NEW RESOURCES

The Project Apollo Archive has added over 8,000 high-resolution images to Flickr. “The collection includes original scans from the Hasselblad cameras the astronauts used to document their missions, including some of the most iconic space photos in history. What’s perhaps more exciting are the thousands of other photos that document minutia from the missions, including hundreds of photos of different aspects of the moon.” Even if you don’t want to dive into the collection, visit this blog post. Great photos.

12,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant records spanning 1966-1979 are now available online. “Over these two years and some odd months, we keyed grant data from thousands of edge-notched McBee cards into a development database, scanned the cards and ran optical character recognition (OCR) software, reconciled funding amounts, and wrote scripts to ingest and integrate data into the NEH’s electronic Grants Management System. And, as of September 2015, all the award records are open to search via the Funded Project Query Form and as datasets on Data.gov. We’re so excited to share this institutional history, especially as the NEH celebrates its 50th anniversary September 29, 2015.”

Now available: an online archive devoted to disasters and humanitarian crises across all history. “Currently focused on disasters in China’s past, as we expand our scope we invite contributions from experts on the subject of disasters, broadly defined, in all regions and periods of history. As we develop, we also aim to serve as a forum of collaborative work and data-sharing for researchers from around the world.”

USEFUL STUFF

Handy! Sideplayer for Chrome lets you watch YouTube videos in a popup.

More extensions: TechCrunch has a briefwriteup on GoogleGIFs. This extension animates GIFs in Google image search results.

Teachers! The National Science Foundation has a great roundup of “citizen science” projects where participants can help count birds, identify plankton, measure precipitation, and more.

Banjo Discovery is being offered to journalists for free. “Since launching, Banjo has mapped the earth, recording what each location looks like on social media on a usual day, and built a technology that can alert users to any changes in this activity, such as a flurry of posts about a breaking news event.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Google/Alphabet has dropped “Do no evil,” in favor of “Do the right thing,”, and equally-meaningless slogan as it’s completely subjective. “Do the right thing” according to what? US law enforcement’s desire to gather cell phone data with little oversight? The UN-stated position of encryption as a human right? The people who think Twitter harrassment and spam is free speech? The EU court rulings which state their court rulings should apply to search results all over the world? Drop the slogans, Googlebet. There’s no point.

Edward Snowden joined Twitter and immediately got bodyslammed by notifications. “Snowden, who pulled in around one million followers in not much time at all, soon found that he was overwhelmed by the attention and returned to Twitter to complain. His complaint was that all this attention had loaded him with some 45GB of notifications, which might show on his communications bills, particularly the part that concerns data.”

Google has officially become Alphabet. Google still exists as a subsidary, so I’ll keep calling Google Google. “The company announced its plans for a new corporate structure back in August. Google itself will continue to exist under the leadership of CEO Sundar Pichai, while Alphabet serves as “a collection of companies” led by CEO Larry Page.”

Fun with goofing around: someone managed to own the Google.com domain name… for one whole minute. Good afternoon, Internet…

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

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