NEW RESOURCES

Now available: a database of citizens killed by law enforcement in the last 20 months. In Kenya. “More than 122 people were shot and killed by police in Kenya over the first eight months of 2016, representing a seven per cent increase over the same period last year. This finding is contained in Deadly Force, the most comprehensive database on death from police encounters ever published in Kenya. It was compiled from media and the Independent Policing Oversight Authority (IPOA) reports as well as reference records from human rights organisations.” The database is divided into 2016-so-far and 2015.

A new site aims to collect conspiracy theories from all over the Internet. “The suspicion that the vast network of Young Men’s Christian Associations around the world is secretly controlled by the US’s intelligence agency is just one of the thousand conspiracy theories collected on a new site, the Conspiracy Blog. The site, which launched yesterday, bills itself as ‘the Wikipedia of conspiracies’ and hopes to be a repository for the unfathomably large number of such theories, many of them about the machinations of the world’s powerful.”

The Library of Congress has added the Montana Folklife Survey Collection. “The collection consists of approximately 145 sound recordings, 10,500 photographs; and 3 ½ linear feet of manuscripts that document interviews with Montanans in various occupations including ranching, sheep herding, blacksmithing, stone cutting, saddle making, and mining; various folk and traditional music occasions including fiddle and mandolin music in Forsyth….”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Search has added information from the College Scorecard. “Designed hand-in-hand with students, parents, educators, researchers, policymakers and counselors, the College Scorecard has the most comprehensive data ever published about college costs, graduation rates, employment outcomes and student debt for every college. The dataset includes nearly 2,000 elements for more than 7,000 institutions, dating back 18 years….We’re thrilled that starting today you can find college cost, graduation and earnings information from the College Scorecard directly in Google Search.”

Twitter has opened up “Moments” to everybody. “Twitter’s Moment’s feature is one of the most unique tools to be introduced to the platform in the last few years, but it’s been limited in that only the wizards at Twitter HQ and a select few partners could create them. That’s now changing. The company today opened up Moments so that anyone can make one about pretty much topic. Twitter first opened up Moments to wider selection of companies in August, and announced at the time that it would be bringing the feature to everyone soon.”

Yahoo has open-sourced its neural network solution for finding pornographic images. “Defining NSFW material is subjective and the task of identifying these images is non-trivial. Moreover, what may be objectionable in one context can be suitable in another. For this reason, the model we describe below focuses only on one type of NSFW content: pornographic images. The identification of NSFW sketches, cartoons, text, images of graphic violence, or other types of unsuitable content is not addressed with this model. To the best of our knowledge, there is no open source model or algorithm for identifying NSFW images. In the spirit of collaboration and with the hope of advancing this endeavor, we are releasing our deep learning model that will allow developers to experiment with a classifier for NSFW detection, and provide feedback to us on ways to improve the classifier.”

USEFUL STUFF

I do ResearchBuzz around my work schedule so I often find myself working very early in the morning and very late at night. The times you absolutely do not want random noises coming out of your browser. Lifehacker’s got a writeup on what looks like a decent solution if you use Chrome. “Once installed, Silent Site Sound Blocker only allows whitelisted sites to play audio. When you visit a site that tries to auto-play audio or a video, you get a pop-over asking whether you’d like to whitelist the site and play audio from it all the time, play it just this once and then ask the next time you visit, reject this once and ask the next time you visit, or blacklist the site entirely and never play audio when you visit it again.”

From Online Journalism Blog: How to: analyse your Twitter or Facebook analytics for the best days or times to post. “Twitter’s analytics service is a useful tool for journalists to understand which tweets are having the biggest impact. The dashboard at analytics.twitter.com provides a general overview under tabs like ‘tweets’ and ‘audiences’, and you can download raw data for any period then sort it in a spreadsheet to see which tweets performed best against a range of metrics. However, if you want to perform any deeper analysis, such as finding out which days are best for tweeting or which times perform best — you’ll need to get stuck in. Here’s how to do it.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

KICKSTARTER CORNER: A new Kickstarter is attempting to fund an online museum of lingerie. “Our aim is to create a website that catalogues (initially!) Karolina Laskowska’s current extensive collection of lingerie, offering detailed imagery of every garment and valuable historical contextual information. All of this will be supplemented with specially curated exhibitions, blog posts and constant new additions. In short, the closest digital thing to the experience you’d get in an actual museum, and even a bit extra!” Considering that the fundraising goal is less than $9000 US, and the project has already raised more than $3500 US with 28 days to go at this writing, it has an excellent shot. You may find this site offensive depending on how salaciously you view underwear.

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

McAfee has released its list of the most dangerous celebrities. These are not celebrities who are going to pop out and punch you; instead, they’re celebrities who can put you at risk for malware if you search for them online. “To identify the top threats, we used McAfee® WebAdvisor to browse the internet for pages related to celebrities. To do this, we paired celebrity names along with popular search terms such as ‘torrent’ or ‘HD download.’ So what did we find? This year, queen of laughter Amy Schumer tops the list — except you’ll want to avoid the malware-infected punch in this punchline. Here’s a look at this year’s top ten most dangerous celebrities…” Good afternoon, Internet…

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