NEW RESOURCES

University of Wisconsin-Madison: Campus museums recreate ‘cabinet of natural history’ digitally. “A new UW2020 initiative will centralize the databases of the university’s five natural history museums, which have separated over the decades to specialize and accommodate growing collections. The 1.3-million-specimen Wisconsin State Herbarium will coordinate with the zoology, geology, entomology and anthropology museums to merge records in a way that allows researchers to study the full scope of natural artifacts in one central location. This digital cabinet of natural history will link the museums’ combined 9 million-plus specimens that span all seven continents, the moon and Mars.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

9to5Mac: Apple offering free repairs on Hurricane Harvey-damaged devices, report claims. “9to5Mac reports that Apple has unofficially been offering free repairs on devices damaged by Hurricane Harvey. Readers have reportedly had water-damaged and impact-damaged iPhones fixed for free by the Apple Store, against regular Apple policy on water damage or physical problems with devices.”

USEFUL STUFF

Ditch That Textbook: The Gmail survival guide for busy teachers. “Seems like the textbook example of educators’ use of email is to check it often, respond whenever and spend lots of time doing repetitive email tasks. If your inbox owns you, it drags you back in time after time without feeling like you’ve accomplished much of anything when you’re done. But if you can tame your email and have it work for you, you have more time for the things that matter most — professionally and personally.”

Geneanet: Geneanet Genealogy Library Free! September 8 – 10, 2017. “More than 3 billion indexed individuals! The Genealogy Library gives access to hundreds of thousands documents indexed for genealogy research.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Verge: Why are some weird Wikipedia pages yanked into oblivion?. “Wikipedia is the web’s most expansive encyclopedia, but the nature of its crowdsourced information makes it prone to vandalism, misinformation, and a deeper question of what truly deserves its own page. Twitter accounts like @DeletedWiki memorialize these dead pages by tweeting out titles hourly, and it’s easy to understand why they’ve been sent off to the big information dump in the sky.”

Washington Post: Apparent crackdown in Vietnam on social media, but many users undeterred. ” The police in communist-led Vietnam have been cracking down especially hard on free expression over social media for the past few months. Or, at least as far as experts, regular users and dissident bloggers can tell, that seems to be the case.”

Bloomberg Quint: Google Continues to Hire in China Even as Search Remains Blocked. “Google’s search service may be banned in China but parent Alphabet Inc. is hunting for workers in a further sign it has ambitions in the world’s biggest internet market. At least 20 positions based in Beijing are advertised on the company’s careers site, spanning engineering and marketing to product managers. Multiple listings are shown in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

The Next Web: Facebook code makes for 16% of the average site… and that’s a problem. “With two billion monthly active users, more than half of all netizens are now on Facebook. In fact, the social media platform has become so integral to the internet that a large number of sites nowadays contain small chunks of Facebook code.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Hacker News: Taringa: Over 28 Million Users’ Data Exposed in Massive Data Breach. “Exclusive — If you have an account on Taringa, also known as ‘The Latin American Reddit,’ your account details may have compromised in a massive data breach that leaked login details of almost all of its over 28 million users.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Vivaldi: My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil. “As the biggest online advertising company in the world, Google is often the first choice for businesses that want to promote their products or services on the Internet. Being excluded from using Google AdWords could be a major problem, especially for digital companies. Recently, our Google AdWords campaigns were suspended without warning. This was the second time that I have encountered this situation. This time, however, timing spoke volumes.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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