afternoonbuzz

Colorado Newspapers, Building Windows, PubChem, More: Friday Afternoon Buzz, October 27, 2017

NEW RESOURCES

Colorado Virtual Library: CHNC News! Historic African American Newspapers Now Available. “[History Colorado] most recently digitized and added Denver African-American newspapers, the Statesman (1905-1912), and The Denver Star (1912-1918). The Statesman was first published by Joseph D. D. River in 1889. In 1912, The Denver Star began to bill itself as ‘The paper formerly known as the Statesman.’ In 1913, it was noted that ‘the papers formerly known as The Statesman and The Independent, have been merged into The Denver Star.’ While these papers covered news from African-American communities in ‘Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and the West’, they also covered local news from Denver’s Five Points district. Five Points, sometimes referred to as the ‘Harlem of the West’ is one of Denver’s oldest neighborhoods. These newspapers offer researchers a vast amount of information on Denver’s African American culture and community, including its residents, businesses and aspects of everyday life.”

Architects Newspaper: In Japan, a research institute and symposium gives the window its due. “Founded by the Japanese fastener (and yes zipper) company YKK in 2007, the Window Research Institute or as they term it ‘Windowology,’ is hoping to become the world–class center for research on glazed openings and an archive of research for scholars…. The YKK Institute that created the window event and exhibit is creating an online archive of windows for scholars that makes it the most important repository on window research in the world.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

PubChem Blog: Publisher Springer Nature contributes millions of chemical-article links. “PubChem added more than 26 million links to scientific articles, thanks to contributions from the publisher Springer Nature. Of these, 1.6 million links point to open access or free-to-read documents! Springer Nature includes the SpringerLink, SpringerOpen, and BioMed Central research platforms as well as the nature.com website. Combined, they include more than 10 million scientific documents spanning the primary literature, book chapters, and reference works. InfoChem, a subsidiary of Springer Nature, identified the chemicals mentioned in these scientific articles using a proprietary approach.”

NBC News: Release of JFK Assassination File Is Delayed as Deadline Looms. “The National Archives needs the official approval of President Donald Trump to begin releasing the 35,000 documents online and meet a deadline to divulge the papers set by Congress 25 years ago by The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. But as of Thursday afternoon, the memo specifying which material the CIA, State Department and other agencies still want to keep under wraps had not made it to Trump’s desk, U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.”

CNET: Google Science Journal app gets noteworthy makeover, hits iOS. “Budding scientists take note. That’s what Google wants you to do, anyway. The company said Wednesday that it’s added new note-taking abilities to Science Journal, and has made the app available on iOS as well as Android.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BuzzFeed: Twitter Is Banning Ads From Russian Media Outlets RT And Sputnik Because Of Election Meddling. “All advertising from RT and Sputnik will be banned on Twitter, the company announced Thursday, due to the US intelligence assessment that the state-owned Russian media outlets attempted to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. The decision to ‘off-board’ all advertising from RT and Sputnik accounts is effective immediately, Twitter announced in a blog post.”

New York Times: Twitter Says It Overstated Monthly-User Figures for 3 Years. “Twitter said on Thursday that it had overstated its monthly-user figures since 2014 after mistakenly including data from third-party applications in its counting. The revelation came as the company reported that its net loss had narrowed in the third quarter and that its number of daily active users had risen 14 percent.”

TechCrunch: A critical metric for Alphabet’s success is suddenly showing signs of life. “Alphabet delivered a knockout quarter today, handily beating the estimates from Wall Street — but, perhaps more importantly, showing actual growth in a critical metric that has seen a consistent decline for quite some time. Google’s cost-per-click — a metric that helps define how valuable its ads are — grew 1% quarter-over-quarter this year. ”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NPR: AI Model Fundamentally Cracks CAPTCHAs, Scientists Say. “Scientists say they have developed a computer model that fundamentally breaks through a key test used to tell a human from a bot. You’ve probably passed this test hundreds of times. Text-based CAPTCHAs, a rough acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart, are groups of jumbled characters along with squiggly lines and other background noise.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

UC San Diego: Machine Learning Detects Marketing and Sale of Opioids on Twitter. “Between June and November 2015, some 619,937 tweets containing the keywords codeine, Percocet, fentanyl, Vicodin, Oxycontin, oxycodone and hydrocodone were collected. The findings, published online in the American Journal of Public Health in October, detected 1,778 posts that were marketing the sale of controlled substances, 90 percent included hyperlinks to online sites for purchase.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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