NEW RESOURCES

In development: an online database of governmental artifacts related to Pennsylvanians with disabilities. ” Local historians are creating an online database chronicling Pittsburgh’s disability history. The Western Pennsylvania Disability History and Action Consortium was created to centralize legislation, photos, videos and equipment belonging to state agencies. It’ll also provide information and a tool for advocacy groups, organizers said.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Instagram’s new business pages will get comment moderation. “Comment reels can become cesspools, especially on celebrity social media posts that get replies by the thousands. But now Instagram is letting its new business pages take out the trash with a new Comment Moderation option. It ‘Blocks comments with words or phrases often reported as offensive from appearing on your posts.'” Sounds like it’s not that customizable.

A new Twitter bot is dedicated to tweeting about “gun incidents”. “Yesterday I released a new twitter account. @USGunIncidents posts about recent gun crime in the USA. It posts very simply the town/city, state, number of people injured, number of people killed, and a link to the source (if it’s available).” It’s not clear if these are incidents where a gun was involved (like a robbery), where a gun was used to threaten but not necessarily injure (hostage situation), where a gun was fired but possibly without injury, suicides, crimes involving fake guns, etc. Having bots aggregate information on topics is useful but clear definitions would be helpful here.

Is Google going to build its own Android Wear smartwatches? “Speaking to Android Police, a reliable source has told us that Google is currently building two Android Wear devices – possibly Nexus-branded – for release some time after the latest Nexus phones are announced. One watch will be larger, sportier, and more fully-featured (LTE, GPS, heart rate), the other will be smaller and lack the aforementioned mobile data and GPS.” This is a rumor and clearly presented as such. The author of the article, David Ruddock, does some speculation on the possibility and on the smartwatch market in general.

USEFUL STUFF

Good stuff from Alice Keeler: Google Classroom: Do Not Jump In The Deep End. “Making the shift to digital is NOT about doing what you’ve always done in a digital format. Digital allows us to rethink our tasks.”

Pretty good: 10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do on Instagram. “While Instagram’s main functions continue to be easy to access and use, there are several options, tools, and third-party apps that most of us don’t even realize are out there! We’ve covered a lot of Instagram’s hidden features before, and discussed some of the best Instagram tricks, but there are still more where those came from.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Interesting: The Guardian is asking its users to help it read the Chilcot Report. “The revelations, contained in a lengthy report by government adviser John Chilcot, point to a British government that relied on faulty intelligence and was overly hawkish when there were non-military alternatives to war. But there’s a lot more detail in the report, which is 2.6 million words long. For comparison, that’s four times longer than ‘War and Peace,’ Leo Tolstoy’s mammoth novel about the French invasion of Russia.”

Google recently closed a ton of inactive AdSense accounts, but the way they went about it is causing a lot of consternation around the Web.

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

A couple of YouTubers are in trouble for regularly promoting a gambling site without disclosing that they owned it. “Until yesterday, if you were to browse the video pages of popular gaming YouTubers Trevor ‘marTn’ Martin and Tom ‘Syndicate’ Cassell, you’d have found a string of videos about the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive gambling site CSGO Lotto. These videos showed the pair gambling weapon skins on the site, which allows anyone over 13 years of age to trade their hard-earned weapon skins for actual money. They often won big, resulting in videos with titles like “HOW TO WIN $13,000 IN 5 MINUTES.”… It turns out the owners of the CSGO Lotto website are none other than Martin and Cassell.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Interesting: Do Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science speak your language? “Prior research has shown that Google Scholar has a more comprehensive coverage than Scopus or the Web of Science, especially for scholars in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Most recently, Harzing & Alakangas (2016) showed that, on average, the Web of Science had only 23% of the citations of Google Scholar for the Social Sciences and only 7% for the Humanities. For Scopus the respective figures were only slightly better at 30% and 11%. However, all of the academics in this sample were Associate or Full Professors employed at the University of Melbourne, an Anglophone university that is ranked number one in Australia and ranked 22 worldwide in the Times Higher Education ranking for the Social Sciences. Virtually all of the academics’ publications were in English.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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