NEW RESOURCES

Northern Ontario Business: Online database connects Indigenous skilled workers to jobs. “A national skills inventory for Indigenous workers that’s been a decade in the making is inching closer to being rolled out across Canada. Working Warriors is an online database that aims to catalogue Indigenous workers — along with their contact information, skills and certifications, experience and interests — to make it easier for them to be hired on projects across the country.”

Devex: WHO readies to launch online database tracking health worker attacks. “A new, interactive database built by the World Health Organization will soon shine a spotlight on the extent of violence against health care workers and the risks they are facing in some of the world’s toughest places to deliver aid. The online database, set to launch within the next few months, will track possible, probable and confirmed attacks in real-time, which any public user can search and sort by country or type of attack.”

Iowa State University: Easy Access to Wildlife Experts Available with Online Tool. “Wildlife is everywhere in Iowa. As farmers and landowners across the state encounter this wildlife, questions of how to manage and care for animals bubble to the surface. The wildlife program with Iowa State University Extension and Outreach has created a new application to help Iowans find local contacts to help provide answers. The online application consolidates contact information for natural resource professionals in all corners of the state.” Quickly reviewing the “Wildlife Conflict Resolution” category, it looks like this site provides both government and non-government resources. Hall’s Critter Gitters! Big Papa’s Nuisance Wildlife Control!

DigitalNC: UNC School of the Arts yearbooks are here. “Yearbooks from our partner, the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, are now up on DigitalNC. These yearbooks span the years 1972 to 2016. Located in Winston-Salem, the UNC School of the Arts (UNCSA) is an arts conservatory that is part of the University of North Carolina public university system and serves high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. These yearbooks pertain specifically to high school program at UNSCA.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Twitter lets you avoid trolls by muting new users and strangers. “When trolls barge into people’s notifications with offensive replies or user names, those legitimate users might not keep coming back to Twitter. So today the company rolled out new tools to help you silence the riff-raff. There are now options to mute notifications from newly registered accounts, people you don’t follow and people who don’t follow you.”

Google is offering some updates for Google Forms. “Google Forms makes it easy to collect information, plan events, solicit feedback, and more. Today, we’re adding new features and using machine learning to make Forms work better for your business.”

The Next Web: Google is now suggesting ‘best torrent sites’ directly in search. “As spotted by TorrentFreak, the Big G is now showing a carousel with curated torrent websites when you search for the term ‘torrent sites’ or ‘best torrent sites.’ The section features several notorious P2P hubs, including The Pirate Bay, RARBG and IsoHunt – all of which have previously been flagged for piracy.”

USEFUL STUFF

From the Internet Archive blog: How to play and play with thousands of digitized 78rpm records. “There are over 50k uploaded recordings from 78’s from users, and there are now 10’s of thousands of high-bitrate unrestored transfers of 78’s that are part of the Great 78 Project. With this many, it gets hard to find things you want to explore. Here are some techniques I do…”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

? From CNBC: Google has been paying academic researchers who write favorable papers, report says. “Google has paid researchers and academics who have worked on projects that support the company’s positions in battles with regulators, a report in The Wall Street Journal said on Tuesday. Google’s practice might not sound all that different from lobbying, but The Wall Street Journal revealed that some of the professors, including a Paul Heald from the University of Illinois, didn’t disclose Google’s payments.”

I suppose someone has to. From Techspot: The Internet Archive is collecting AOL free trial CDs. “One era’s trash is another era’s treasure. That’s perhaps the best way I can think to describe the Internet Archive’s latest collection. The non-profit digital library is in the process of collecting something that was next to impossible to avoid in the 1990s – the venerable AOL CD-ROM.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Google Blog: PAIR: the People + AI Research Initiative. “Today we’re announcing the People + AI Research initiative (PAIR) which brings together researchers across Google to study and redesign the ways people interact with AI systems. The goal of PAIR is to focus on the “human side” of AI: the relationship between users and technology, the new applications it enables, and how to make it broadly inclusive. The goal isn’t just to publish research; we’re also releasing open source tools for researchers and other experts to use.”

University of Minnesota Morris: Identifying Twitter Spam by Utilizing Random Forests. “The use of Twitter has rapidly grown since the first tweet in 2006. The number of spammers on Twitter shows a similar increase. Classifying users into spammers and non-spammers has been heavily researched, and new methods for spam detection are developing rapidly. One of these classification techniques is known as random forests. We examine three studies that employ random forests using user based features, geo-tagged features, and time dependent features. Each study showed high accuracy rates and F-measures with the exception of one model that had a test set with a more realistic proportion of spam relative to typical testing procedures. These studies suggest that random forests, in combination with unique feature selection can be used to identify spam and spammers with high accuracy but may have short- comings when applied to real world situations.” Good morning, Internet…

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