NEW RESOURCES

Pacific Standard: Charting The Rich History Of Dyslexia Advocacy. “The History of Dyslexia, unveiled in July, is a website that aims to make the fruits of about 140 years of dyslexia research available to the public…. It’s a joint project of an interdisciplinary group of four professors at Oxford University, who specialize in history, psychology, and education policy. So far, their project features a timeline of key events, a collection of oral interviews, and an online archive containing documents, photographs, and oral histories.”

Internet Archive: Introducing Face-O-Matic, experimental Slack alert system tracking Trump & congressional leaders on TV news. “Working with Matroid, a California-based start up specializing in identifying people and objects in images and video, the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive today releases Face-O-Matic, an experimental public service that alerts users via a Slack app whenever the faces of President Donald Trump and congressional leaders appear on major TV news cable channels: CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the BBC. The alerts include hyperlinks to the actual TV news footage on the TV News Archive website, where the viewer can see the appearances in context of the entire broadcast, what comes before and what after.”

Union College: Read all about it: Concordy archives dating to 1877 now online. “When the first issue of The Concordiensis appeared on Nov. 1, 1877, its editors had a simple mission: ‘to be a genuine representative of the culture and scholarship, the manliness and enterprise of Union,’ in such a way ‘that no alumnus will be willing to forego it, both by a lively exhibit of the present doings, and by such copious and familiar information concerning graduates, that the memory of her gray old walls may be kept green in every heart loyal to his Alma Mater.’ The public can now judge whether that mission has been upheld for more than a century.” The Concordiensis is the newspaper for Union college.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

USGS: Historical Maps at Your Fingertips. “TopoView 2.1 is a modern web application built on an open source mapping platform that is free of charge. The highly interactive service provides tools and procedures that allow users to easily find historic map scans from USGS’s Historical Topographic Map Collection and even compare those with modern day maps. The new version is full of improvements and advancements based on hundreds of user comments and suggestions.”

Google Blog: Adventures abound: Explore Google Expeditions on your own. “Google Expeditions makes it possible for teachers to take their classrooms on virtual reality field trips to amazing places like the Taj Mahal or Machu Picchu. Today, we’re starting to roll out a new solo mode of Expeditions for Android, so that anybody can explore more than 600 different tours on their own. Just download the Expeditions app (coming soon for iOS), drop your phone into Cardboard and get ready for an adventure.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: How to Tell if a Photo Has Been Doctored. “Nearly every photo online has been edited in some way, whether through cropping, filtering, compressing, color-correcting, or other generally innocuous touch-ups. But a lot of people attempt to pass off doctored images as true ones, leading to hoaxes, crackpot theories, and more than one trip to Snopes for some fact-checking. You can do the world a service by helping those around you identify real photos against fake ones. Here’s how…” This is beginner level, but a useful start. Some of the comments are interesting.

Gizmodo: The Best Cloud Storage For Every Need. “Thanks to dropping storage prices, speedier internet, and slicker software, you’ve now got a plethora of choices when it comes to keeping your files in the cloud, safe from harm and ready on demand. Yet there are a lot of different services, and while they can all handle your storage needs, they are not all created equal. Some work better for photo fans, while others are a better option if you’re hoarding thousands of MP3s.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Ars Technica: N. Korean defectors show locations of mass graves using Google Earth. “A new report from the South Korea-based Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG)—a non-governmental organization that tracks human-rights abuses and crimes against humanity by the world’s most oppressive regimes—details how the organization’s researchers used Google Earth in interviews with defectors from North Korea to identify sites associated with mass killings by the North Korean regime. Google Earth imagery was used to help witnesses to killings and mass burials orient themselves and precisely point out the locations of those events.”

The Verge: Verizon admits to throttling video in apparent violation of net neutrality . “Yesterday, we reported that Verizon Wireless appeared to be throttling Netflix traffic, — and today, the company seems to have come clean. In a statement provided to Ars Technica and The Verge, Verizon implicitly admitted to capping the traffic, blaming the issue on a temporary video optimization test.” Remember, Verizon owns Yahoo now. And it owns AOL.

RESEARCH & OPINION

Lauren Weinstein: Another Google Accessibility Failure: Chrome Remote Desktop. “In most respects, CRD is excellent. Data is encrypted, and in most circumstances the data connection is peer-to-peer without going through Google servers. In some configurations, system audio is sent along with the screen image. But Chrome Remote Desktop also has a horrible, gaping accessibility problem — that has persisted and generated bug threads that in some instances now stretch back unresolved for years — that seriously limits its usefulness for those very users who could most benefit from its use.”

UCSB: A Virtual Revolution. “Laila Shereen Sakr, an assistant professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Film and Media Studies, is using billions of social media posts to create a revolutionary work of art. Using a program she developed — the R-Shief Media System, which has been collecting and analyzing social media posts since 2008 — she’s building a virtual reality (VR) world that gives form to those countless tweets.”

Metafluff: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs. “I’ve got a Firefox profile with 1691 tabs. I started trying to write down why, but gave up for now. It was becoming an overly long exploration of product design and the future of the web. It’s Friday. Let’s keep things simple.” Good morning, Internet…

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