NEW RESOURCES

Apparently there are only two Jewish baseball players in the official baseball Hall of Fame. But now there’s an entire online museum dedicated to Jewish baseball players. “The Jewish Baseball Museum is a passion project for [Jeff] Aeder, 54, who says he has amassed one of the largest collections of Jewish baseball memorabilia in the country. His collection, which is showcased on the site, comprises some 2,000 objects — among them are a Ron Blomberg bat with a Star of David on the knob and a letter written by Greenberg to a friend during World War II — and approximately 2,500 pre-1990 baseball cards of Jewish players.” AND he’s a Cubs fan. So there you are.

This should be interesting: the state of Utah now has a registry for white-collar criminals. “Utah’s white-collar database is expected to grow to 230 people in the coming months. The database is also set to include those convicted of financial felonies beginning in 2006. Names generally stay on the list for 10 years for first-time offenders. Another offense adds another 10 years and third-time offenders remain on the database permanently.”

The government of India has launched a National Business Register. “Just as the National Population Register seeks to record details of every citizen, the Business Register will aim to record district-wise details of establishments engaged in production or distribution of goods or services. It will comprise 33 columns that will offer details such as the name of an enterprise, its location, activities, type of ownership, number of workers, PAN/TAN, etc.”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Google says it is now letting you save images to Google from the desktop. I tried this with two different accounts and I could not get it to work – perhaps it’s still rolling out? “For example, if your yard is in need of some spring re-planting, just go to your desktop, search for an image and tap the star to save your potential new flowers, bushes, or even swimming pools. When you’re at the store ready to start buying, you’ll be able to pull up your saved images on your phone and start building your perfect yard. ”

USEFUL STUFF

Tech.Cloud has a short writeup about an interesting proofreading tool. “The tool is called TypoVision which makes it very easy to spot editing mistakes by creating an alphabetized list of words used in the document. This sounds simple enough, but it makes a big difference. By disorienting yourself from the writing in its original form you can overcome your natural instinct to overlook typos.”

From MakeUseOf: How to create your own wiki with OneNote.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Chinese users briefly had access to Google over the weekend. “According to the South China Morning Post, bloggers started posting online that they had gained access to Google on Sunday night at 11.30pm, only to find that ‘the great firewall of China’ had once again shut it down by 1.15am.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

If you’re worried about Internet security, this’ll give you a jolt: a site called VNC Roulette that shows screenshots of unsecured desktops. Based on the languages of what I was seeing, these things are all over the world. I didn’t see anything pornographic but one screenshot showed what looked like personal information of patients at a medical practice. If you remote-access your desktop, make sure it’s secure.

Microsoft has updated its transparency report. Which now includes revenge porn stats: “In all, Microsoft says that it received 537 requests to remove revenge porn photos or videos across Bing search results, OneDrive and Xbox Live in the last six months of 2015. Of the 537 requests, the company took action on 338 of those requests.”

Facebook’s accidental activation of its “safety check” feature caused some confusion. “Several Quartz staffers in New York city received alerts, and people from around the world have mentioned the mistaken prompts on Twitter. There have been tweets from users whose listed locations include South Africa, Nepal, Canada, and the US.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Interesting: the state of American health, as told by Twitter. “The folks over at Bay Alarm Medical took a closer look at nearly 500,000 geotagged tweets to determine just what people were saying about being sick, and where in the U.S. they were saying it. When combining this crowdsourced data with information from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the team managed to come up with a broad-level overview of sickness across the country.”

From MIT Technology Review: AI Hits the Mainstream. “Today the industry selling AI software and services remains a small one. Dave Schubmehl, research director at IDC, calculates that sales for all companies selling cognitive software platforms —excluding companies like Google and Facebook, which do research for their own use—added up to $1 billion last year. He predicts that by 2020 that number will exceed $10 billion. Other than a few large players like IBM and Palantir Technologies, AI remains a market of startups: 2,600 companies, by Bloomberg’s count.” Good morning, Internet…

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