NEW RESOURCES

The University of Texas at Arlington is developing an online archive to house music from folks in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. “David Arditi, a UTA assistant professor of sociology, is developing “MusicDetour – the DFW Local Music Archive,” with three goals in mind: to house local music, develop big data that is open and available to all, and to build community…. MusicDetour will be hosted initially by UTA in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology’s Center for Theory, but Arditi said future plans involve philanthropic efforts to fund student workers both for curation and greater web development.”

Dischord Records (home of punk stalwarts like Minor Threat, Fugazi, etc) has uploaded its entire archive to Bandcamp. “Yes, every artist on the Dischord roster is now represented on its Bandcamp page, meaning that listeners can dive into the historic D.C. punk scene without needing an Apple Music or Spotify subscription…”

The country of India is getting a database of smaller businesses. “The relevant data concerning the country’s 51 million Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) will be digitised soon, according to P Uday Kumar, Director, National Small Industries Corporation (NSIC).”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Microsoft has made the “Learning Tools for OneNote” addon available to everybody. “Learning Tools for OneNote is compatible with both OneNote 2013 and OneNote 2016 with the add-in available here. Otherwise, those who already have the preview of Learning Tools for OneNote installed can simply click the update button in the Learning Tools tab from within OneNote.”

USEFUL STUFF

Ubergizmo has a roundup of reverse image search sites.

From Guiding Tech: Top 3 Apps for Live Translations with Your Smartphone Camera. I love these apps. They really do feel like magic.

Librarians/Libraries using Academic Search Complete: Karaline Wood has put up a nine-minute video on how search it effectively. The screen might look blurry, but that’s because the autoplay (at least mine) is at 360p. Shift it up to 720p and it looks great.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Vatican is refusing to release its Holocaust-era archives. “The debate over the church’s secret wartime files is not new. The Vatican is the only country in Europe that refuses to open all of its World War II archives to independent historians and researchers. The issue is more than simply an academic debate over the appropriate rules for public disclosure of historically significant documents. The church’s files are thought to contain important information about the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.”

Google, which made something over $4 billion in profit last quarter if I recall correctly, apparently is not keeping a close-enough eye on its Knowledge Graph scraping operations, or it doesn’t mind repeating that stupid thing about Sarah Jessica Parker looking like a horse. “Google, it seems, had an algorithm hiccup and managed to connect the joke to Parker — which is good — while also insulting her on the Knowledge Graph result for her name — not so good — by adding the link to the infamous blog that started the long-running joke.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Disney company Playdom has had a forum breach (PRESS RELEASE). “On July 12, 2016, unauthorized activity was detected on the playdomforums.com website, resulting in an immediate forensic investigation of the incident by Disney Consumer Products and Interactive Media (DCPI). The investigation found that an unauthorized party obtained usernames, passwords and email addresses for approximately 391,000 playdomforums.com accounts. The unauthorized party also obtained the Internet Protocol (IP) address collected during user registration on playdomforums.com. The Playdom Forum website does not collect credit card numbers or other sensitive personal information, such as Social Security numbers.”

Ooops! SwiftKey had a bit of a data leak. “According to the reports, some users have discovered that when they surfed to websites with login pages that they were offered email addresses that weren’t familiar to them. Some users even reported that they have received calls from complete strangers who found their number through SwiftKey’s predictive text. As it turns out, this was a bug and an issue with SwiftKey’s sync services.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Researchers at Yahoo have developed an abuse-detecting algorithms. “The Yahoo team used a number of conventional techniques, including looking for abusive keywords, punctuation that often seemed to accompany abusive messages, and syntactic clues as to the meaning of a sentence. But the researchers also applied a more advanced approach to automated language understanding, using a way of representing the meaning of words as vectors with many dimensions.” The technique has a success rate of about 90%, which is wow. Good morning, Internet…

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