NEW RESOURCES

Raspberry Pi has launched new online training resources. “The courses will run alongside our face-to-face training offerings (Picademy, Skycademy, and Code Club Teacher Training), and are facilitated by FutureLearn, a leading platform for online educational training. This new free training supports our commitment to President Obama’s Computer Science For All initiative, and we’re particularly pleased to be able to announce it just as Computer Science Education Week is getting underway. Here’s the lowdown on what you can expect…”

I don’t know if this is new or just new-to-me, but South Korea has an online archive of stamps and posters dating to 1945. “The Archives said all stamps and public posters issued since 1945, when the nation was freed from Japanese colonization, can be searched via its website…”

A large collection of Dutch Caribbean history has gone online. “The Dutch Caribbean digital heritage project, made possible through a subsidy of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science OCW, was an extensive endeavour that involved the sorting and selecting of a whole lot of material of which some pieces were very fragile because they are very old. Project Leader Innovation and Projects of the Leiden University Dr. Saskia van Bergen mentioned a few figures in her presentation during the symposium in Leiden: 2,600 book titles, 11,000 articles, 450 magazines, 300 manuscripts were meticulously scanned by a professional company in Lisse, the Netherlands.”

USEFUL STUFF

Science Magazine: How to keep up with the scientific literature. “Few aspects of scientific work may be as crucial—and yet as easy to neglect—as reading the literature. Beginning a new research project or writing a grant application can be good opportunities for extensive literature searches, but carving out time to keep abreast of newly published papers on a regular basis is often challenging. The task is all the more daunting today, with the already vast literature continuing to grow at head-spinning speed. To help you keep track of the literature and avoid feeling too overwhelmed, Science Careers asked scientists in a diverse range of fields to discuss how they integrate searching for papers, and reading them, into their working routine.”

Chris Aldrich: How to Own & Display Your Twitter Archive on Your Website in Under 10 Minutes. “As part of my evolving IndieWeb experience of owning all of my own internet-based social data, last year I wanted a ‘quick and dirty’ method for owning and displaying all of my Twitter activity before embarking on a more comprehensive method of owning all of my past tweets in a much more comprehensive way. I expected even a quick method to be far harder than the ten minute operation it turned out to be.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

LA Times: Twitter is the new social media darling for travelers, solving problems and saving money. “When I’m in a travel bind, whether it’s before a trip or at the airport, I often use Twitter to contact the airlines. That social media outlet can lead to better service and sometimes even savings.”

From Merriam-Webster: In a Time of Uncertainty, a Divided Nation Searches for Puppies. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: puppy was our top trending word on December 1. It’s still trending now. So is the word flummadiddle.”

Vice: Deadlifts and Selfies: How Social Media Shaped the Modern Bodybuilder. “Once a niche scene that has ebbed in popularity, bodybuilding has entered the digital age, and bodybuilders—aspiring, amateur and professional—are navigating an industry where ‘success’ comes faster and is more attainable than ever before.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Bloomberg: Google DeepMind Makes AI Training Platform Publicly Available. “DeepMind is putting the entire source code for its training environment — which it previously called Labyrinth and has now renamed as DeepMind Lab — on the open-source depository GitHub, the company said Monday. Anyone will be able to download the code and customize it to help train their own artificial intelligence systems. They will also be able to create new game levels for DeepMind Lab and upload these to GitHub.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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