NEW RESOURCES

In development: a tool to track commercial fishing trawlers worldwide. “Oceana, an international conservation organisation, together with Google and SkyTruth, a nonprofit group that uses aerial and satellite images to track changes in the landscape, are due to launch the Global Fishing Tracker within weeks. The public, non-governmental organisations and local authorities will be able to use it to monitor coastlines and marine conservation areas, follow individual boats in near real-time and track what boats of a particular flag are doing.”

Do you love horror movies? Here ya go: a database of jump scares. “Where’s The Jump? does exactly what it says on the tin: consisting of a fairly cohesive catalogue of major horror movies and all the jump scares hiding within, including a listing of each individual moment and the time in the movie in which it occurs. Then, there’s an additional star rating to let people know the exact intensity and frequency of said jump scares.”

Coming soon: a database of decisions from the HM Courts and Tribunal Service. “It will include judgments from England, Wales and Scotland and will initially only cover new judgments.”

Al Jazeera now has an English Facebook bot. “The idea behind the bot is simple, in a nutshell, we deliver the right news at the right time by allowing users to choose the type of news they are interested in. Users can decide how often they want to receive breaking news articles, when to receive them, and when to stop receiving them. From the beginning we decided to integrate Facebook’s Instant Articles into the bot in order to keep it modular.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Trends has gotten some updates. “Last week, Google Trends announced a refresh to its site, in addition to the launch of a new hub for Olympic trends. According to a Google spokesperson, the Google Trends refresh came with a few new tools, including the ability to compare search trends by geographic location and view historical data by day.”

Twitter continues to struggle with gaining users. “In its latest forecast of US Twitter usage, eMarketer has significantly downgraded its projections amid nearly stagnant growth reported by the company in Q2. By the end of this year, 52.2 million people in the US will access their Twitter accounts at least once a month. That’s a 2.0% increase over last year. ”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: Funny Ways to Automate Facebook Posts With IFTTT. Some creative thoughts here. “Have your Facebooks posts become so infrequent that your friends are wondering whether you’ve moved to Mars? Do you want to appear more active on the social network, without actually taking the time to write new posts?You’ve come to the right place. We’ve gathered some of best IFTTT recipes that post to your Facebook account automatically. All of these are practical. Some can even become hysterical.”

Are you having trouble with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update? Microsoft has some more ideas for a fix.

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Oracle is crying foul on its trial with Google. “Oracle attorney Annette Hurst said that the launch of Google Play on Chrome OS, which happened in the middle of the trial, showed that Google was trying to break into the market for Java SE on desktops. In her view, that move dramatically changes the amount of market harm that Oracle experienced, and the evidence should have been shared with the jury.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Clickbait is loathed everywhere, but some of its characteristics may be useful – like in the titles of academic papers. “According to a recent study, journal articles whose titles contain ‘clickbait-y’ characteristics are shared more widely. Analysing over 2000 titles from articles published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2013 and 2014, researcher Gwilym Lockwood from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, discovered that positive framing and more interesting phrasing lead to more attention online.”

Research: What are the health risks of having a different ‘Facebook self’? “People may express their true self more easily on Facebook than in person, and the more one’s ‘Facebook self’ differs from their true self, the greater their stress level and the less socially connected they tend to be, according to a new study published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking website.”

Medium: Bots are Better Without Conversation. “It has been four months since we launched the Kik Bot Shop and Facebook opened its bot platform for Messenger. It’s been about the same time since the hype around bots was at its peak, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicting that bots would be as big as apps. Since then, the hype has cooled, with some people now wondering why bots suck and politely asking not to be exposed to them. At Kik, we remain bullish on bots, but we’ve noticed the same thing everyone else has: so far, there has been no killer bot. ” Good morning, Internet…

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