NEW RESOURCES

Apollo Magazine: How a digital dictionary will advance furniture history. “Previously, when you typed ‘Chippendale’ into an art-historical database, you would have received basic information, which may or may not have been entirely correct. Now there is a new resource, British and Irish Furniture Makers Online (BIFMO), just launched and available to all online, which will not only tell you about Thomas Chippendale, but which will give you access to all his connections in the furniture trade, to his patrons, to the influence he had on furniture design, and to his materials and workshop practice.”

Mississippi: County, Municipal Documents Filed With Secretary Of State Now Available Online . “More than 5,500 county and municipal documents filed with the Secretary of State’s Office are now available for search and review online…. The new online database contains recently executed and historical documents received from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, some dating back to the 1800s. Historical papers will continue to be scanned and added to the database as they are received. ”

EurekAlert: A visual database of human plasma compounds . “Researchers in Japan have created a database of metabolites from blood samples collected from over 5,000 Japanese volunteers, making it freely available online as a valuable resource for researchers around the world.”

Daily Sabah: Trove hidden from Nazis, Soviets offers glimpse into Jewish life in Western Europe. “For decades, a confessional in a church in Lithuania’s capital Vilnius kept a precious secret: a trove of documents offering an unprecedented glimpse into Jewish life in Eastern Europe before and during the Holocaust. The cache, with documents dating back to the mid-18th century, includes religious texts, Yiddish literature and poetry, testimonies about pogroms as well as autobiographies and photographs.”

USEFUL STUFF

Hongkiat: 5 Free Tools To Notify You of Website Content Changes. “To know when a website changes its content, you have to go to that website and check it frequently and manually. This doesn’t sound like much work, unless it comes to an e-commerce site or a news website where web content changes happen quickly and suddenly. In such a case, you should leave it to web content monitoring tools.”

I feel kind of weird linking to this. But it seems foolish not to. If it can help save one person, then why not? Toronto Metro: B.C. team offers online Naloxone tutorial to help prevent overdose deaths. “People can now learn how to administer Naloxone, the antidote to opioid overdose, by watching a five-minute video online. St. Paul’s emergency medical team led the project and launched the online tutorial this month in an effort to help more people access the life-saving drug. At the end of the tutorial, participants receive a certificate that they can show at a nearby pharmacy, or any Naloxone dispensing site, to receive a free kit.” I’m not sure you can get a free kit in the United States. But I am sure that the more people know about effectively administering Naloxone the better.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Forbes: Startup Behind The Obama Social Media Archive Helps Government Agencies Document Their Hashtags. “Back in January 2017, the Obama administration launched an open archive of 250,000 posts, photos and videos shared by the White House during the former President’s term in office. The archive is maintained by ArchiveSocial —a five-year-old tech startup from Durham, NC—and fulfills a new requirement for transparency on the part of U.S. government institutions.”

Newsweek: Saudi Arabia’s Government Might Be Getting Help From Social Media Giants To Shut Down Dissent. “Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi dissident who was granted political asylum in Canada, wants to know why his viral hashtag disappeared from Twitter. The 27-year-old political science student has more than 270,000 followers on Twitter. But some of his Arabic-language hashtags disappeared as soon as they started going viral, he said. Especially the ones criticizing Saudi Arabia and its crown prince, Mohammad Bin Salman.”

Economic Times: How Narendra Modi has successfully managed to turn the country into a data set. “A few years ago, the word ‘government’ evoked the picture of slow-moving babus in the backdrop of tall almirahs bulging with bundles of files that appeared as old as parchments. Today, most ministries have websites that track projects in real time. The government is geotagging MGNREGA assets to stop leakages and bring transparency. The tagging will help identify the work, the money spent on it, the number of people who worked on it, among other things.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Business Insider: A fourth class-action lawsuit against Google claims the company rips off publishers and their advertisers. “Google has again been sued in US federal court by a web publisher alleging that the search giant does not refund advertisers when it discovers they have spent money on “invalid” clicks, and instead wrongly retains the money for itself. The suit is at least the fourth in a string of suits against Alphabet’s Google search unit making similar allegations. One case won a ruling granting it class-action status in July of this year.”

BBC News: Rape conviction quashed over new Facebook evidence. “A man jailed for rape four years ago has had his conviction overturned after new Facebook evidence emerged. Danny Kay’s sentence was quashed by the Court of Appeal after deleted messages were found in an archived folder backing his version of events.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Observer: New Studies Ask: Did Social Media Bias Favor Trump or Clinton?. “During the 2016 election, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were rated as two of the worst presidential candidates in history. Most critiques focused on their style and scandals, yet other nominees have had faced similar issues. Could it be that media in general, and social media in particular, played a role in driving down their numbers?” Good morning, Internet…

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