NEW RESOURCES

Library of Congress: Papers of Abraham Lincoln Now Online in Full Color . “Abraham Lincoln’s papers from his time as a lawyer, congressman and the 16th president are now online in full color in a new presentation after a multi-year digitization effort at the Library of Congress. The Library holds a collection of more than 40,000 Lincoln documents dating from 1774 through Lincoln’s presidency and beyond, including materials from his campaigns, Lincoln’s first and second inaugural addresses and the earliest known copies of the Gettysburg Address. The more than 20,000 original documents in the collection have been digitized as high-resolution images through a collaboration with agencies in Illinois.”

NIH: NIH Clinical Center provides one of the largest publicly available chest x-ray datasets to scientific community . “The NIH Clinical Center recently released over 100,000 anonymized chest x-ray images and their corresponding data to the scientific community. The release will allow researchers across the country and around the world to freely access the datasets and increase their ability to teach computers how to detect and diagnose disease. Ultimately, this artificial intelligence mechanism can lead to clinicians making better diagnostic decisions for patients.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Roundtable: Google changes info command search operator, dropping useful links. “Google has confirmed with Search Engine Land that they have changed the way the info command, a search operator that gives you more details about a site, is displayed in search. Previously, the info operator would give searchers the snippet plus additional links to find more operators that show links to the site, the Google cache link, similar sites to that site and more.”

University of Virginia: Digital Social Network Linking The Living And The Dead Expands. “The Social Networks and Archival Context, or SNAC… aims to blow open the doors of libraries and archives and revolutionize the way primary documents are organized and made accessible. The digital platform addresses the longstanding research challenge of discovering, locating and using historical records stored all over the world. It can show links between the living and the dead, and between individuals, families and organizations, across time and place.”

The Next Web: Google plans to update Chrome with better ad-fighting features. “Google is rolling out new security features for Chrome which will make it harder for third-party ads to subvert pop-up blockers or disguise links within a site. On its Chromium blog, Google admits to getting lots of user feedback saying that sites will randomly redirect to other pages — one in five feedback reports relate to seeing unwanted content. Some pages do it automatically, while others have transparent overlays or deceptive buttons.”

TechCrunch: Skype launches Photo Effects – sticker suggestions powered by machine learning. “Not content with merely launching its own take on Instagram and Snapchat’s Stories, Skype today is adding another copycat-like feature to its app: photo stickers. The company says it’s introducing new ‘Photo Effects’ (as it’s calling these stickers), which include things like face masks, decorative borders, witty captions, and more. However, unlike the photo stickers you’ll find in other social apps today, Skype will actually suggest the stickers to use based on the photo’s content, day of the week, and other options.”

USEFUL STUFF

Linux Journal: Slicing Scientific Data. “I’ve covered scientific software in previous articles that either analyzes image information or actually generates image data for further analysis. In this article, I introduce a tool that you can use to analyze images generated as part of medical diagnostic work. In several diagnostic medical tests, complex three-dimensional images are generated that need to be visualized and analyzed. This is where 3D Slicer steps into the workflow. 3D Slicer is a very powerful tool for dissecting, analyzing and visualizing this type of complex 3D imaging data. It is fully open source, and it’s available not only on Linux, but also on Windows and Mac OS X.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

FA Magazine: SEC Creating Searchable Database Of Barred Brokers And Advisors. “Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Jay Clayton told the nation’s top regulators and securities attorneys today that the agency is creating the first-ever website and national database that investors can search to ferret out barred and suspended advisors and brokers. ‘We think this will be particularly valuable when bad actors have shifted from the registered space for investment advisors and broker-dealers to the unregistered space,’ Clayton told attendees at the Practising Law Institute’s 49th Annual Institute on Securities Regulation in New York City today.”

Business Insider: How a nerdy Swedish database startup with $80m in funding cracked the Paradise Papers. “Emil Eifrem was driving home from his goddaughter’s fifth birthday party in Gothenburg, Sweden, when his phone started buzzing. A stream of notifications alerted him to the Paradise Papers, a massive leak which showed how the world’s richest people use offshore havens to shield their wealth. ‘I switched seats with my wife,’ he said. ‘We turned on the radio, and as I’m sitting in the car I’m pulling up my laptop, trying to hotspot. I knew what my Monday would be like.’ Over the next 24 hours, Eifrem knew he’d be fielding a bunch of interview requests about the leaks.”

The Daily Beast: Exclusive: Russia Activated Twitter Sleeper Cells for 2016 Election Day Blitz. “The Daily Beast analyzed a dataset of 6.5 million tweets containing election keywords like ‘Hillary’ and ‘Trump’ that was collected over 33 hours last Nov. 7-9 by Baltimore-based data scientist Chris Albon. The data are not comprehensive—only tweets with one of the keywords were collected, and limitations in Twitter’s API prevent a full capture even of those. But they represent a significant sampling of Election Day Twitter.”

The Register: Snap: We’ve blown $3bn this year and Tencent wants to give us more. “Nose-diving social media company Snap Inc. says it has secured a significant investment from Chinese tech powerhouse Tencent. The photo sharing company slipped the disclosure into yesterday’s remarkably poor quarterly earnings report, saying the 145 million shares were a non-voting stake and would not be subject to much scrutiny from regulators.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Insider Car News: VW taps Google’s quantum computers to help develop EV batteries. “Volkswagen AG plans three research projects on a Google quantum computer as part of the German automaker’s push to develop new digital features for cars and broaden its technological heft beyond manufacturing and selling vehicles. The two goliaths plan to focus on three areas of research: traffic optimization, machine learning processes and the development of new materials and structures with an eye toward improved electric auto batteries. Quantum computers can solve certain highly complex tasks considerably faster than conventional supercomputers.” Good morning, Internet…

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