TWEAKS & UPDATES

The New Orleans Museum of Art has joined the Google Cultural Institute. “For now, there are 71 works of art from NOMA featured on Google’s portal. There are plans to add more. In all, the museum has about 40,000 works of art. The museum houses one of the most important, and eclectic, fine arts collections in the South.”

Twitter has open-sourced its tool, Heron. “Heron is a proven, production-ready, real-time stream processing engine, which has been powering all of Twitter’s real-time analytics for over two years. Prior to Heron, we used Apache Storm, which we open sourced in 2011. Heron features a wide array of architectural improvements and is backward compatible with the Storm ecosystem for seamless adoption.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Delete Old Gmail Messages in Bulk Using Filters

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Kickstarter Corner! The Minnesota Center for Book Arts is trying to raise money for a rubber stamp archive. “By uniting the extensive private collections of Scott Helmes and William “Picasso” Gaglione under one roof, the H/G Archive is one of the largest repositories of rubber stamps and stamp-related materials in the world. Comprised of hundreds of commercial and one-of-a-kind boxed sets and over 70,000 individual stamps spanning a period of 120 years, the H/G Archive is both comprehensive and incredibly diverse. In addition to physical stamps, the collection includes original stamp art, artists’ books, limited edition publications, journals, catalogs, reference materials, correspondence art, assemblings, design specifications, posters, and production materials.”

Web annotation has been in and out of fashion for several years. Looks like it’s in fashion again. “Annotation allows critics to add line-by-line comments to webpages in a corrective ‘layer’ that doesn’t change the original content — but can certainly change minds. Last July, after Climate Feedback’s volunteer scientists shredded a particularly egregious Telegraph climate story, the paper revised the offending text. (The editors did, however, leave an inaccurate headline intact.)”

An article in Variety rips a strip of Marissa Mayer and her tenure at Yahoo. “Marissa Mayer has sat behind the wheel at Yahoo for nearly four years. She has had the luxury of running one of the world’s most recognized internet brands, with a surging digital ad market, a cooperative board, a truckload of cash and 1 billion monthly visitors. And still she has failed to turn things around at the beleaguered company.” This article also shows the cover of Variety, which I find – what’s a word that means you’re not quite offended, but you think something’s in annoyingly poor taste?

YouTube will be covering E3 again this year. “Coverage begins on Sunday, June 12, with early press conferences from EA and Bethesda. Stay tuned on YouTube after the press conferences because you won’t want to miss post-coverage from our friends at Rooster Teeth – who will be streaming from the conference throughout the week.”

Alrighty then: Facebook and Microsoft are teaming up to lay a trans-Atlantic cable. “The cable, called ‘MAREA’ after the Spanish word for ‘tide,’ will be capable of 160 terabits per second of bandwidth and will stretch more than 4,100 miles of ocean in a submarine cable system. The two companies have hired Telxius, the infrastructure company owned by global communications giant Telefónica, to manage MAREA and expand network hubs from Europe to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Construction is slated to begin in August of this year with a goal of October 2017 to complete the cable.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Google has prevailed in the Google/Oracle lawsuit. “Google won a jury verdict that kills Oracle Corp.’s claim to a US$9 billion slice of the search giant’s Android phone business. Oracle contended that Google needed a license to use its Java programming language to develop Android, the operating system in 80 per cent of the world’s mobile devices. Jurors in San Francisco federal court on Thursday rejected that argument and concluded Google made fair use of the code under copyright law.”

There are concerns that that Amazon Echo and Apple’s Siri violate US privacy laws designed to protect children. “An investigation by the Guardian has found that despite Amazon marketing the Echo to families with young children, the device is likely to contravene the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), set up to regulate the collection and use of personal information from anyone younger than 13. Along with Google, Apple and others promoting voice-activated artificial intelligence systems to young children, the company could now face multimillion-dollar fines.”An investigation by the Guardian has found that despite Amazon marketing the Echo to families with young children, the device is likely to contravene the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), set up to regulate the collection and use of personal information from anyone younger than 13. Along with Google, Apple and others promoting voice-activated artificial intelligence systems to young children, the company could now face multimillion-dollar fines.”

Microsoft wants you to stop using lame passwords. “No matter how many times we tell you to change your passwords and make it anything but your birthday, “123456,” or “password,” many still aren’t taking the efforts to make their accounts more secure. So Microsoft is actively doing something about it by banning weak passwords entirely. The team calls it ‘dynamically banned,’ which means that if your account uses a password that appears in the most-used/stolen password list, Microsoft will force you to create a more complex one instead.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Looks like the EU is pushing hard to make scientific research open access. “EU research ministers meeting in Brussels on Friday are expected to endorse a move to abandon the traditional journal subscription model and embrace freely-available scientific research by 2020. According to a draft text seen by Science|Business, the ministers will, ‘Welcome open access to scientific publications as the option by default for publishing the results of publicly-funded research,’ and call, ‘To remove financial and legal barriers, and to take the necessary steps for successful implementation in all scientific domains.'” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. 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!