NEW RESOURCES

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has launched MedPix, a medical image database. “Over the past 16 years, MedPix has amassed an impressive collection of over 53,000 images from over 13,000 cases. The MedPix collection categorizes and classifies the image and patient data for each of several subsets of image database applications (e.g. radiology, pathology, ophthalmology, etc.). The content material is both high-quality and high-yield and includes both common and rare conditions. ”

The New York Times has created a Slack bot for the 2016 elections. “Want more election coverage right in your company’s Slack? On Friday, The New York Times rolled out NYT Election Bot, which anyone can add to their Slack channel to receive “live results and updates on the 2016 elections from The New York Times.”

The Wyoming State Historical Society is launching an online archive of oral histories. “The database will be a catalog of Wyoming’s oral histories, categorized by criteria such as historical events, as well as where to find the recordings. Project Director Barbara Bogart spent over a year tracking down the stories from the state’s museums, private collections and libraries.”

The Internet Archive has started a museum of old computer viruses. Don’t worry, though: “To ensure visitor safety, all viruses have been neutered by removing any destructive routines contained within. All that’s left are some semi-amusing DOS-based computer graphics with a slightly cheeky edge.” Oh dear. I think I remember some of these…

TWEAKS & UPDATES

LinkedIn is getting rid of its ad network. “Last year LinkedIn followed the example of other tech platforms with lots of user data, like Google and Facebook, and started letting advertisers use that data to target their ads to people outside of LinkedIn. Twelve months later the work-centric social network is shutting down that part of its ad business.”

Looks like Periscope might be getting some updates. “As big Periscope users here at Phandroid, we get excited whenever we hear about new features that could soon make their way to the service. Take Periscope co-founder and CEO Kayvon Beykpour who, when asked about 2 new features currently in testing by beta users, revealed private broadcasts are already in the works.”

Apparently Yahoo is scaling down Flickr, and now I am very worried about Flickr Commons. The Commons isn’t nearly the busy place it used to be, but there are enough institutional collections on it that it would be a huge loss. “To be clear, Yahoo is *not* shutting down Flickr, but it has decided to scale it down. In other words, Flickr will be alive, but Yahoo has decided to reduce its investment in the online photo sharing service. Flickr will soon be operated with minimal overhead, and resources and funds meant for Flickr might be allocated to some other venture within Yahoo’s umbrella.”

USEFUL STUFF

From Lifehacker Australia: The Best Tips for Finding Cheap Airfare with Google Flights. As you might imagine I review a lot of “tips” articles. I bypass the ones that are thin and minimally-researched, and include only most substantive. This one is especially good.

Alan Levine is on a roll! He’s written a great look at old-school social bookmarking. And one of the things I love about Alan’s blog is that the comments add even more to his post.

Platter of Gold has a roundup of services to convert PDFs to high-quality images.

Larry Ferlazzo has a short list of links about this year’s Super Bowl commercials . (I’m sure the list will get longer.)

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Twitter says it has shut down over 125,000 terrorist- or terrorism- related accounts since mid-2015. “We have increased the size of the teams that review reports, reducing our response time significantly. We also look into other accounts similar to those reported and leverage proprietary spam-fighting tools to surface other potentially violating accounts for review by our agents.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Google’s DeepMind AI gets to play Go, mess with pictures, and now it’s navigating mazes. Sounds like a fun job! “The AI’s greatest challenge came from a 3D maze game called Labyrinth, a test bed for DeepMind’s tech that resembles Doom without the shooting (see video at top). The system is rewarded for finding apples and portals, the latter of which teleport it elsewhere in the maze, and has to score as high as possible in 60 seconds.” Good morning, Internet…

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