NEW RESOURCES

The state of South Dakota has had railroad images added to its archives. “The collection emphasizes railroad depots and features images dating between the 1900s and the 1970s.” There were over 600 images added.

The state of Nevada has launched a judicial history database. “The Supreme Court’s Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) has published an online judicial history of all elected judges in Nevada since before statehood. The resource can be found at http://nvcourts.gov/AOC/JudicialHistory/. The searchable database contains information from The Political History of Nevada, published by the Secretary of State. It also contains information compiled by the AOC.”

California consumers have a new tool to compare healthcare costs. “A first of its kind in California, California Healthcare Compare allows consumers to compare hospital and medical group quality in the areas of maternity care, hip and knee replacement, back pain, colon cancer screening, and diabetes to help consumers make informed decisions about where to seek care. The site also reveals estimated regional costs for more than 100 different medical procedures or conditions ranging from appendicitis to prostate cancer, illustrating dramatic price differences depending on where you seek care. To enhance consumers’ knowledge of the healthcare system, Consumer Reports provides expert tips and advice on how to navigate the healthcare system.”

There is now a digital archive to accompany a book about the ethics of suicide. “Margaret Pabst Battin, distinguished professor of philosophy and medical ethics at the University of Utah has spent almost 40 years researching, collecting and organizing historical sources on suicide, examining every side of these issues. Her new book, ‘The Ethics of Suicide: Historical Sources,’ published by the Oxford University Press with an accompanying digital archive hosted by the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library, provides a diverse range of thinking about suicide throughout history, representing a full range of cultures and traditions.”

USEFUL STUFF

Unfortunately this knowledge is getting more and more useful: 6 Ways to Tell If a Viral Story is a Hoax.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Atlantic has a really good article on why non-transparent algorithms really freak me the heck out. “These are the mysteries of the algorithms that rule the web. And the weird thing is, they aren’t just inscrutable to the people clicking and scrolling around the Internet. Even the engineers who develop algorithms can’t tell you exactly how they work. And it’s going to get more convoluted before it gets clearer. In fact, for a few reasons, it probably won’t get clearer ever.”

From Google: a beginner’s guide to deep neural networks. 6-minute video. There will also be an AMA with two people from the video this Friday, September 25.

The Daily Sabah has an article about Turkey’s Farabi Digital Library. “Seen as a pilot scheme for Turkey, the IRCICA Farabi Digital Library is Turkey’s first web-based computational library and searches for written, printed, visual and audio materials, which then transfers them onto an electronic platform following an optical character recognition (OCR) process. The resources are then converted into a readable and emendable format. Designed in a way to be used in other libraries, researchers from all over Turkey can access necessary materials online.”

Facebook is being accused of spying on Belgian citizens “like the NSA”. “In opening arguments in a closely watched case being brought against the social network company, Frederic Debussere, representing the Belgian privacy commission (BPC), referred to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about surreptitious mass surveillance by the spy agency.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

The Facebook Dislike button is here! … as a big ol’ scam. Naked Security has the details.

Oh look, WHOEVER WOULD HAVE EXPECTED IT, an security patch for Adobe Flash. 23 flaws fixed. Patch patch patch.

France to Google: Why, yes, you DO have to remove those search results globally. “Google’s informal appeal against a French order to apply the so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ to all of its global Internet services and domains, not just those in Europe, has been rejected. The president of the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), France’s data protection authority, gave a number of reasons for the rejection, including the fact that European orders to de-list information from search results could be easily circumvented if links were still available on Google’s other domains.” Good morning, Internet…

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