NEW RESOURCES

University of California Santa Barbara: Nature Stories “Scientists and historians alike are reaping scholarly dividends from a massive effort to collect, describe and archive land-use records and historical materials of all kinds from across the University of California Natural Reserve System (NRS). Seeking to inform the future by preserving the past, the NRS History & Archive Project is the brainchild of UC Santa Barbara environmental historian Peter Alagona…. The big goal of the ongoing project is to inventory, preserve and promote the use of documents and other materials related to the history of the NRS and the 39 sites — 750,000 acres in total — that it encompasses throughout California.”

CleanTechnica: New Interactive Map Displays Every Wind Farm & Factory In America. “The American Wind Energy Association has this week published a new interactive map which displays every single wind farm and factory across the United States, aimed to help people better picture the substantial growth of the US wind industry. The US wind industry most recently installed 357 MW (megawatts) worth of wind capacity in the second quarter, bringing the country’s cumulative capacity up to 84,405 MW, made up of 52,000 commercial wind turbines currently operating in 41 states plus Guam and Puerto Rico. ”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Digital Trends: Will Soundcloud Bite The Dust? Investors To Determine Its Fate By Friday. “It turns out that, without a massive parent company like Google, it’s quite difficult for streaming services to turn a profit — especially when your CEO is too busy partying to pay attention. Now, the platform is relying on its investors to stay alive, with a rescue funding round set to close tomorrow, August 11.” Which is today.

TechCrunch: Snap sinks as Q2 growth and revenue fall short . “Snap’s Q2 earnings report was another failure on a long, downward path for the social media company as user growth slowed under the pressure of Instagram. Snap added 7.3 million daily active users to reach 173 million with a 4.2 percent growth rate, slower than the 5 percent growth that got it to 166 million DAU in Q1. Snap missed on revenue that reached $181.6 million with a loss of -$0.16 earnings per share. That’s compared to Wall Street’s estimates of $185.8 million in revenue and a loss of -$0.14 EPS plus 175 million users.”

USEFUL STUFF

TechCrunch: PhishMe offers free phishing training tool to SMBs. “When employees received hundreds of emails a day, how do companies protect themselves from this insidious and all too common threat [of phishing]? One way is by carefully training employees to recognize a scam, not fall for it, and most importantly report it, so the company can remove all such emails from their domains. That kind of testing has tended to be out of reach for SMBs, who, in spite of the obvious threat, haven’t been able to justify the cost of spending money to provide that training. All of those excuses went away today when PhishMe, a 6.5 year old startup that helps companies protect themselves from phishing scams, announced it was releasing a free phishing testing tool for companies with 500 employees or less.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Quartz: Becoming a social media “influencer” is the new unpaid internship, and just as exploitative. “Social influencers with 1,000 to 100,000 followers can be paid between $50 to $1,000 to advertise for a brand, according to influencer marketing firm Hireinfluence, which works with brands such as Oreo and Microsoft to place products in the social feeds of popular personalities.
Most of the dozens of women who [Brooke Erin] Duffy interviewed, despite many hours of unpaid work, have little to show for their efforts.”

GMA News (Philippines): Adult social media users with 5k followers can cover Duterte events –PCOO. “If you are 18 years old with a social media page that has at least 5,000 followers, Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO) can accredit you to cover President Rodrigo Duterte. PCOO Secretary Martin Andanar on Wednesday confirmed that he just signed Department Order No. 15 or the interim social media practitioner accreditation.”

The Next Web: The alt-right will protest the firing of James Damore with a ‘March on Google’. “Right wing activists are rallying to show up at the offices of Google to protest the firing of the now-infamous software engineer and author of that viral memo, James Damore. The so-called #MarchOnGoogle is slated to take place on August 19 in various locations across the US. So far the organizers have confirmed at least five cities, including New York City, Washington DC, Austin, Boston and the Mountain View HQ where Damore used to work.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

eWeek: Hack the Air Force Bug Bounty Program Finds 207 Vulnerabilities. “Security researchers in May and June hacked the United States Air Force and got paid a total of $133,400 for their efforts. The Hack the Air Force bug bounty program enabled 272 hackers to take aim at a select list of public-facing USAF web assets to find and responsibly disclose vulnerabilities.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Phys.org: AI, crowdsourcing combine to close ‘analogy gap’. “Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem devised a method enabling computers to mine databases of patents, inventions and research papers, identifying ideas that can be repurposed to solve new problems or create new products. Specifically, they developed a way for computers to find analogies—comparisons between sometimes disparate methods and problems that highlight underlying similarities.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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