NEW RESOURCES

Now available online: scrapbooks for baseball player Babe Ruth. “Twenty-five volumes of 10 different Babe Ruth Scrapbooks in the collection are available online for the first time. These one-of-a-kind scrapbooks, created by Ruth’s agent Christy Walsh, provide a unique look at Ruth’s career through letters, stories and photographs, and give a glimpse at the authentic Babe Ruth.” More content will be added over time.

The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum recently put a bunch of stuff online. “The Cooper Hewitt just completed a massive digitization project, in which it made 200,000 items—92 percent of the museum’s entire collection—available online. A major curatorial feat, the project took a year and a half, dozens of staffers, and digitization experts from The Netherlands to complete. At times, the team was digitizing 600 objects a day, and adding them to the online collection within 48 hours.”

A new online streaming service promises all Olympics, all the time. “…the free site already has a marathon’s worth of viewing, including on-demand video features on Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt’s triple gold medal-winning performance and 5,000-meters runners Nikki Hamblin of New Zealand and Abbey D’Agostino of the USA, who both fell and helped each other up to finish.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Second prize, TWO weeks in Philadelphia: Adobe is bringing back Flash on Linux. For some reason. “Four years ago, Adobe made a decision to stop updating the Flash Player package (NPAPI) on Linux, aside from delivering security patches. It has made an about turn on this decision in the last week and has said that it will keep it in sync with the modern release branch going forward. It is currently testing the latest build in a beta capacity.”

Facebook is messing around with its timeline again. “The feature essentially collects a few recent posts from your friends and places them in a dedicated section at the top of your news feed, where you can easily see how many comments each entry has received.”

USEFUL STUFF

Neato: the Hubble Space Telescope has a Twitter account. “Each tweet lists which scientist (or group of scientists) is using the Hubble with which specific instrument, and where the telescope is pointing and why, whether for observing or just calibrating.”

All you old-schoolers! Fun stuff from MakeUseOf:
How to Create an RSS Feed for Any YouTube Channel.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Google wants its self-driving cars to keep an eye out for the police. “As per a new patent discovered by the PatentYogi team, Google looks to be in the process of making a police vehicle detection system for its autonomous vehicles. After all, a car that’s smart enough to get you from Point A to Point B without any help from its human driver should also be smart enough to avoid those flashing lights.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

CMU: Friends help friends on Facebook feel better. “Personal interactions on Facebook can have a major impact on a person’s feelings of well-being and satisfaction with life just as much as getting married or having a baby, a new study by Carnegie Mellon University and Facebook researchers shows.” Having Facebook researchers involved weirds it a bit. So does the fact that Google was one of the funders.

From Vice: Scientists Are Worried About ‘Peer Review by Algorithm’. “On August 23, a Dutch statistician shook up the usually slow world of scientific publishing by giving it a glimpse of an automated open data future. Chris Hartgerink, a researcher at Tilburg University’s Meta-Research Group, used a program called Statcheck to scan over 50,000 published scientific papers for statistical errors and posted the results to the science discussion board PubPeer.”

TechCrunch: Why the advertising industry needs to embrace AdBlock. “I am now part of the problem. The advertising industry is wringing its hands and shaking its fist at the use and growth of ad-block technology, but I am not above temptation. I simply installed it. And much like the many million people who have done so already, I love it and probably won’t ever fully abandon it.”

OTHER STUFF I THINK IS COOL

Hey, it’s Google Street View, only cat style. “Aware of many people’s penchant for pussycats, Hiroshima’s tourist office last year happened upon the genius idea of launching a “Cat Street View” service, showing the local town of Onimichi from the low-down perspective of one of its furry inhabitants. Presumably the online tool was a hit, as it’s just posted similar Street View-style content for a second location in the neighboring town of Takehara, Rocket News reported.” 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!