NEW RESOURCES

University of Cincinnati Magazine: Diving deep for data. “Paleobiologist David Meyer took his first underwater photograph in 1967, the year he got into diving…. Fifty years later, Meyer has accumulated a library of images documenting marine species around the world to understand the ancient ones from the Ordovician Period 450 million years ago that he studied as a geologist in the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences. Now Meyer is sharing his life’s work with the public in UC’s digital repository for scholarly works, Scholar@UC. He is converting his old photographic slides to digital images for UC’s new Global Marine Biodiversity Archive.” There isn’t a lot in the archive yet, but enough that I’m looking forward to seeing what gets added.

Library of Congress: Library of Congress Launches Three New Educational Apps. “The Library of Congress, in collaboration with various educational organizations, today announced the launch of three web- and mobile-based applications related to Congress and civic participation for use in K-12 classrooms. From stepping behind the camera with photographers who fought against child labor to building a timeline that traces African Americans’ journey towards freedom, students are able to do all these things and more using the set of new free educational interactives.”

Stanford Medicine: New database expected to strengthen prematurity research. “A new online tool will make it easier for researchers to share many types of data from scientific studies of premature birth. The recently launched March of Dimes Database for Preterm Birth Research brings together information collected at five prematurity research centers funded by the March of Dimes, including Stanford’s.”

The Park Record (Utah): Decades of Park Record content added to University of Utah online archive. “The newly added content also includes the short-lived but colorful history of The Newspaper, which was published from 1976 to 1983 before merging with The Park Record. The collection includes the infamous GONE SKIING front page published Jan. 5, 1977, the day it finally snowed after a tedious drought, as well as a number of irreverent April Fool’s Day editions.” Sounds like fun.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Nieman Lab: The Trust Project brings news orgs and tech giants together to tag and surface high-quality news. “Will readers trust the news more if they have more information about who’s behind it It’s worth a try. Thursday marks the launch of The Trust Project, an initiative three years in the making (but feeling oh-so-relevant right about now) that brings together news outlets such as The Washington Post, The Economist, and the Globe and Mail, as well as Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Bing, in a commitment to ‘provide clarity on the [news organizations’] ethics and other standards, the journalists’ backgrounds, and how they do their work.'” But not clarity on how search engines are arranging and surfacing news stories from these organizations via algorithm?

TechCrunch: Google’s chatbot analytics platform Chatbase launches to public. “At Google I/O this year, Google quietly introduced a new chatbot analytics platform called Chatbase, a project developed within the company’s internal R&D incubator, Area 120. Today, that platform is being publicly launched to all, after testing with hundreds of early adopters including Ticketmaster, HBO, Keller Williams, Viber, and others.”

Variety: Verizon’s Oath Is Laying Off Around 500 AOL, Yahoo Employees. “The Oath does not include a guarantee of employment. Verizon’s Oath internet-media division is cutting more jobs, with the latest round of layoffs affecting around 500 staffers from the former AOL and Yahoo brands. That represents 4% of its total global headcount of approximately 12,000.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

UpGuard: Dark Cloud: Inside The Pentagon’s Leaked Internet Surveillance Archive. “While a cursory examination of the data reveals loose correlations of some of the scraped data to regional US security concerns, such as with posts concerning Iraqi and Pakistani politics, the apparently benign nature of the vast number of captured global posts, as well as the origination of many of them from within the US, raises serious concerns about the extent and legality of known Pentagon surveillance against US citizens. In addition, it remains unclear why and for what reasons the data was accumulated, presenting the overwhelming likelihood that the majority of posts captured originate from law-abiding civilians across the world.”

Voice of America: Even After Death, Social Media Still Connects Loved Ones. “Social media is turning into a vast graveyard for profiles of owners who have passed away, leaving them unattended or as standing memorials. And some experts are urging social networks to do more to help users prepare for their digital deaths. There are millions of them – pages that remain on social media sites, and in some cases, automatically update after their owners’ death. The numbers vary from 5 million to as many as 300 million, according to Jed Brubaker, a digital death expert with the University of Colorado, Boulder. But it’s hard to know the exact numbers because ‘tracking the rate of death across the world is hard,’ he said.”

Bloomberg Quint: Block Porn or Be Blocked, Indonesia Warns Google, Twitter. “Indonesia has threatened to bar the world’s biggest social-media providers from operating in the country unless they comply with stringent demands to filter pornography and other content deemed obscene.”

Washington Post: I tried out Google’s translating headphones. Here’s what I found.. “Google has set out to make its mark on the headphone world with Pixel Buds — wireless headphones that can control your phone and that claim to translate conversations in real time. But how do they stack up? Google sent us a pair to review to find out.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Wired: The Dark Side Of ‘Replay Sessions’ That Record Your Every Move Online. “WHEN INTERNET USERS visit Walgreens.com, a software company may record every keystroke, mouse movement, and scroll, potentially exposing medical conditions such as alcohol dependence, or the names of drugs a user has been prescribed, according to Princeton researchers.” Good morning, Internet…

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