NEW RESOURCES

The city of Aspen, Colorado is getting a new online archive of photographs. “When Mary Eshbaugh Hayes died earlier this year, the beloved Aspen journalist, author, photographer, and figure around town left behind a legacy that includes more than 65,000 photographs documenting Aspen’s history over six decades. The entire collection was donated to the Aspen Historical Society, and the first 1,000 pictures will be available to view online starting Monday.”

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission has has launched a new database. “The digitised records cover British, Irish and Commonwealth casualties from the Second World War, together with records for most other nationals commemorated at CWGC sites: this includes the records for German soldiers. The release of the CWGC’s Second World War records follows the successful release of the First World War archive in August 2014.”

In development: a digital archive of LGBTQ oral histories. “[Elspeth] Brown, an associate professor at UTM, is director of The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, a multi-year research project that will create the largest collection of LGBTQ+ oral histories in North America. Known as the Collaboratory, the project explores ‘the histories of trans people, queer women, gay men and lesbians in the U.S. and Canada through the creation of a virtual research meeting place.’ Based at U of T, the project is partnered with Toronto’s Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, University of Toronto Libraries and a several community-based archives across North America. Over five years, the Collaboratory will digitize and transcribe existing oral history collections, and create new collections of trans-related materials. It will also develop a digital ‘oral history hub’ of resources, along with a library guide to aid research in the CLGA’s large collection of trans history materials.”

USEFUL STUFF

From SteamFeed: The best social media management tools in 2015. I had only heard of one of these!

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Google has apparently completely removed 8chan from its search results. “Google appears to have taken an unprecedented step in filtering its search results by banning an entire domain—and adding a warning about ‘suspected child abuse content’ to a search for the domain itself. Ars Technica has been unable to determine exactly when the change went into effect, but Imgur posts as early as this Wednesday pointed to a Google-wide ban of the imageboard site 8chan.”

More Google: it wants to help people manage their diabetes. “In Google’s continued expansion into the realm of healthcare, the Internet giant has now announced a new partnership with glucose monitoring company Dexcom to develop a wearable glucose monitor. Whereas current monitors tend to be clunky and costly, both companies seem confident that their newfound alignment will bring a much needed revolution to diabetes patients looking to keep tabs on their blood sugar levels.”

VR has gone to being a constant background murmur to a constant chatter on my RSS feeds. If you’re trying to get an overview, check out this headset roundup from Digital Trends. “Unfortunately, the limits of computer processing power and memory have relegated proper VR devices to military and government use. There have been attempts to make VR devices for the consumer market, but they have all been received poorly. Some true believers always remained, however, and now 2016 seems to poised be the Year of VR. The big names in the industry have all slated their devices for release in the upcoming year, and consumers will have a great selection to choose from when the virtual headsets finally hit shelves. Below are some of our favorites, along with their specs and features. Virtual worlds never looked so inviting.”

Jason Scott, on whom I am getting a bit of a nerdcrush, is trying to save tens of thousands of manuals. He could use some help – some actual physical help – if you’re in the Baltimore area.

Hey! The Taj Mahal is on Twitter.

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

There’s been yet another malvertising attack. “Millions of people visiting weather.com, drudgereport.com, wunderground.com, and other popular websites were exposed to attacks that can surreptitiously hijack their computers, thanks to maliciously manipulated ads that exploit vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash and other browsing software, researchers said. The malvertising campaign worked by inserting malicious code into ads distributed by AdSpirit.de, a network that delivers ads to Drudge, Wunderground, and other third-party websites, according to a post published Thursday by researchers from security firm Malwarebytes.” Y’all, please turn Flash off or use NoScript.

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Nature has published the results of a survey on open access publishing. “A survey of 22,000 academic researchers by Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and Palgrave Macmillan has found that a decreasing number of authors are concerned about perceptions of the quality of open access publications. In 2014, 40% of scientists who had not published open access in the last three years said ‘I am concerned about perceptions of the quality of OA publications.’ But this year, only 27% said they were concerned. In the humanities, business and social sciences (HSS), the drop was more marked; from 54% in 2014 to 41% in 2015. Nonetheless, concerns about perceptions of the quality of OA publications is still the leading factor in authors choosing not to publish OA.”

It’s not as entertaining as Deep Dream, but Google is training its AI to detect pedestrians. Quickly. “We present a new real-time approach to object detection that exploits the efficiency of cascade classifiers with the accuracy of deep neural networks. Deep networks have been shown to excel at classification tasks, and their ability to operate on raw pixel input without the need to design special features is very appealing. However, deep nets are notoriously slow at inference time. In this paper, we propose an approach that cascades deep nets and fast features, that is both extremely fast and extremely accurate.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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