NEW RESOURCES

From the Global Investigative Journalism Network: Drilling Down: A Quick Guide to Free and Inexpensive Data Tools. A lightly-annotated link list; lots to explore here.

Digg now has a TV mode. I do not use Digg for anything but Digg Reader (which is fantastic), but this sounds interesting. “Digg TV (currently in beta) is a full-screen video viewing experience that lets you sit, relax and peruse the site’s curated videos. If watching only the top videos on the site isn’t enough for you, you can choose from a plethora of categories including Food, Art, Technology, News, Originals, Booze and more. So many more.”

University of North Carolina Archaeologists and Librarians have created an online catalog of (mostly) North Carolina artifacts. “Search the North Carolina Archaeological Collection is the result of a collaboration between the Labs and UNC’s University Library. Librarians working with the RLA converted previously internal records into a fully searchable online guide. Each record includes information about the object in question—what it is, where and when it was found, and where RLA staff should look to retrieve it.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Play Music is increasing its free personal cloud storage to 50,000 songs. Yow.

Facebook is updating its suicide prevention/intervention tools. “Working with Forefront and other mental health experts, Facebook enhanced its suite of tools to support suicidal people and tell those who see and report suicidal posts on Facebook how they can help. When someone sees a post that suggests its author might be considering suicide, they can click on a dropdown menu and report the post to Facebook.”

Apparently Yo is turning into an update aggregator. “But today Yo launches what Arbel says was the plan all along, a way to subscribe to photos and links but no words from sources you might not care enough about to download a whole separate app. The Yo Store is free, and offers alerts from 150 services including BuzzFeed, NBA, Coinbase, TechCrunch, MTV, and weird-looking cat Lil Bub.” Somebody do something like this for university libraries…

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Google is planning new headquarters in Mountain View, CA, but there are concerns.

Apparently YouTube made $4 billion dollars last year and exactly $0 in profit. “To put that into perspective, Facebook – a company that continues to work its way into the video market – generated over $12 billion in revenue last year. Its 1.3 billion users helped turn a profit of almost $3 billion.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Pinterest is expected to have 50 million users by next year. I still don’t get Pinterest.

Wow! Using crowdsourcing to help with speech therapy. “Listeners were asked to rate recordings of 100 words containing the ‘r’ sound, collected from children with trouble pronouncing the sound and working to correct it in speech therapy. Twenty-five experienced listeners and 153 AMT [Amazon Mechanical Turk] listeners scored the ‘r’ sounds as correct or incorrect. Data from experienced listeners were collected over a period of three months, while data gathering using AMT took a mere 23 hours. The researchers found that when responses were aggregated, there was a very high level of overall agreement. When items were classified as correct or incorrect based on the majority vote across all listeners in a group, the AMT group and the experienced listener group were in agreement on all but seven of 100 items.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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