NEW RESOURCES

Huh: a city in Australia is starting a database of crappy buskers. “LOCAL residents have responded to the news that Lismore City Council will be enforcing tougher restrictions on buskers in an attempt to rid street performers who are too loud, repetitive or downright offensive. It was revealed yesterday that, heeding submissions from frustrated CBD business owners, a bad busker database will be kept by council, and if a busker has too many complaints against them, their license will not be renewed.”

A new tool is designed to show how much clinical trial data isn’t published. “The results for nearly half of all clinical trials conducted by big drug makers during the last decade have not been published, and one company — Ranbaxy Laboratories — has not published findings for any of the nearly three dozen trials conducted in the past 10 years, according to a new online tool.”

Interesting: there’s now a subReddit for newly-discovered fish species. From the page: “A place to post newly discovered fish species, taxonomic changes and official species names.”

New-to-me: an online museum of beer tap handles. And aren’t they beautiful! I don’t drink beer. Maybe someone has a collection of iced tea handles. Probably not. “Tap handles are the most powerful piece of marketing available to brewers at the point of purchase, and the market has never been more crowded. According to the Brewers Association, between 2014 and 2015 alone, the number of regional craft breweries in the U.S. increased by about 32%. Great tap handles can help beers find new fans, while mediocre handles can sentence good beers to the echelon of un-drunk ales.”

M. Finkel & Daughter will publish a digital archive of needlepoint / sampler catalogs. “This fall M. Finkel & Daughter will present the 50th edition of its semiannual catalog Samplings. By the end of the year, needlework collectors and scholars will be able to scroll through the previous 49 catalogs online free of charge. The archives, which will include images and information on over 1600 samplers and silk embroideries, will be ‘useful for reference and research for years to come,’ the Philadelphia firm said.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Nuremberg Trials Project has a new Web site. “The new website replaces our previous online presence dating from 2003 and offers through its new design deep, faceted document and photograph search and full-text keyword transcript search. Document page images are viewable at a variety of zoom levels, and the transcripts are rendered as both plain text and scanned page images. All document and transcript page images and transcript full text are downloadable and printable.”

Congress.gov has gotten even more updates! “With today’s update we have added additional items that users have requested. We frequently get questions on how to contact your member of Congress. There is now a prominent section for contacting your member. Another addition is the Recent section circled below. The first link for Yesterday in Congress was a favorite on THOMAS that users missed. Occasionally, we receive requests for a function that is already available on Congress.gov. There is now a featured Search Tip to share and highlight such items. You can also subscribe to search tips from the RSS and Email Alerts page.”

USEFUL STUFF

In anticipation of the election, the New York Times is dropping its paywall for 72 hours. “The New York Times is inviting readers to take advantage of its reporting, analysis and commentary from the lead-up through the aftermath of the 2016 election. Readers will have unlimited access to NYTimes.com for 72 hours from 12:01 a.m. ET on Monday, November 7 until 11:59 p.m. ET on Wednesday, November 9.”

In fact, if you plan to follow the election obsessively on Tuesdsay, you’re going to have all kinds of options. “How do you plan on tracking the election results as they come in Tuesday night? (Anxiously? Obsessively? Dripping with sweat?) Guardian U.S. hopes you’ll check your phone’s lock screen: Following tests of push notifications around the Brexit decision and during the first U.S. presidential debate, The Guardian U.S. Mobile Innovation Lab will send real-time updates to app users’ lock screens on November 8.”

Definitely need to try this service that was written about in Lifehacker:
Turn Your Saved Articles Into Instant Podcasts Automatically “…let’s turn to a wonderful little tool called Narro that can turn your heaped reading list into podcasts. These personal podcasts can then help you get through your reading list faster. Send your bookmarked articles to this cross-platform app and fill up those in-between minutes.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Another day, another ridiculous (probably automated) attempt to abuse the DMCA. Happily Google wasn’t having it. “Another day, another example of copyright being a tool for censorship. MarkMonitor is one of the largest companies out there in the ‘IP protection’ business — and they also have a decently long history of filing bogus DMCA notices. And in one of its recent ones… they targeted a Techdirt news story. You see, three years ago, our own Tim Cushing wrote a little story about how Adobe launched its Creative Cloud subscription offering and had the DRM on it cracked within 24 hours.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Phys.org: Algorithm has the word on U.S. election. “A University of Queensland computer scientist who harvests social media to accurately predict election results says he can confidently call next week’s United States election.” Good morning, Internet…

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