NEW RESOURCES

A collection of radical/activist posters are now available online. “We are excited to share with everyone these Labadie Collection posters. Acquired over the past 100 years, they range in topics from anarchism (our strongest collecting area) to civil liberties, anti-colonialism, anti-war/pacifism, feminism, labor, youth and student protest, ecology, Occupy, and more. Due to their format, until now, we have only been able to provide very limited access. Our hope is that they will get more use now that everyone can view them.” There are over 2200 posters in the collection, looks like. A glance finds some that are interesting, some that are artistically wonderful, and some that could be found offensive.

Magazine African Business now has a digital archive available. “The best selling pan-African business magazine, African Business, published by IC Publications in London, has today launched its extensive digital archive. 33 years, 375 issues, and over 40,000 pages of the monthly magazine are now fully accessible and searchable, on Exact Editions, as well as the iOS and Android apps.”

The Inuvialuit Cultural Resource Centre is getting a digital archive. “The Inuvialuit Cultural Resource Centre is having its collections digitized and uploaded online thanks to a University of Alberta research project. When the project is complete, Inuvialuit audio recordings, documentaries and texts will be available on the internet.” The Inuvialuit are an Inuit people who live in arctic Canada, and any people who have a specific game to try to make each other laugh (mak) sound great to me.

Low-income families who rely on schools to help feed their children now have some help in the summer months. A new Web site lets families find summer meal resources. You can enter a zip code and get a map along with a table of results; click on the table and you’ll get a variety of information on the resource, including hours of operation, phone number, and meal types served.

The state of Delaware has launched a new online database of commercial and industrial properties available. “ZoomProspector provides real estate, demographic and industry data to help businesses and site selection professionals select locations in Delaware. In addition to having access to an interactive map that provides easy access to a comprehensive database of available properties around Delaware, selectors and potential investors will also have the ability to view information on Delaware’s labor market, infrastructure and more.”

The UCLA Film and Television Archive have launched a digital archive featuring resources from the LGBT show “In the Life”. “Created by John Scagliotti in 1992, ‘In the Life’ began as a variety-type show, but quickly evolved into a newsmagazine format, becoming an award-winning and respected source for LGBT journalism at a time when lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people were often invisible in media. Produced by In The Life Media, the series was the first — and remains the only — LGBT newsmagazine broadcast on public TV. “In the Life” ran in more than 200 markets around the country; its final episode aired in December 2012. The archive has 15 seasons of the show available online now. All 21 seasons — along with outtakes, interviews and other significant video content —will be available this fall.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

WordPress 4.3 beta 1 is now available. Lots of changes to this one. I like the password updates.

USEFUL STUFF

Ancestry is giving free access to records relevant to the original 13 US colonies. Free access ends Sunday.

Oh, this sounds like a great idea! Microsoft is going to launch a Minecraft education portal for teachers. “When it goes live, education.minecraft.net will provide teachers around the world with a forum to share ideas on how the video game can be used as part of lessons….The company says primary schools in Seattle are already teaching basic maths skills by calculating perimeter, area and volume in Minecraft, while middle schools students are learning about various religions by recreating sites in the game.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Oh, ugh. Google’s photo app made a really, really horrible mistake. “Google says it is ‘appalled’ that its new Photos app mistakenly labelled a black couple as being ‘gorillas’. Its product automatically tags uploaded pictures using its own artificial intelligence software.” This didn’t come up in testing so it could be fixed before release? Really?

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Interesting paper from Wei Wei and three other researchers (Wei Wei is getting the credit because I found it on his site at CMU) – The Fragility of Twitter Social Networks Against Suspended Users. “Social media is rapidly becoming one of the mediums of choice for understanding the cultural pulse of a region; i.e., for identifying what the population is concerned with and what kind of help is needed in a crisis. To assess this cultural pulse it is critical to have an accurate assessment of who is saying what in social media. However, social media is also the home of malicious users engaged in disruptive, disingenuous, and potentially illegal activity. A range of users, both human and non-human, carry out such social cyber-attacks. We ask, to what extent does the presence or absence of such users influence our ability to assess the cultural pulse of a region?”

You remember that mention I made last week of Google’s research that let a neural network make trippy art? Google’s open sourced the tool. “A small group of Google software engineers have open sourced a new tool that can take an image and create an artistic spin on it using deep neural networks…. To use the tool, people will also need to set up NumPy, SciPy, PIL, IPython, or a scientific python distribution such as Anaconda or Canopy.” Good morning, Internet…

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