NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me: a database of inexpensive places to get tattoos removed. “For seven years, Mark Drevno has traversed America’s jails and prisons, talking to thousands of inmates about how to build a better life on the outside. Drevno is the CEO of Jails to Jobs, a Lafayette-based nonprofit that’s dedicated to helping those former inmates build job skills and find work. Drevno authored a how-to book that’s gained widespread praise as a template for formerly incarcerated people seeking work. But the group’s biggest hit, according to criminal justice experts, is the creation of a comprehensive database of places that offer cheap, accessible tattoo removal services.”

University of North Carolina: 100 Years of the Daily Tar Heel Now Available Freely Online. “We are very excited to announce that papers spanning the first 100 years of the Daily Tar Heel have been digitized and are now freely available online through the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. The digital collection covers the years 1893-1992. It contains 73,179 pages in 12,168 issues.”

Financial Post: ‘Massive effort’ underway to create database that will shed light on Canada’s housing market. “Last summer, as policy makers grappled with how to tackle soaring real estate prices in the Vancouver and Toronto areas, they encountered a major obstacle: there was no comprehensive database tracking all the potential variables at play, especially when it came to foreign buyers. Now, a ‘massive’ effort is underway at Statistics Canada to make sure that problem never arises again.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

From Larry Ferlazzo: Amazon Makes Its Teacher Resource-Sharing Site Public Today. “Amazon unveiled its Amazon Inspire teacher resource-sharing site about a year ago. At that time, you could request access to it (see Amazon Officially Announces Its Education Platform & Gives It A Name). Today, I received an email saying it’s now public and they want you to sign-in using your Amazon account.”

TechCrunch: Google launches Hire, a new service for helping businesses recruit. “Google today announced the launch of Hire, a new service that helps businesses more effectively manage their internal recruiting process. Hire offers businesses a cohesive applicant tracking service that’s deeply integrated with G Suite to make it easier for businesses to communicate with their candidates and track their progress through the interview process.” Makes sense after the Google Jobs thing.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Wired: Google Glass 2.0 Is A Startling Second Act. “Don’t call Heather Erickson a glasshole. Yes, that’s Google Glass on her frames. But she’s not using it to check her Facebook, dictate messages, or capture a no-hands video while riding a roller coaster. Erickson is a 30-year-old factory worker in rural Jackson, Minnesota. For her, Glass is not a hip way to hang apps in front of her eyeballs, but a tool—as much a tool as her power wrenches. It walks her through her shifts at Station 50 on the factory floor, where she builds motors for tractors.” Should have focused on industry applications to start with…

Bloomberg: Google’s Quantum Computing Push Opens New Front in Cloud Battle. “For years, Google has poured time and money into one of the most ambitious dreams of modern technology: building a working quantum computer. Now the company is thinking of ways to turn the project into a business. Alphabet Inc.’s Google has offered science labs and artificial intelligence researchers early access to its quantum machines over the internet in recent months. The goal is to spur development of tools and applications for the technology, and ultimately turn it into a faster, more powerful cloud-computing service, according to people pitched on the plan.”

Small Business Trends: Bots Are Taking Over: Fiverr Adds Subcategory Dedicated to Chatbots Development Gigs. “The attack of the bots continues as they spread their reach everywhere from data gathering, to analytics, web indexing and more, automating tasks across the internet. And now it’s easier than ever to create your own bot. Freelance marketplace Fiverr has a new subcategory dedicated to chatbots development services.” Adding this is a data point about the proliferation of chatbots, not because I think everyone should rush to Fiverr.

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Register: Dow Jones index – of customers, not prices – leaks from AWS repo. “It’s an all-too-familiar, straightforward breach: someone left a cloud repository configured to offer ‘semi-public access’, meaning ‘the sensitive personal and financial details of millions of the company’s customers’ was exposed…. The repo was an AWS S3 bucket with the wrong privacy settings: by configuring it to allow access to authenticated users, whoever set it up didn’t seem to realise they were offering access to any authenticated AWS user – not just those with Dow Jones-associated accounts).” That’s not a straightfoward breach, that’s a straightforward leak.

RESEARCH & OPINION

Quartz: There are only four types of Facebook users, researchers have found. “…a new study, published in the International Journal of Virtual Communities and Social Networking, confirms that Facebook has a Rashomon effect: various user groups interpret the experience of using it very differently. Surprisingly, however, the researchers also found they could easily categorize users into four broad types: ‘relationship builders,’ ‘window shoppers,’ ‘town criers,’ and ‘selfies.'” Not sure I agree with this, but it’s an interesting place to start when considering how people use Facebook. Good afternoon, Internet…

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