NEW RESOURCES

Now available: a new database for finding exoplanets. “Today, a team that includes MIT and is led by the Carnegie Institution for Science has released the largest collection of observations made with a technique called radial velocity, to be used for hunting exoplanets. The huge dataset, taken over two decades by the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, is now available to the public, along with an open-source software package to process the data and an online tutorial.” I had to look up what an exoplanet is. Space.com has a good overview.

A new tool hopes to allow easier access to social sciences research. “MetaBUS… is search engine containing more than a million quantitative findings across 25 years of research and 20-plus journals related to the fields of management, including human resource management and organizational behavior, and psychology, including industrial-organizational and personality. Students and faculty using metaBUS can search over 4,000 topics that are hierarchically arranged. Broader topics, such as job performance and cognitive ability contain narrower ones, such as specific task performance and job knowledge.” I mentioned MetaBUS last May when it seemed release was imminent, but I didn’t hear anything else about it until now.

A new Web site provides information on hospitality jobs in Louisiana. “The site is free for job seekers and offers the capability to search more than 500 open positions available at any given time, upload or build their resume by creating a profile, and offers resources for job seekers to boost their candidacy with industry-based certifications.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

YouTube Kids is getting some updates. “Our Original Content team under Susanne Daniels is adding four new Original series to YouTube Red, created especially with the YouTube Kids app in mind. These new series will feature top creators: DanTDM , Joe and Cody of TheAtlanticCraft, popular tween music act L2M, and Fruit Ninja. This marks the first time YouTube Red has invested in creators who are producing original programming for family audiences. These series will debut starting in the spring. Additional shows are in development and will premiere throughout 2017.”

Flickr has turned 13. “For the next year, we’ll be connecting photographers and their work in new, interesting ways and we can’t wait for you to be a part of the journey with us. Throughout this month we’re putting a call out to the Flickr Community to create a gallery with their favorite 13 images. Tag the first photo with #Flickr13 and we’ll feature our favorites on the Flickr Blog and social media.” Most of the photographers I know who used Flickr have left. YMMV.

USEFUL STUFF

DigitalNC has created an “exhibit page” for its African-American newspaper collections. “In North Carolina, the first African American papers were religious publications. The North Carolina Christian Advocate, which appears to be the earliest, was published from 1855-1861 by the North Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, followed by the Episcopal Methodist, a shorter-lived publication produced during the Civil War by the same organization. After the Civil War, the number of African American newspapers continued to grow in North Carolina, reaching a peak during the 1880s and 1890s with more than 30 known titles beginning during that time.”

More goodies from Amit Agarwal: See the Email Sender’s Company and Logo in your Gmail Inbox. “The default layout of your Gmail inbox has the sender’s name listed in the left most column followed by the subject and the date of the message. The emails are sorted in reverse chronological order with the newest messages listed at the top. The problem with this layout is that you cannot figure out who the actual sender of a message is without actually opening the email.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

MakeUseOf: Fake News Is Exposing You to Malware!. “Fake news isn’t just spreading an alternative truth. Sites delivering fake news also serve up something more immediately dangerous (depending on who you ask): malware. Is the risk posed by fake news peddlers real? Or is the risk only as real as the fake news?”

TorrentFreak: Change.org Petitions Used For Pirate Movie Downloads. “The Change.org petition website has more than 100 million users and is used for causes big and small. However, in recent times it’s been put to a more unusual use. Pirates have been creating petitions containing links to infringing movies and people have been joining up to vote.”

Techdirt:
Oracle Files Its Opening Brief As It Tries (Again) To Overturn Google’s Fair Use Win On Java APIs. “As was widely expected, back in October, Oracle announced its appeal of Google’s big fair use win, concerning its reuse of certain Java API components in Android. If you’ve been following this (long, long, long) case, you’ll recall that Google has won twice at the district court level. The first time, Judge William Alsup correctly noted that APIs were not subject to copyright, because copyright law clearly states that copyright protection does not apply to “any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery” and an API is a process, system or method of operation. However, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), who only had jurisdiction over the case because it initially involved a patent issue, seemed unable to understand that an API is different from software and overturned the lower court’s sensible ruling.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

WIRED: How to Keep Your AI From Turning Into a Racist Monster. “As the tech industry begins to create artificial intelligence, it risks inserting racism and other prejudices into code that will make decisions for years to come. And as deep learning means that code, not humans, will write code, there’s an even greater need to root out algorithmic bias. There are four things that tech companies can do to keep their developers from unintentionally writing biased code or using biased data.”

Newswise: Wikipedia Readers Get Shortchanged by Copyrighted Material. “When Google Books digitized 40 years worth of copyrighted and out-of-copyright issues of Baseball Digest magazine, Wikipedia editors realized they had scored. Suddenly they had access to pages and pages of player information from a new source. Yet not all information could be used equally: citations to out-of-copyright issues increased 135 percent more than issues still subject to copyright restrictions.” Good morning, Internet…

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