Hey! Using Twitter to get unemployment data. “LSA Economics Professor Matthew Shapiro has found a new way to harvest employment information from tweets and hashtags faster and more accurately than the government’s official reports….There were times when Shapiro’s numbers matched the reports, and there were times when they didn’t. When they differed, Shapiro’s numbers were more accurate than the government’s.”

Twitter will now remove images of deceased individuals at the request of their family. BUT: “… the micro-messaging service said it will consider public interest factors such as the newsworthiness of the content while reviewing such media removal requests and may not be able to honor every request.”

Google System has some stupid Google Search tricks.

The state of Pennsylvania has launched Pennsylvania Learns on iTunes U (PRESS RELEASE). “Pennsylvania Learns on iTunes U brings state standards-aligned resources to the world’s largest online catalog of free educational content that helps educators create courses, including lectures, assignments, books, quizzes and syllabi, and offer them to millions of iOS users.”

Genealogists, there has been a major update to the 1861 Census of Canada Database. “Following the release of the 1861 Census of Canada database in 2013, a number of missing records and misplaced images were reported by Library and Archives Canada clients and staff. We corrected over 133,000 entries!”

The FDA has launched an API for accessing its database of medical device reports. “These products are used by millions of Americans, and they are essential, well-performing tools of modern healthcare, but occasionally they present a safety issue due to risks not identified in prior studies, a malfunction, a problem with manufacturing, or misuse. These incidents are collected in a publicly available FDA database called MAUDE – short for Manufacturer and User Facility Device Experience. As part of the openFDA project, there is now an Application Programming Interface (API) for this dataset, which provides a way for software to interact directly with the data.” The reports number in the thousands and go back to the 1990s. Good afternoon, Internet…

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