NEW RESOURCES

ITP: UAEU develops new search engine for life sciences. “Researchers at the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) have developed a new search engine which should make it easier to search for scientific data. The ‘Biocarian’ search engine has been developed to provide an efficient and user-friendly way to search through life science databases.” The site’s address is not mentioned in the article; you can reach it at http://www.biocarian.com . You can also get a deep technical overview of the search engine in this BMC Bioimformatics article: BioCarian: search engine for exploratory searches in heterogeneous biological databases .

Donegal Now: Gaeilge Minister launches website with Gaelic texts from the 1607 Flight of the Earls. “DONEGAL TD and Minister for Gaeilge, Joe McHugh, has launched a new online archive of gaelic texts spanning three centuries and including reports of the Flight of the Earls from Donegal in 1607. Staff of the Royal Irish Academy based in Teelin in Co Donegal were part of a team which put together 19 million words from various texts from across Europe into the incredible online resource.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

WordPress 4.9 Beta 4 is now available.

Niemanlab: Are you a low-quality web page? (Are you sure?) Facebook sheds a little light on its algorithm . “Facebook … went ahead on Tuesday and, at an event at CUNY in New York, released a set of ‘News Feed Publisher Guidelines’ that aim to decipher the News Feed algorithm a bit and help publishers better understand ‘content guidelines, quality guidelines, and community standards to aid your efforts to find and engage your audience on News Feed.’ (In other words, do this or we’ll bump your stuff to the secondary feed. Haha! Just kidding.) The panel included a discussion between Facebook News Feed VP Adam Mosseri and CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis.”

USEFUL STUFF

The American Library Association (ALA) is offering a Webcast about fake news on November 1. “In our role as gatekeepers of information, librarians have always been responsible for establishing the authority of information. But with social media ensuring that news articles—whether real or not—spread like wildfire, how can help our users filter the real from the fake? How can we maintain our professional obligation to ensure equal access to information in a politically charged time where it seems like not all information is created equal? In our next episode of American Libraries Live, you’ll have a chance to discuss these questions with our expert panel. We’ll discuss this and how we can move forward as a profession.”

Small Business: An RSS App is the Best Way to Keep Up With The News You Need or Want . “It was via an RSS feed from Gizmodo that I was reminded how dependent I am on RSS to keep up with the various types of news and information important to my work (and play). I agree with Gizmodo: ‘RSS is far better for following the flow of news than any alternative source, including and especially social media…It is faster, more efficient, and you won’t have to worry as much about accidentally leaking your news reading habits to all your Facebook friends.'” RSS, Google Alerts, Nuzzel, and, more and more, VisualPing.

ChuckEgg: Cheap Digital Signage using Google Slides & Raspberry Pi ($40 per display) . I know this seems kind of weird for me to include but I would have paid a good stack more than $40 to know about this a few years ago. If you don’t have deep pockets, setting up decent digital displays in a small business is very tough. Librarians, you might want to check this out.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Dawn (Pakistan): Govt to monitor social media, says interior minister. “Amid growing concerns over the alleged disappearance of a number of social media activists linked to the ruling party, Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal on Tuesday announced plans to formulate a framework to monitor social media in order to prevent it from being used as a tool to malign national institutions and spread anarchy or extremism in the country.”

Times of India: Cops to use Google Maps to decongest roads. “Google will come to the aid of road managers in Delhi, with traffic police all set to use Google Maps to monitor traffic situations on arterial roads. The cops will employ the traffic maps, which give real-time vehicular situations, determine the congestion on roads. If any stretch is seen to be badly affected, a screenshot of the map will be sent on a Whatsapp group to the traffic inspector, ACP and DCP concerned for corrective actions.”

TechCrunch: Another AI chatbot shown spouting offensive views. “Yandex, Russia’s homegrown Google rival — which offers a suite of similar products in its target non-U.S. markets, from search to webmail to maps — outed another equivalent offering earlier this month: An AI assistant.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Lifehacker: How Apps Use Your Photos to Track Your Location . “If you’re worried about apps tracking your location, it’s not enough to limit your location sharing. You need to limit camera-roll sharing too. If you’ve ever given an app access to your camera roll—to take photos, or store screenshots, or any given reason—you’ve also let it see where all those photos were taken. Felix Krause, an iOS developer and security writer, built an app to demonstrate this back door…”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Wired: Burning Memories. “On Sunday night, October 8, my parents’ house in Napa burned to the ground in the wildfire. For my mom and dad, now in their eighties, the place had been a retirement escape from the hurlyburly of New York. My wife and I were married there 23 years ago, in the hillside living room looking out over a vine-carpeted valley. The fire turned this refuge into a heap of tile and ash. It also torched our family history: a mountain of scrapbooks, photo prints, and travel diaries that we will never mine again.” Good morning, Internet…

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