NEW RESOURCES

Sure, people get credit for publishing scientific research papers — but what about when they help develop scientific research software? Depsy wants to make sure that everybody gets love for their work. “We made Depsy to solve a problem: in modern science, research software is often as important as traditional research papers–but it’s not treated that way when it comes to funding and tenure. There, the traditional publish-or-perish, show-me-the-Impact-Factor system still rules.”

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) is opening up its performance shares database. “By logging onto the PROs’ ACE Database … music users and the public will be able to access what percentage of fractional shares to each copyrighted musical composition is ‘controlled by ASCAP.'”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Libraries and Archives Canada has updated its naturalization records database. “Library and Archives Canada is pleased to announce the release of a new version of the online database Naturalization Records, 1915-1951. The nominal index has been extended with the addition of more than 68,000 names and now covers the years from 1915 to 1944, inclusively.”

It looks like Facebook Messenger is getting more-integrated photo recognition. “…Facebook Messenger‘s newest feature Photo Magic scans your newly taken photos with facial recognition, and immediately notifies you with an option to send pics to friends that are in them. The test is rolling out in Australia today on Android and later this week on iOS, before reaching other countries if people enjoy it.”

Pinterest has added a visual search tool. “If you spot something in a pinned image, like a certain piece of furniture or a cool clothing accessory, you can simply tap the new search icon in the top right corner to select the item and look up visually similar results.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Bob Ross marathon on Twitch was so successful that Twitch is making him a regular feature. “From 3 PM PST to 9:30 PM PST [on Mondays], Twitch will run one season of “The Joy of Painting.” Because there are 31 seasons, there won’t be repeats until seven months pass by. Twitch will also celebrate Bob Ross’ birthday by running an all-episodes marathon yearly on October 29th.”

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has gotten a grant to investigate the integration of newspaper content into DPLA material. “Over the course of the next year, DPLA will investigate the current state of newspaper digitization in the US. Thanks in large part to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress’s joint National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) showcased online as Chronicling America, many states in the US have digitized their historic newspapers and made them available online. A number of states, however, have made newspapers available outside of or in addition to this important program, and DPLA plans to investigate what resources it would take to potentially provide seamless discovery of the newspapers of all states and US territories, including the over 10 million pages already currently available in Chronicling America.”

VentureBeat: How brands are using Periscope. “Brand advertisers have taken notice of new livestreaming platforms like Periscope, and they are trying to use them to cut through the noise of digital marketing. This year, the digital advertising spend will approach $60 billion, so brands are increasingly challenged to get their message out to the right people.”

Apparently Barack Obama has joined Facebook. “It’s not a campaign page, or the staff-run White House page, it’s a place where Barack can just be himself and talk directly to the people, like an average guy trying to get a Home Depot discount.” Then why is the page URL https://www.facebook.com/potus/ ? Did he do that just to troll the next president?

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Yikes! More than 20,000 apps auto-root Android devices. “Lookout detected more than 20,000 samples of the trojanised adware disguised as legitimate top applications that include Facebook, Candy Crush, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp and others. Malicious actors repackage and inject malicious code into very many popular applications discovered in Google Play, then later publish them to third-party app stores. Lookout believes many of the apps are fully functional.”

A couple of the patches released in Microsoft’s latest Patch Tuesday are pretty critical. “All users running Windows Vista and later — including Windows 10 — are affected by two flaws, which could allow an attacker to install malware on an affected machine.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Research: Do tweets to scientific articles contain positive or negative sentiments? “The study is based on all articles and reviews published in 2012 in the Web of Science (WoS) linked to tweets captured by Altmetric.com until 30 June 2014 via the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) as described in Haustein, Costas, and Larivière (2015). Retweets were excluded to focus on original contributions on Twitter and tweets reduced to those from accounts with English language settings to limit the number of tweets in other languages. This resulted in as set of 487,610 tweets mentioning 192,832 papers, which was analysed with SentiStrength.” Good morning, Internet…

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