NEW RESOURCES

PR Newswire: Jerrick Unveils The Omni Archive: Entire Collection of Iconic Sci-Fi Magazine Now Available Online (PRESS RELEASE). “Through The Omni Archive, all 200 issues of the published magazines are available for viewing and purchase on Amazon. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the nonprofit organization Museum of Science Fiction (MOSF), the world’s first comprehensive science fiction museum in Washington, D.C. This is the first time the collection has been available for digital download in high-resolution.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

ProPublica: Introducing the Vox-ProPublica Video Fellowship. “….that’s what we’re here to announce: the Vox-ProPublica Video Fellowship. It’s a yearlong position for a video producer, who will be embedded in Vox’s team, producing work fueled by ProPublica’s reporting. We figure everyone wins: Vox will get to dig into ProPublica’s investigations. ProPublica will get to learn about social video from the best in the business. And most importantly, you — our readers — will get great visual stories treated with creativity, curiosity and care.” Vox is a national treasure. I discovered it via YouTube and promptly subscribed. If you want a sample story (genealogists, you’ll love this) check out the Vox video on the work that goes into colorizing old photos.

Google Blog: Keeping your company data safe with new security updates to Gmail. “Keeping company data secure is priority one, and that starts with protecting the tools that your employees use every day. We’re constantly adding security features to help businesses stay ahead of potential threats, and are excited to announce new security features for Gmail customers, including early phishing detection using machine learning, click-time warnings for malicious links, unintended external reply warnings and built-in defenses against new threats.”

USEFUL STUFF

Echoes from the Vault: Practice Makes Perfect! New Tools for Reading Old Handwriting. “The ReadMe! resource incorporates digital images of key manuscripts held in the University Library. These have been carefully chosen to provide good examples of characteristic styles of handwriting from the medieval to the early modern periods. Short extracts are made available along with model transcriptions. Students enter their own transcriptions one line at a time. Clicking the MarkMe! button indicates the presence of mistakes. Anything that is flagged in red needs to be checked again. Students can amend their transcriptions and click MarkMe! as many times as they wish. When satisfied (or defeated!), they can click the ShowMe! button to reveal the correct transcription. This means that by using the resource students are able to get extra practice and instant feedback: in effect they can mark and correct their own work.” Anybody can play with this online tool.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Peel Art Gallery: Why Don’t Archivists Digitize Everything?. “In this post we’ll share some of the behind-the-scenes realities of digitizing and uploading rare materials. We hope this boosts awareness about some important facets of document digitization and sharing. One is the vast army of largely anonymous labourers out there whose work makes these valuable resources available. Another is the existence of the original records behind the images, which archivists continue to steward. We also hope that people who are informed about digitization will advocate for archives in the opportunities and challenges they face.”

The Next Web: Why does Google think most happy families are white?. “A Google Images search for ‘happy family’ reveals a significant bias for white, two-parent homes. At the time of writing, 81 of the top 100 results feature white families and just one contains a single parent.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Naked Security: Chrome bug that lets sites secretly record you ‘not a flaw’, insists Google. “Remember last year’s Google Chrome bug that gave pirates a way to steal streaming movies? Well, we’re ready for our closeup, Mr DeMille! This time, we’re potentially the stars of hackers’ movies: there’s a Google Chrome ‘bug’ (depending on who you ask) that allows sites to surreptitiously record audio and visual, all without an indicator light.”

The Guardian: Parents lose appeal over access to dead girl’s Facebook account. “The parents of a dead 15-year-old who appealed to Facebook to allow them access to her account to see if she was being bullied before her death have lost their claim in court. Berlin’s court of appeal ruled on Wednesday that the parents of the teenager, who died in 2012 after falling in front of an underground train, have no claim to access her details or chat history.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Monash University: Google map data to locate best hospitals for patients with stroke. “A world-first study at Monash University has used Google map data to locate the hospitals to which patients with stroke should be transported for urgent and highly specialised treatment.” If you read my recent article Why Aren’t We Talking About Google Maps? you’ll understand why this doesn’t fill me with delight.

Bowdoin College: Morality on Twitter: Collaborative Project Analyzes 1.2m Teacher Posts. “A pioneering research project, involving education and computer science faculty, has now processed more than 1.2 million teacher tweets in an effort to get the true measure of what America’s educators are saying about their jobs.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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