CNET: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube to livestream Ariana Grande benefit. “Social media is going to be all over Ariana Grande’s sold-out benefit concert to aid the Manchester, England, bombing victims. Three of the biggest sites — Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — will each be livestreaming Grande’s ‘One Love Manchester’ concert on Sunday. The event will be shown on the pop star’s Facebook page, Twitter account and YouTube channel.”

NEW RESOURCES

UC San Diego: UC San Diego Launches Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology. “The Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology envisions serving as the central research hub and institutional platform for students, faculty, and other researchers working on understanding the relationship between people and the sea, as well as climate and environments worldwide. The center plans to share its discoveries through a state-of-the-art database and website, publications and peer-reviewed studies, press releases, and possibly through future exhibits at Birch Aquarium at Scripps.”

Phys.org: Crystalline structures database provides recipes for non-expert ‘chefs’ cooking up new materials. “In response to popular demand, materials scientists at Duke University have resurrected an online cookbook of crystalline structures that started when the World Wide Web was Netscape Navigator and HTML 1.0. In 1995, Michael Mehl, then a scientist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, began collecting, cataloguing and sharing information about crystalline structures on a basic website for colleagues. Researchers needed a reference catalogue to guide their efforts because crystals form hundreds of different structures in nature. Chemists use crystals as handy building blocks for new materials because of their rigid, ordered molecular shapes, which help determine a material’s properties.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Digital Trends: This Social Media Platform Is Dedicated Entirely to Gif-like Animated Stills. “Plotagraph’s social platform is designed to help artists and photographers exhibit and share their work. Unlike a GIF, which is created from a video, Plotagraph creates partially animated photos by starting with only a single photo — the end result is similar, but the process is faster, developers claim. On the social platform, the animated still will auto-play and auto-loop across all devices, making it the first social platform dedicated exclusively to animated, GIF-like photos.”

Search Engine Journal: Yandex Opens Up Content Distribution Platform “Yandex Zen”. “Search engine Yandex has launched a platform for content creation and distribution, which it calls Yandex Zen. Yandex Zen is an AI-powered and personally targeted content feed which goes out to millions of users worldwide. The platform is open to anyone from large media companies to ordinary bloggers.”

USEFUL STUFF

Noupe: Page Weight: Free Web App Checks Your Website For Image Obesity. “Big images slow down your website’s buildup on the visitor’s device. That’s logical. Nonetheless, a lot of page operators don’t think about this circumstance at all. The free tool Page Weight helps you diagnose and remove graphic obesity.”

Haven’t linked to Larry Ferlazzo in a while but this seems appropriate: New Resources For Teaching & Learning About The Reality Of Climate Change. “Not matter what President Trump says or does, most teachers, of course, will continue to teach the facts of climate change. Here are some new additions to the massive The Best Sites To Learn About Climate Change list…”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Paste Magazine: How the Trump-Russia Data Machine Games Google to Fool Americans. “I’m going to show you one specific weapon in this war that’s being used against you and me and the United States right now: Google. There are other information weapons, such as bots and fake news sites, but other stories have those pretty well covered. But before we get started, though, two things to keep in mind: First, most of us don’t even know we’re in this war yet. You don’t know when you’ve been wounded, when you’ve been killed. And that’s the whole point: You’re not supposed to.” More political than I usually include, but makes a lot of good points.

New York Times: Dissecting Marissa Mayer’s $900,000-a-Week Yahoo Paycheck. “When a withered Yahoo is absorbed by Verizon Communications in the next week or so, it will be the end of an era for one of the pioneering names of the internet age. It will also conclude the remarkable five-year run of Yahoo’s chief executive, Marissa Mayer, who was paid nearly a quarter of a billion dollars — a generous sum even by Silicon Valley’s lofty standards — while presiding over the company’s continued decline.”

TechCrunch: Lyft finally releases a diversity report. “Here are some high-level stats. Lyft is 63 percent white, 19 percent Asian, 6 percent black and 7 percent Latinx. Uber, on the other hand, is 49.8 percent white, 30.9 percent Asian, 8.8 percent black and 5.6 percent Hispanic. So, yes, Lyft is whiter than Uber, but Lyft employs more people who identify as female than Uber, with 42 percent of Lyft’s staff identifying as female. At Uber, women make up 36.1 percent of its workforce.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Courthouse News: USDA Ducks Demand to Put Animal-Abuse Records Online. “A federal judge will not force the government to post animal-welfare compliance records online, finding public interest does not trump the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s duty to protect private individual information. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge William Orrick III denied the Animal Legal Defense Fund’s motion for a preliminary injunction that would have forced the USDA to make documents previously removed from several animal-welfare government databases available for public inspection.” Boo!

The Next Web: Amazon Web Services users are carelessly leaking tons of sensitive data. “Personal credentials, proprietary source code, confidential employee contracts, even human genome sequences – these are just a few examples of sensitive data picked up by a security firm looking into a feature of Amazon’s Web Services.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!