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George S. Patton, Punjabi-Americans, California Open Data, More: Saturday Buzz, September 3, 2016

Hell week has turned into hell weeks. I’ll keep getting this done as I can. Love you!

NEW RESOURCES

New on the Library of Congress Web site: the diaries of George S. Patton. “The diaries, 1910-1945, digitized for this online presentation, illustrate Patton’s activities during the Mexican Punitive Expedition, World War I, and World War II. The volumes, particularly from 1942 to 1945, document Patton’s daily activities and observations and reveal his candor about himself, personally and professionally.”

Launching next month: a digital archive chronicling Punjabi-American life in California. “The Punjabi American Heritage Society in Yuba City partnered with UC Davis to collect and preserve articles, letters, photographs, diaries, speeches and video interviews to tell the stories of Punjabi-Americans and their migration to the Sacramento Valley.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

California’s Open Data Portal is now open source. “Seeking to foster a collaborative software development culture and community in California, all seven separate, agency portals have been electronically centralized and more datasets added on a range of issues: buildings, grants and contracts, recycling, water, economy and demographics, and fleet and transportation.”

Instagram is going to let you zoom.

Google wants to make Fashion Week more mobile-friendly. “Fall fashion season is here — from New York to London, Milan and Paris, the big trends are about to debut at Fashion Weeks around the world. And this year in Google Search on your mobile phone, you can see the latest styles straight from the runway, hear directly from the designers, shop your favorite looks, see the schedule of events, find related news and follow the action like you’re sitting in the front row — or even backstage.”

It looks like Google has shelved Project Ara for the time being. “Though Google has no plans to release the phone, the handset may still find itself into consumers’ hands through licensing agreements with third parties, Reuters reported, citing unidentified sources. The revelation marks an abrupt about-face for Google, which promised at its annual developers conference in May that its long-awaited modular phone would be available to developers by the end of this year.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The End of Term Web Archive needs your nominations. “For the End of Term 2016 archive, the Library of Congress, California Digital Library, University of North Texas Libraries, Internet Archive, George Washington University Libraries, Stanford University Libraries and the U.S. Government Publishing Office have joined together for a collaborative project to preserve public United States Government websites at the end of the current presidential administration ending January 20, 2017. Partners are joining together to select, collect, preserve, and make the web archives available for research use…. You can help the project immensely by nominating your favorite .gov website, other federal government websites or governmental social media account with the End of Term Nomination Tool.”

Fun stuff from The Internet Archive: Hacking Web Archives. “…it has been exciting to see — and for us to support and participate in — a number of recent efforts in the scholarly and library/archives communities to hold hackathons and datathons focused on getting web archives into the hands of research and users. The events have served to help build a collaborative framework to encourage more use, more exploration, more tools and services, and more hacking (and similar levels of the sometime-maligned-but-ever-valuable yacking) to support research use of web archives. Get the data to the people!”

One day, Twitter is going to be the subject of any studies about how not to do things as a social media platform. Here’s one of the stories which might be quoted. “Kelly Ellis is a software engineer at Medium. She’s verified on Twitter and has roughly 11,000 followers. And for the past week or so, Ellis has been the subject of relentless targeted abusive tweets from @fredcarson915. Among the barrage of 70 tweets (all of which were posted to Medium by Ellis), @fredcarson9151 tells Ellis he wishes she would be raped and calls her a ‘psychotic man hating “feminist.”‘” Twitter did not suspend the harasser’s account until after the media attention this and similar articles generated, which… well, it’s gross. Icky.

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Stanford Engineering: How will driverless cars and other applications of AI affect society? “A panel of academic and industrial thinkers has looked ahead to 2030 to forecast how advances in artificial intelligence (AI) might affect life in a typical North American city – in areas as diverse as transportation, health care and education ­– and to spur discussion about how to ensure the safe, fair and beneficial development of these rapidly emerging technologies.” The report is available as a free, 52-page PDF.

Harvard Business School Working Knowledge: The Twitter Election. “Twitter is emerging as one of the most important players in the 2016 presidential election, write John Quelch and Thales Teixeira. But does it have the power to determine which candidate will win?” This is why Twitter has such a huge responsibility to be fair to its users in terms of how they are treated on the platform – a responsibility for which I see no evidence it is taking seriously. Good morning, Internet…

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