Bad Weather Florida – http://researchbuzz.me/bad-weather-florida/

Bad Weather South Carolina – http://researchbuzz.me/bad-weather-south-carolina/

Bad Weather North Carolina – http://researchbuzz.me/bad-weather-north-carolina/

NEW RESOURCES

Now available, a digital archive of early handwritten recipes from Nova Scotia, Canada. “The Nova Scotia Archives has scores of them in its personal collections, and has created a digital exhibit featuring hand-written and early printed recipes, some dating as far back at the 1700s. Archives director Lois Yorke says most recipes in the What’s Cooking? Food, Drink and the Pleasures of Eating in Old-Time Nova Scotia exhibit were found in the collections of private individuals.”

The government of Hawaii has released a new digital archive for Kahoolawe. “The Hawaii government agency in charge of Kahoolawe, a former Navy bombing practice island off of Maui, has released a new online database of photos and documents illustrating the island and its archaeological artifacts.”

Now available: a database of prehistoric human teeth. “Archaeologists have created a new database from the teeth of prehistoric humans found at ancient burial sites in Britain and Ireland that tell us a lot about their climate, their diet and even how far they may have travelled. In a paper, led by Dr Maura Pellegrini from the University of Oxford, researchers say that individuals in prehistoric Britain were highly mobile.” It looks like the data are within the paper, not clear if it’s available as a separate download / standalone thing.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museums has revamped its Web site (sounds like it’s been adding new content, too.) “The site includes the Hayes’ museum’s obituary index, the ability to search through the museum’s 90,000 books, manuscripts and images of the president and his family and educational programs and resources. [Kristina] Smith said site visitors can browse through the museum’s manuscript collections online, search the diaries and letters of President Hayes and look at political cartoons from the Gilded Age.”

Google is promising the next iteration of Chrome won’t be such a memory hog. “The Chrome team working on V8, the part of the browser that runs the JavaScript programs that make websites tick, “significantly reduced the memory footprint” of websites like Imgur, Reddit, Twitter and The New York Times. The changes come in Chrome 55, due in December.” I have a 2GB Chromebox and a 4GB Chromebox. The 4GB is fine but the 2GB is getting tougher and tougher to use…

USEFUL STUFF

VERY cool! Stolen from Paul P – thanks Paul! How To Make a Map From Open Data Using a Spreadsheet. “There’s been an explosion of open data made available by all levels government, but much of it is still in a pretty raw form and can be hard to manipulate and visualize. However, Google Sheets provides some powerful data import functions that can automatically populate a spreadsheet from a data feed, and Geosheets adds mapping and geospatial functions to Google Sheets. So the two combined can allow you to make a map from open data very quickly and without downloading anything.”

Google Scholar wonks, you’ll like this: Scraping Google Scholar to write your PhD literature chapter. “This post is about a prototype ‘network’ approach to finding papers using data from Google Scholar, hopefully pointing to what could be done with more open data. I was able to use a supervised program searching on Google Scholar to extract my data, but a scalable version of this tool would require open data.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Oh argh: YouTube recently did a content takedown worthy of Facebook. “There was reason to celebrate last week: the European Parliament adopted my report to update the EU’s export control laws for goods that are used for torture and the death penalty. I uploaded a series of videos on YouTube of the debate in the Parliament… Three hours later I found a notice in my inbox, which explained that one of the video’s in this playlist had been taken down.”

Apparently Verizon wants to knock $1B off its purchase price for Yahoo after news of the hacking scandal surfaced. That’s a little over 20% the original price. “Yahoo is telling Verizon that a deal is a deal and that the telecom giant has no legal avenue to change the terms. Yahoo’s next board meeting is in two weeks but the two parties are continuing discussions.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Techdirt: Senator Ron Wyden Says White House Is Required By Law To Reveal Details Behind Yahoo Scanning. “So, one of the things in the USA Freedom Act is a provision requiring that the White House declassify any ‘novel interpretations’ of the law in ordering surveillance. This was to avoid the situations, such as under the Section 215 program, where the intelligence community reads words to mean things differently than anyone else would read them. Now, given what we’ve learned so far about the Yahoo email scanning case and the fact that it clearly goes beyond what people thought the law enabled, it seems clear that there’s some interpretation somewhere that’s ‘novel.'”

In fact, the Yahoo scanning scandal is having international repercussions. “Yahoo’s decision to scan clients’ email accounts at the behest of US authorities has prompted questions in Europe as to whether EU citizens’ data had been compromised, and could help derail a new trans-Atlantic data sharing deal.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Oh, thank goodness, because I might be doomed: Social media won’t affect your ability to concentrate: Study “New York: Frequent use of online social media does not lead to long-term problems with your ability to concentrate, says a new study. These modern communication tools do not, it seems, interfere with our primal instincts, such as long-term attitudes, time appreciation, and concentration, in the way that many critics have suggested in recent years, said the study published in the International Journal Social Media and Interactive Learning Environments.” Good morning, Internet…

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