NEW RESOURCES

Latin American Herald Tribune: Epa Launches New Multimedia News Service for Europe’s Citizens and Media. “The European Pressphoto Agency (epa) launched on Saturday a new information tool targeted at European citizens and media, focusing on world news with an emphasis on events happening in Europe. Epa, which brings together nine news agencies from across Europe including Spain’s EFE, said in a statement that its new portal aimed to offer members of the public direct access to current events through the media.”

Thanks to Matt S. for bringing this to my attention, from the Smithsonian: Citizen Scientists Will Bring Zombie Astrophotos Back to Life With “Astronomy Rewind”. “A new citizen-science project will rescue tens of thousands of potentially valuable cosmic images that are mostly dead to science and bring them fully back to life. Called “Astronomy Rewind,” the effort, which launched March 22, will take photographs, radio maps, and other telescopic images that have been scanned from the pages of dusty old journals and place them in context in digital sky atlases and catalogs. Anyone will then be able to find them online and compare them with modern electronic data from ground- and space-based telescopes, making possible new studies of short- and long-term changes in the heavens.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Quartz: You’re about to help Facebook understand how your private messages make you feel. “The social-media company is now poised to add a new level of precision to their data-collecting engine: Reactions in Messenger. Facebook users will soon be able to give thumbs up, thumbs down, and a variety of other smiley-face-based reactions to individual messages, much like the reactions on public Facebook posts.”

Phandroid: Google Introduces a “Free App of the Week” section on the Play Store. “Who doesn’t love free stuff? Let alone free apps and games? Well, it seems Google knows how much we would like to have a free app or game to download every week and has introduced a new section to the Play Store.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: Are You Wrong? 5 Sites to Find Out. “The human mind is a complex beast. It draws information from various sources. Sometimes, odd things stick with us, and over time, our mind treats them as ‘facts’. Only one day, we find that it isn’t a fact at all. You’ll be surprised how often you are wrong. It’s not stupidity, gullibility, or any defect in you. Misconceptions happen, it’s a part of being human. Whether it’s the news you read, the “facts” you heard, or the things you believed in. As you grow up, you should want to challenge yourself, and figure out what you are wrong about and what you are right about. Here are a few sites to help.”

Quartz: Here are 250 Ivy League courses you can take online right now for free. “The 8 Ivy League schools are among the most prestigious colleges in the world. They include Brown, Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale, and Columbia universities, and the University of Pennsylvania…. These Ivy League schools are also highly selective and extremely hard to get into. But the good news is that all these universities now offer free online courses across multiple online course platforms.”

WIRED: How to Protect Your iCloud Account, Juuust in Case Those Hackers Aren’t Joking. “A HACKER GROUP called Turkish Crime Family says that it can access 250 million iCloud accounts, and will do so on April 7 to reset the password, locking people out of their accounts. They’ve even threatened to wipe people’s linked iPhones if Apple doesn’t pay up. And while it’s hard to tell how legitimate the threat is, their assertions make now as good a time to lock down your iCloud as ever.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Engadget: Germany wants to regulate a 24-hour livestream as a broadcaster. “You might want to think twice about running a non-stop livestream just because you can — at least in Germany, regulators will want to have a word with you. They’ve told the 24-hour let’s play channel PietSmietTV that it has to apply for a broadcasting license by April 30th if it wants to keep running.”

TorrentFreak: Google Gets More WordPress.com Takedown Requests Than WordPress Itself. “WordPress has published new data on the number of piracy takedown notices the company receives. Of all the DMCA requests copyright holders sent, roughly 40% were rejected due to inaccuracies or abuse. Most interesting, perhaps, is that Google processes more WordPress.com takedowns than WordPress itself.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TechCrunch: Stories are the new News Feed . “If the camera is the new keyboard, then the future of social media will look more like a slideshow than a Word document. So while Snapchat invented Stories, we’ll have to get used to using them everywhere. We can still praise Snapchat, or be pissed at Facebook for changing the apps we use every day, but we have to accept that this our reality now.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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