NEW RESOURCES

The Daily Sentinel: Accessing the past in print: Bossard to offer digital newspapers online. “Bossard Memorial Library in Gallipolis has stepped even further into the digital age by offering a convenient look at the past for those who have access to the internet. The library now has every newspaper printed in Gallipolis, including the Daily Times, Sunday Times-Sentinel, The Gallipolis Daily Tribune, and others, since 1895 on microfilm, which has always been available to the public. … Every newspaper is now online and has been converted from microfilm into a fully digital and searchable index that is available for free and can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection.”

University of Florida: CJC Creates New Tool to Track North Central Florida Legislators’ Activity. “A new Legislative Tracker, developed by the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, will offer North Central Florida residents the ability to easily keep track of their state legislators’ activity throughout the current legislative session. The College’s Innovation News Center (INC) built the tool that tracks the work of the area’s 10 state legislators (seven representatives and three senators) during the 2018 legislative session which continues through March 2018.”

PhilPapers: Moving toward PhilPeople. “In the coming months, we will launch PhilPeople, a new service from the PhilPapers Foundation developed with the support of the APA. PhilPeople will be a searchable database of philosophers. It will have an associated search engine that enables searches on a number of dimensions (e.g. by areas of specialization, location, and demographic features). PhilPeople will also provide a profile page to any philosopher who wants one, with links to their publications on PhilPapers. It will include social networking features. It will also include an associated database of academic departments of philosophy, with searchable information about each of these departments.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Meet your match: Google app finds famous art you look like. “Sure, we all know what famous person we vaguely look like (I always get Geena Davis, which … I wish! She’s still in a ‘League of Her Own.’) But the blandly named Google Arts & Culture app will dig through thousands of museum artworks from days gone by to see if you have a truly old-school doppelganger. It matched me up with numerous paintings, but the app’s top choice was a Renoir. Although I doubt the woman depicted in his painting wore braces.”

USEFUL STUFF

Library of Congress: Receive an Email when a Member of Congress has a New Remark Printed in the Congressional Record. “Congress.gov alerts are emails sent to you when a measure (bill or resolution), nomination, or member profile has been updated with new information. You can also receive an email after a Member has new remarks printed in the Congressional Record. Here are instructions on how to get an email after a Member has new remarks printed in the Congressional Record.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: In Some Countries, Facebook’s Fiddling Has Magnified Fake News. “One morning in October, the editors of Página Siete, Bolivia’s third-largest news site, noticed that traffic to their outlet coming from Facebook was plummeting. The publication had recently been hit by cyberattacks, and editors feared it was being targeted by hackers loyal to the government of President Evo Morales. But it wasn’t the government’s fault. It was Facebook’s.”

Quartz: Instagram CTO says they do not withhold “likes” to keep users coming back for more. “Who doesn’t like Instagram ‘likes?’ Watching those little hearts racking up after posting a photo has the potential to deliver feelings ranging from validation that our picture has been noted and approved, to an all-round fuzzy sense of being loved. Instagram knows that, of course, and it is allegedly exploiting it to increase the frequency of visits to its platform, according to a Jan. 6 report in the Globe and Mail.” As you might guess from the headline, Instagram is denying this.

PopSugar: The Top 10 YouTube Videos of 2017. “Every year, YouTube releases a list of the top trending videos from across the platform. The reason why I love it so much? It doesn’t just capture the obvious moments of the year that was; instead, it shows the things that people around the world loved so much that they couldn’t help but watch again, things we may have never known about, things that transcend the current events and popular culture that we know oh so well. In 2017, the list was no exception.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

MIT Technology Review: Google and Others Are Building AI Systems That Doubt Themselves. “Researchers at Uber and Google are working on modifications to the two most popular deep-learning frameworks that will enable them to handle probability. This will provide a way for the smartest AI programs to measure their confidence in a prediction or a decision—essentially, to know when they should doubt themselves.” Good evening, Internet…

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