NEW RESOURCES

A new set of digitized records show police activity in Dublin, Ireland, between 1905-1918. “The records cover some of Dublin’s major historical events, including the 1913 Lockout, the 1916 Rising and its aftermath. Over 30,000 people were arrested during this period and these details are all contained in the records.”

The Division of Workers’ Compensation (DWC) (California) has released a new search tool for Independent Medical Review (IMR) decisions. (That link is a PDF.) “Over 300,000 IMR cases have been decided since the medical dispute resolution process was implemented on January 1, 2013. Following a determination by a physician reviewer, information for each case is posted to the DWC website. The public can use the new tool to search for decisions by case number, date of injury, specialty of reviewer, and/or category of treatment request.”

The National Library of Medicine has launched a new Learning Resources Database. “These materials include videos, tutorials, and handouts on products such as PubMed, ClinicalTrials.gov, Unified Medical Language System, and many more. Now you can find resources using one interface rather than searching different areas of the NLM Web site. An API is also available to auto-populate NLM learning resources on your Web site. The database currently holds all of the resources previously listed on the former Distance Education Resources Web page. ”

USEFUL STUFF

Sean Hackett is building a database of results from MMA (mixed martial arts) fights. And, lucky for us, he’s writing about how he’s doing it. Read the posts from the bottom up. The first one is “Building a large database of MMA fight results I: scraping with rvest” (Rvest is a simple Web scraper for R.)

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

I learned a new term today: data exhaust. “Big data is now a familiar term in most of the business world, and companies large and small are scrambling to take advantage of it. Data exhaust, on the other hand, is less widely known, and in some ways it’s an evil twin brother. Here are five things you should understand about data exhaust’s pros and cons.” I wrote an article about something similar – something like 25 years ago – only I called it industrial editorship. It was the idea that you generate knowledge of your industry as a byproduct of your participation, and you could do something with that knowledge.

A UK publisher’s Facebook page was deleted after it posted criticisms of the Turkish government. But Facebook says it wasn’t involved. “Zed Books, an independent publisher founded in 1976, found its Facebook page deleted outright on Tuesday, without any warning or notification. It said its attempts to contact Facebook for an official statement on why its page was removed had gone unanswered, and that it had been given no timeframe for recovering it. After the Guardian contacted Facebook over the issue, Facebook got in touch with Zed Books, and told the Guardian: ‘Facebook has not taken Zed Books page down. We are in contact with them to help understand what has happened and to resolve the situation.'” The last time I deleted a Facebook page, I was told that it wouldn’t be deleted for 14 days (I think) in case I changed my mind. This is very odd.

Wha? Warren Buffet is bidding for Yahoo? “Either Yahoo has passed that test to warrant Buffett’s participation, or [Dan] Gilbert and the other consortium members have made Buffett a financial offer he can’t refuse, as was the case when Goldman gave him a sweet deal for financing in the depths of the financial crisis. Buffett eventually made over $3 billion on that rescue operation.”

Are Tor and Twitter going to team up? “Following the highly successful ‘unlikely alliance’ between Facebook and Tor, privacy advocates at the Tor Project are now engaged in discussions to improve working relations with Twitter, a 330-million-user strong network that is criticized for blocking out and hassling Tor users from around the world.”

From Recode: Google Fiber is the most audacious part of the whole Alphabet. “Googlers won’t say this out loud, but they despise the cable industry. They find it inert, predatory and, worst, anti-innovation. So Google wants to replace it. And unlike the other moonshots now housed under Google’s umbrella company, Alphabet, Fiber is a project that could succeed in the near future. Google Fiber is now up and running in five markets (it added Nashville last month) and has plans under way for 17 more. Expect that pace to quicken.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Uh-oh. The free utility to unlock CryptXXX ransomware doesn’t work anymore. “For the past month, people infected with the CryptXXX ransomware had a way to recover their files without paying the hefty $500 fee to obtain the decryption key. On Tuesday, that reprieve came to an end.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

A thesis from Byron Boots at the University of Montana: Sentiment Expression on Twitter Regarding the Middle East. ” In this research, I am looking at scholarly works, journalism sources, and other reports to learn more about some of the ways Twitter has been used as it relates to the Middle East and better establish context for my data analysis. This information helps guide me in performing realtime sentiment analysis – or opinion mining – on Twitter data using open-source sentiment dictionaries with machine learning algorithms to provide highly accurate analysis of emotional response as it relates to the Middle East.” The thesis is only 14 pages long and I feel like he barely scraped the surface with this analytical research. However, Mr. Boots does go over the tools he used to get the tweets and perform an analysis, so if you have any interest in Twitter mining/analysis this is worth a read.

Editorial in the International Business Times: Facebook has destroyed the open Web. “For me, as someone who spent six years in prison at a time when being online was a serious and intellectual activity, it is heart-breaking to see how Facebook has changed the internet into little more than a portal for entertainment. Mark Zuckerberg killed the open web and all the bridges it had created in order to make money. But when he, with an innocent face, starts warning the world about walls, divisions and intolerance, it feels like a dark Orwellian nightmare. The open web could have been a remedy at a time when closed borders rule. But Mark Zuckerberg destroyed it.” Good morning, Internet…

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