TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Oklahoma Historical Society has updated its online Oklahoma encyclopedia of history and culture. “Nearly 1,000 of 2,466 original encyclopedia articles have been updated, and several hundred more will be prepared and added in the future, [Bob] Blackburn said. ”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Google has hired a new CFO – Ruth Porat.

The Wall Street Journal has an eye-widening article about how much money and time Google spends on Washington. “Last year, Google spent $16.8 million on lobbyists, more than any other company except for Comcast, according to lobbying disclosures. The 2014 total by Google is more than triple the company’s lobbying spending in 2010, the year before the FTC antitrust probe began, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Google has about 100 individual lobbyists at 20 lobbying firms.”

More Google: it is warning about unauthorized TLS certificates. “The bogus transport layer security certificates are trusted by all major operating systems and browsers, although a fall-back mechanism known as public key pinning prevented the Chrome and Firefox browsers from accepting those that vouched for the authenticity of Google properties, Google security engineer Adam Langley wrote in a blog post published Monday. The certificates were issued by Egypt-based MCS Holdings, an intermediate certificate authority that operates under the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). The Chinese domain registrar and certificate authority, in turn, is included in root stores for virtually all OSes and browsers.”

Yahoo is asking Firefox users to switch back to its search engine. “Yahoo is touting the message that Firefox switched from Google to Yahoo has their default search partner in November so all Firefox users should also consider making the switch as well.”

Harvard, Ohio State, the University of British Columbia, and 10 University of California institutions are getting involved in a project to develop a financial model for open access. “‘Pay It Forward: Investigating a Sustainable Model of Open Access Article Processing Charges for Large North American Research Institutions’ is a yearlong effort to study the implications of new funding models for scholarly communications, particularly the use of article processing charges, and determine their sustainability for research universities in the United States and Canada. The project partnership includes three major research libraries (Harvard University, Ohio State University and the University of British Columbia) as well as the 10 University of California campuses. The project will create a detailed, flexible, and publicly available financial model to help university administrators and librarians develop open access policies and strategies.”

Artifacts destroyed in Mosul will be rebuilt in 3-D. “Two weeks after the sacking of the 300 year-old Mosul Museum by a group of ISIS extremists went viral on Youtube, researchers from the ITN-DCH, IAPP and 4D-CH-WORLD projects launched Project MOSUL to virtually restore damaged artefacts and make them accessible from virtual museums…. To reach this objective, the team is planning to use 4D-CH-WORLD’s technology to reconstruct and model Mosul artefacts virtually from crowd-sourced images available online. 4D-CH-World has spent the past two years designing what it calls the ‘first worldwide fully automated 4D reconstruction system capable of handling large image galleries in the wild.'”

Harvard Working Knowledge has an article on the Tate Museums and its digitial marketing/social media strategy. The article is interesting enough by itself, but if you want the whole 26-page HBS case study, it’ll run you $8.95.

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Pew Research: local news is hard to find on Twitter. (Pew pew pew pew pew!) Good morning, Internet…

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