel for that context and that landscape the same witless gratitude and overflowing emotion that I feel toward the state where I live. And the feelings for both are tinged with regret and self-recrimination, because I know in neither case will I ever be able to repay everything that has been given to me.

I’m not sure when I’ll be able to come back and devote as much time as I would like to ResearchBuzz — to be honest, I have no idea how this will end. But it seemed very important that I say something, and most important that I tell you: I love. I love the world that makes ResearchBuzz possible, though I have to leave it for a while. And I will not stop.

See you soon.

Openclipart has a new logo and some updates.

Why yes, I am into hip-hop (and pretty much all music except opera, sorry opera fans, I just don’t get it) – the University of Houston libraries has announced a new finding aid for its DJ Screw Papers collection.

The University at Buffalo has added more photographs to its online James Joyce Collection. Good morning, Internet…

Forbes has an article about Julian Assange’s new online archive (not really a search engine as I’ve seen in called in a few articles) the Public Library of United States Diplomacy (PLUS D). “The group has started with a searchable archive that includes the 250,000 leaked State Department memos it had previously titled Cablegate and added to them 1.7 million files from the State Department during the 1973 to 1976 tenure of Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State. In total, the archive includes about a billion words.”

Vermont citizens, your state treasurer has created new tools for finding and claiming lost life insurance benefits.

The city of Petersburg, Alaska now has an online newspaper archive. The current archive spans from 1913 to 1931.

More newspapers: meanwhile, the San Bernardino County Sun archives are being donated to the San Bernardino County Historical Archives and Cal State San Bernardino’s John M. Pfau Library. The newspaper archives, which go back to 1894, will be digitized by the San Bernardino County Archives.

Wait, Tumblr has shut down Storyboard? What?

I found out from PetaPixel about
PhotosNormandie, an online archive of over 3000 photos from the Battle of Normandy and afterwards.

The Ministry of Culture of Taiwan is planning an oral history project, the results of which will be posted in an online database.

So apparently the further you travel from your home the happier your tweets get? Hey, let’s test this out — somebody send me to the moon!

More Twitter: there are 20 million fake Twitter accounts?

I’m not sure WHY you’d want to do this, but you can now hide messages in photos on Facebook, thanks to a new browser extension.

Hey! You can now search video on HouseLive.gov. There’s also a new RSS feed to track activity on the House floor.

And in our “OH FREAKIN’ SWEET!” department, we have a new free tool that takes tables of data in PDF files and extracts them into CSV format.

Useful: USA.gov has a tool for verifying whether social media accounts are official government accounts or not.

Remember when I mentioned that Google was stopping the publication of Frommer’s travel guides in print? Arthur Frommer has bought the brand back and will be resuming publication of the travel guides in ebook and paper format. You GO Mr. Frommer.

More Google: Google+ has gotten full-size image uploads from the desktop.

The SEC has decided that it’s okay for public companies to use social media to make disclosures. So a company could have their CEO account announce something to Facebook “friends,” and that’s okay (but the friend limit is 5000 people.) Or make an announcement at 5pm on Friday via a Facebook fan page, knowing very well that Facebook does not distribute fan page posts to all fans. I won’t even go INTO searching social media archives to find something a year or two after the fact. I think this is a terrible idea.

Firefox Version 20 is now available.

Greg at Search Engine Showdown has an update on Bing’s date searching. URL switches! Woo!

Interesting: Yahoo Mail has teamed up with Dropbox.

Do you use SoundCloud? TechHive offers some hints for digging into it. Good morning, Internet…

Yelp has released a free revenue estimation tool for local businesses.

The Wilson Center has released a massive new declassified materials archive. “… declassified official documents from nearly 100 different archives in dozens of different countries that provide fresh, unprecedented insights into the history of international relations and diplomacy.”

Amazon has acquired Goodreads.

Microsoft has launched a Web site for searching its patents.

Apparently Google’s new Compose experience is now the default. Afraid I don’t care for it — I’ll have to get used to it..

Delicious has some new features. I like the idea of logging into Twitter and having Delicious automatically pull my links.

blekko has announced some new features for its search engine, izik.

The US Census Bureau has released a new extraction tool for employment data. “Primarily for advanced users, the new tool allows users to extract data for specific geographies and industries without first downloading large data sets. The data are available in comma separated value (.csv) format for states, counties, metropolitan and micropolitan areas, and workforce investment areas. Future updates to the tool will include additional Local Employment Dynamics data products.”

An article at INC. compares Google Keep to Evernote. I’ll be sticking with Evernote, thanks.

I never know whether to post on April Fools’ Day — but if you’re into that sort of thing here are popular pranks from years gone by. I’ll post links to roundups of this year’s pranks tomorrow. Good morning, Internet…

More Google: The FBI wants more real-time GMail spying power.

Nice one from Lifehacker: the best ways to be sure that your use of online photos is legal.

More from Lifehacker: Dropproxy lets you hide your user name when sharing public files.

The Smithsonian Libraries has an excellent blog post: Finding Current Research Using Free Online Sources.

Ooopsie: thousands of Amazon S3 data stores are configured incorrectly and have been left open.

Apparently a giant DDoS attack
caused Internet disruption and widespread wonkiness yesterday. Did you notice any problems?

Lisnews pointed me to this awesome article about the digitizing of parish records in Florida — parish records that go back to the 1500s.

Woo! An RPG built entirely in a spreadsheet. I love this, but I am a huge nerd. Good morning, Internet…

It starts off as an article about an odd/silly Twitter tool which finds tweets of people publicly complaining about how they hate their jobs. But there are some interesting statistics in here about those kinds of Twitter accounts and how they compare to people who tweet positively about their jobs.

Interesting: predicting the spread of lung cancer using an algorithm similar to Google’s PageRank. “The study is part of a relatively new movement to involve physical sciences in oncology research. Mathematics probability models that interpret data from specific patient populations offer a new alternative to the established approach of relying on broader clinical trends to predict where, and how fast, cancer will spread.”

More Google: Phil Bradley goes to Google, gets six results on a page, and goes off.

Even MORE Google: Visually has a new tool that shows your Google Analytics data as an infographic.

LinkedIn has a new search engine.

TIME kicks in on its 140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2013. Hey, there’s Glenn! Good morning, Internet…

The Library of Congress has announced a new free resource – an e-book called “Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving”. Useful for you genealogists out there.

QUILTERS IN ARIZONA! (I know there are at least a few quilters who read ResearchBuzz) — The Arizona Quilters Hall of Fame needs quilts and quilt information for its online database.

The Monday Note (which I have not read before but that’s changing right now) has a thoughtful breakdown on Marissa Mayer’s edict of no work from home. I didn’t agree with that policy (I thought she should have just identified the slackers and fired them) but this article may have changed my mind. Very interesting.

Phil Bradley takes a quick look at Zoom, a freemium Web conferencing service.

Google has announced Google Capture for Hangouts.

More Google: it has apparently officially discontinued the Blocked Sites feature. Wow.

Do you miss Instagram pix in your Twitter feeds? Now you can get them back with a Chrome extension.

Heh: this site lets you fake like you’re on Wikipedia. Good morning, Internet…