NEW RESOURCES

News-Bulletin: New Mexico Department of Health launches new website linking people with vaccine providers. “Today, the New Mexico Department of Health Immunization Program announced the launch of two new interactive maps to help residents find a vaccination provider nearest them. One map is created specifically to help parents of children search for a Vaccines For Children provider. The other will assist uninsured adults to link to a nearby healthcare provider that offers immunizations for New Mexicans without medical insurance.”

State of Delaware: New Web Portal, Special Programming Commemorate 250th Anniversary of John Dickinson’s Revolutionary “Letters”. “n the autumn of 1767, the American Colonies were reeling from a fresh round of taxation without representation handed down by Parliament in London. With their pleas for fair treatment and equal standing ignored by the Crown, the leading men of the fledgling colonial opposition began to turn their thoughts to more direct acts of resistance. But before the Boston Tea Party, before the First Continental Congress, and well before July 4, 1776, the Colonies needed a message to bring them together – a clear text that would lay out their common cause and draw them even closer in unity.”

New Caanan Patch: New Database Reveals Patient Death, Violations in CT Hospitals. “No one wants to go the hospital, but if you do or if a loved one needs to, you’re likely going to want to check out this updated searchable in-depth database prepared by the Connecticut Health-Investigative Team. Newly released inspection reports from state health officials reveal violations at numerous hospitals that compromised patient safety, C-HIT reports.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Guardian: English Heritage joins the digital age with new Google partnership. “Viewers will be able to peer into English Heritage palaces, explore castle ruins and admire historic ceilings in detail without leaving the comfort of their own homes through a new partnership between the charity and Google Arts and Culture. The website will open up 29 English Heritage properties – the first time that Google has worked with an arts institution across so many sites – including stately homes, castles, prehistoric sites and 19th-century industrial buildings.”

WordPress 4.9 release candidate 2 is now available. (You did apply that emergency patch last week, right?)

Google Blog: Getting hyper-local: Mapping street-level air quality across California. “We’re just beginning to understand what’s possible with this hyperlocal information and today, we’re releasing data for three additional California regions, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and California’s Central Valley (the Street View cars drove 100,000 miles, over the course of 4,000 hours to collect this data!). Scientists and air quality specialists can use this information to assist local organizations, governments, and regulators in identifying opportunities to achieve greater air quality improvements and solutions.”

USEFUL STUFF

Digital Trends: The best place to print photos online, from budget-friendly to gallery quality. “Photographs deserve to exist in more than just digital pixels. But sometimes details get lost in translation from digital to print, spitting out prints with weird colors, fuzzy details, unexpected borders, and horrible customer service. So what’s the best place to print photos online? We’ve rounded up the options from personal experience, pro photographer recommendations, and web reviews to put together our seven favorite photo printers, from online to in-person.”

Quartz: 200 universities just launched 600 free online courses. Here’s the full list.. “If you haven’t heard, universities around the world are offering their courses online for free (or at least partially free). These courses are collectively called MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses. In the past six years or so, close to 800 universities have created more than 8,000 of these MOOCs. And I’ve been keeping track of these MOOCs the entire time over at Class Central, ever since they rose to prominence.” This is a giant list.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Register: Official US govt Twitter accounts caught tweeting in Russian, now mysteriously axed. “The US Digital Registry – an authoritative list of government Twitter accounts – reveals that almost 30 have been suspended, several after tweeting in, er, Russian. Justin Littman, a software developer and librarian in the ‎Scholarly Technology Group at George Washington University’s Gelman Library, identified the accounts in the process of archiving government tweets and found it odd that they’d been suspended – presumably for rules violations – rather than deleted or protected.” We give government Web sites and social media accounts too much trust for this to happen. There needs to be a process for freezing them in place if they’re not longer used.

New York Times: How Facebook’s Oracular Algorithm Determines the Fates of Start-Ups. “In 2017, everyone seems to be wondering: Is Facebook taking over the world? Most of us now realize that the social network has become far more than a repository for selfies and political rants of its more than two billion users. To ad sellers, Facebook is now a gluttonous monster, which, along with Google, is gobbling up the digital advertising business in the United States; according to Pivotal Research Group, the two companies controlled 70 percent of the market and most of the growth in 2016. From the perspective of American intelligence agencies, Facebook is practically a weapon, used by a company linked to the Kremlin to foment extremism and influence the 2016 presidential election with at least $100,000 worth of targeted ads.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TorrentFreak: US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub. “Sci-Hub, often referred to as the ‘Pirate Bay of Science,’ has suffered another blow in a US federal court. The American Chemical Society has won a default judgment of $4.8 million for alleged copyright infringement against the site. In addition, the publisher was granted an unprecedented injunction which requires search engines and ISPs to block the platform.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Mashable: Artificial intelligence could help us eliminate human bias . “AI technologies on the market are beginning to display intentional and unintentional biases – from talent search technology that groups candidate resumes by demographics or background to insensitive auto-fill search algorithms. It applies outside of the business world as well – from a social platform discerning ethnicity based on assumptions about someone’s likes and interests, to AI assistants being branded as female with gender-specific names and voices. The truth is that bias in AI will happen unless it’s built with inclusion in mind. The most critical step in creating inclusive AI is to recognize how bias infects the technology’s output and how it can make the ‘intelligence’ generated less objective.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!