NEW RESOURCES

DNAInfo Chicago: Is Your Favorite Restaurant Making You Sick? Site Tracks Foodborne Illness. “Dining Grades converts data from public health inspection scores into a letter grade system. Users can view restaurants and their safety records on a searchable map. Because food inspection rating systems differ across state lines, Dr. Harlan Stueven said he wanted to create a consistent rating scheme using pure, unbiased data.” Does not have all cities yet and is at this writing running a bit slowly.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES
CNET: The FAA’s drone database encounters turbulence. “Drone owners won a major victory in court Friday, when the United States Court of Appeals said the registration system may not be legal.”

USEFUL STUFF

BetaNews: New free plugin filters bot data from Google Analytics. “Google’s own bot filtering catches only a small percentage of the bot traffic that hits most sites, leading to traffic analysis data being skewed. Bot detection specialist Distil Networks is launching a free tool designed to remove the bad data created by bots.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

TVNZ: Google lends a hand to help preserve Maori culture. “Tech giant Google is lending a helping hand to East Cape tribe Te Aitanga A Hauiti by lending them some gear usually associated with Street View, so Maori can use data mapping technology as part of a special project.”

IT News Africa: Facebook invests $170m in Uganda. “Working with two local telecommunications partners, Airtel and Bandwidth & Cloud Services, Facebook is planning to lay 770 kilometres of new fibre cables in north-western Uganda by the end of 2017, potentially bringing high-speed internet access within the reach of three million Ugandans.” Please note this article appears to have been pulled from IT News Africa. More details here: https://rbfirehose.com/2017/05/20/it-news-africa-facebook-invests-170m-in-uganda/ .

The New York Times: ‘The Internet Is Broken’: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It. “‘I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,’ Mr. Williams says. ‘I was wrong about that.'”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Wired: A WannaCry Flaw Could Help Some Windows XP Victims Get Files Back. “Since the WannaCry ransomware ripped through the internet late last week, infecting hundreds of thousands of machines and locking up critical systems from health care to transportation, cryptographers have searched for a cure. Finding a flaw in WannaCry’s encryption scheme, after all, could decrypt all those systems without any ransom. Now one French researcher says he’s found at least a hint of a very limited remedy.”

This is from the beginning of May; I apparently missed it. From Healthcare IT News: Hacker: Patient data of 500,000 children stolen from pediatricians. “The patient records of about 500,000 children are up for grabs on the dark web, a hacker named Skyscraper told DataBreaches.net on Wednesday. These records contain both child and parent names, Social Security numbers, phone numbers and addresses. DataBreaches didn’t name the breached organizations but also said that another 200,000 records were stolen from elementary schools.”

Techdirt: Judge Dumps Two Lawsuits Attempting To Hold Facebook Responsible For Acts Of Terrorism. “Two lawsuits filed by victims of terrorist attacks against Facebook have been dismissed. Both suits alleged Facebook was complicit in acts of terrorism simply because it (subjectively) didn’t do enough to discourage use of the platform by alleged terrorists.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TheNextWeb: Study: Snapchat and Instagram are the worst for young people. “The study, published today and called ‘Status of Mind,’ was conducted by researchers for the Royal Society for Public Health in the UK. The researchers surveyed 1,479 British youths ages 14-24, asking them how they felt the different social media networks effected their mental health. They took in several factors such as body image, sleep deprivation, bullying, and self-identity.”

Duke University: New Tools Safeguard Census Data About Where You Live And Work. “A team led by Duke University, in collaboration with the Census Bureau, has developed new methods that enable people to learn as much as possible from Census data and other government workforce statistics for things like disaster management, policy-making and funding decisions, while guaranteeing that no one can trace the data back to your household or business.”

From Timothy de Silva at Claremont McKenna College: Is Google Search Behavior Related to Volatility? Incorporating Google Trends Data into a GARCH Model for Equity Volatility. “Intuitively, one would expect that internet search volume would contain valuable information about investor sentiment for a company. With the development of new data sources, such as Google Trends, this relationship can be more easily and objectively examined. This paper seeks to examine the relationship between a company’s stock price volatility and its Google search volume. A small cross-section of twenty companies is considered, and the goal of this paper is to demonstrate the power of Google Trends data in hope of initiating further research. Using a conventional GARCH framework for financial market volatility, an economically and statistically significant contemporaneous relationship between Google search volume and equity volatility is found.” Good morning, Internet…

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