NEW RESOURCES

A new browser extension is designed to help medical students contribute to Wikipedia. “Built by DocGraph with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), Batea will improve clinical Wikipedia articles by understanding how well they are working for a large group of clinically sophisticated users (especially medical students). By combining their browsing patterns, users will be able to better describe how well Wikipedia is disseminating clinical information as a whole.”

The city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has launched a Web site for tracking property violations. “For years, Pittsburgh building inspectors filed violation notices on paper systems, which meant it often took weeks for the notices to be issued and tracked. Starting this year PLI began building an online database to track violations in real-time…It lists all citations issued since October 15 of this year.”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Google’s natural language search is getting smarter. “Google is saying their search engine is getting better at understanding our natural language searches by specifically better handling superlatives, times and more complicated questions.”

Hate the heart? Looks like Twitter might be testing multi-emoji reactions for its service. I would definitely love to have a way to distinguish between the things I like, the things I intend to look at later, the things I’m “thumb-up”‘ing as part of a conversation, etc…

USEFUL STUFF

Larry Ferlazzo has updated his “best of” tools list for making online timelines.

DearMYRTLE has an overview of the changes at Google+. Check out the rest of her blog if you’re into genealogy.

How-To Geek: How to watch local video files on your Chromecast. “Google’s Chromecast works well for streaming videos from YouTube, Netflix, and other online services. But there isn’t an obvious way to stream local video files from your computer to your TV via the Chromecast. VLC still hasn’t received its long-promised Chromecast support, but there are other solutions you can use. All these options require the Chrome browser with the Google Cast extension installed.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Free Music Archive is holding a fundraiser. It wants to do something really wacky: hire a developer for a year. The FMA is great; if you can spare a few bucks please think about it.

Hmm. Is Yahoo preventing people who use ad blockers from accessing Yahoo Mail? If Yahoo feels it needs to do this to protect revenue, fine, but it needs to be more up-front and communicative about what it’s doing. Doing it this way is just torching user goodwill, one thing Yahoo cannot afford to do.

A couple of buckets are used in a YouTube video to explain just how fast Google Fiber is. When I first got on the Internet I had a 2400 baud modem and I liked it. Get off my lawn.

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Victims of the Patreon hack are being threatened with extortion. “In the wee hours of the morning scammers took to the Internet to demand payment in the form of Bitcoin in exchange for keeping your private Patreon data — including tax ID, tax forms, SSN, DOB, and credit card details — off the Web.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Study half of all natural history specimens are mislabeled? “Specifically, researchers analyzed African ginger specimens from museums in 21 countries and found that 58 percent were mislabeled. Prior studies have shown that a similar number of insects have been misidentified by harried taxonomists.” Good morning, Internet…

I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!