NEW RESOURCES

Know Louisiana: LSM Prepares to Publish Colonial Documents Collection Online. “In a few months, the Louisiana State Museum (LSM) will complete the digitization and online publication of its Colonial Documents Collection, a massive project that will exponentially increase access to this rich archive for researchers of every stripe, from high school students to amateur genealogists to academic historians. The digitization marks the most recent phase of a series of efforts stretching back more than a hundred years to make it easier for researchers to navigate this enormous collection of criminal and civil court cases, commercial transactions, successions, wills, and other legal documents dating back to 1714. Global access to these 220,000 pages, handwritten in French and Spanish, will open up the archives as never before to those who study Louisiana and its inhabitants.”

The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation has created a digital archive for some of the works of Eknath Easwaran. “The Library is an easy-to-use platform offering rich video and audio talks previously unavailable to our worldwide audience. In these talks, Easwaran is speaking to his close students about the teachings of the mystics, spiritual living, and his own eight-point program of passage meditation. The talks have been curated to cover Easwaran’s signature themes across all the different decades of his teaching and new content is published every two weeks.” The Library is free. Unfortunately, it does not appear that subtitles are available.

Duke University: Kenan’s Human Rights Center unveils database to track collaborative initiatives on business and human rights. “The Duke Human Rights Center at the Kenan Institute for Ethics has helped launch a new database that tracks multi-stakeholder initiatives, voluntary initiatives that involve some form of collaboration between governments, NGOs, and private companies, aimed at improving businesses’ treatment of, and respect for, human rights. The goal of the project is to increase public understanding of an emerging source of international standards for responsible business and government conduct.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

IFTTT has added new resources to its Data Access Project. “Coming out of our work on Applets for activism, we started speaking with the team at Equal Rights Advocates. When we embarked on the Data Access Project, we realized it was the perfect opportunity to work closely with ERA to build out a service, and bring more non-profits to IFTTT. Here’s an in-depth look at these groups, and why we’re excited to have them on the platform.”

ABC News: Facebook now deleting 66K posts a week in anti-hate campaign. “Facebook said Tuesday that it deleted about 66,000 posts a week in the last two months as the social media giant cracks down on what it deems to be hate speech. The company said in a blog post that deleting posts can ‘feel like censorship,’ but that it is working on explaining its process better and improving its enforcement of hate speech.”

USEFUL STUFF

BetaNews: Save Gmail emails to PDF or ZIP with a click. “Save emails to PDF is a Chrome extension which enables saving any Gmail email to PDF in a couple of clicks. Download options include saving individual emails to separate PDFs, merging all selected PDFs into one PDF, or saving conversations to CSV or Excel, apparently (the Excel option just saved to PDF for us).”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Guardian: Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?. “In 2011, Claudio Aspesi, a senior investment analyst at Bernstein Research in London, made a bet that the dominant firm in one of the most lucrative industries in the world was headed for a crash. Reed-Elsevier, a multinational publishing giant with annual revenues exceeding £6bn, was an investor’s darling. It was one of the few publishers that had successfully managed the transition to the internet, and a recent company report was predicting yet another year of growth. Aspesi, though, had reason to believe that that prediction – along with those of every other major financial analyst – was wrong.”

YLE: Finland to adopt age limit for social media users from 2018. “Finnish authorities will begin to introduce local rules to ensure compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which takes effect from May 25, 2018. The change will see the introduction of a national age limit for the use of social media services. However officials have not yet decided on the age threshold for setting up a social media account.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Next Web: Massive ransomware attack is causing chaos in airports, banks and more worldwide. “A massive ransomware attack – dubbed Petya – is causing havoc at airports, banks and many other institutions across Europe. It remains unclear who is behind the attack, but Moscow-based security firm Group-IB told Reuters it appears to be a coordinated effort simultaneously targeting victims in Russia and Ukraine. The exact extent of the raid is yet to be determined, but some speculate it could be bigger than WannaCry.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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