NEW RESOURCES

Romania Insider: Romania wine map available in English. “The map is aimed at identifying distinct areas in Romania, as well as helping tourists find the wine cellar they want to visit. It contains an updated list of local vineyards and wine cellars. It does not necessarily work as a tourist guide, but rather has an educational purpose, being an instrument by which wine lovers can discover wine cellars and wine-growing areas from Romania. The new map is focused on wine cellars known to be involved in wine tourism.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

SlashGear: Google Voice bug is blocking inbound text messages for some users. “Google Voice users are complaining about some sort of issue that is preventing them from getting SMS texts. News of the bug first popped up online a couple days ago. Affected users explain that while they can successfully send out text messages using the service, replies sent to them don’t appear in the account, effectively ruining the usefulness of the platform for many people.”

BetaNews: Facebook updates On This Day to make it even more remember-y. “If you have yet to be granted access to Facebook’s trip-down-memory-lane feature, On This Day, now you’re in luck. The social network has opened up the feature to all of its two billion users. At the same time, Facebook is introducing some interesting extras, and taking steps to ensure that more negative memories are not surfaced for you. On top of this, there are new seasonal memories and new ways to celebrate friendships.”

USEFUL STUFF

Digital Trends: The Vinyl Recorder App Lets You Rip Your Favorite Analog Tunes To Your Phone. “All listeners need is a USB turntable and a micro-USB cable to attach it to their phone, at which point they simply load the Vinyl Recorder app and press record. An integration with Gracenote means that after a few seconds, the service will identify the song from its online database, then add information to your digital vinyl rip — including the artist name, song title, album title, album artwork, and genre tags.”

Popular Science: Why and how to erase your browsing history. “Web browsers keep track of your past activity for a reason. That history comes in handy if you want to find a funny article again, or return to your favorite photo of the kids, or if restore a tab that you accidentally closed. At the same time, some people find this constant tracking a little on the creepy side. Not to mention that, if you share a computer with others, you might not want them finding out about a gift you secretly bought them, your interest in 1970s folk rock, or your more private Google searches.” I love disco and I am unashamed.

Lifehacker: How To Download All of Wikipedia Onto a USB Flash Drive. “Wikipedia might not always be the most accurate source of information out there, but it is one of those things that I’m constantly thankful is around. You can actually ensure that the site is always there for you, even when you don’t have a web connection, by downloading it in its entirety. We wrote about a way to do this with an open-source app called XOWA last year, but the process is actually even easier.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

LA Times: Apple removes all Iranian apps from its App Store. “According to the New York Times, Apple reportedly notified Iranian developers whose apps were affected by the ban, saying, ‘Under the U.S. sanctions regulations, the App Store cannot host, distribute or do business with apps or developers connected to certain U.S. embargoed countries.'”

The Next Web: Social media trends: The livestream economy. “Social media interaction between friends, businesses, cultures, and people in general, is constantly changing. Just a few years ago, the livestreaming concept became a reality, and now people can take video in real time and share it instantly with social media followers. Though the initial livestreaming concepts centered on getting regular people to livestream life events and share them with friends and family, the idea is rapidly evolving as businesses, celebrities, and yes, normal people, realize these are new ways to go viral.”

The Irish Times: Calling citizen scientists to save nature with a database. “Work, life and values seem to be happily, even enviably, intermeshed for Liam Lysaght, director of the National Biodiversity Data Centre…. The centre has so far collated 3,500,000 records from the historical and contemporary research of dozens of organisations and hundreds of specialists, professional and amateur. It has augmented this knowledge with a remarkable 500,000 new records from 6,000 (and counting) citizen scientists that flow in daily.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Google Research Blog: Launching the Speech Commands Dataset. “At Google, we’re often asked how to get started using deep learning for speech and other audio recognition problems, like detecting keywords or commands. And while there are some great open source speech recognition systems like Kaldi that can use neural networks as a component, their sophistication makes them tough to use as a guide to a simpler tasks. Perhaps more importantly, there aren’t many free and openly available datasets ready to be used for a beginner’s tutorial (many require preprocessing before a neural network model can be built on them) or that are well suited for simple keyword detection.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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