NEW RESOURCES

TV 6: New website informs about the quality of care at Michigan hospitals. “A new website…launched Tuesday by the Michigan Health & Hospital Association gives consumers and patients easy access to important information about the quality of healthcare provided at hospitals across the state. The website, created voluntarily by the MHA and its member hospitals, provides quality data on a range of infections, C-section rates, readmissions, mortality, retained surgical items, early elective deliveries and more. Visitors to the site can easily see how Michigan hospitals are performing on quality measures and can compare hospitals side-by-side. There are no charges or fees for using the website — all data on the site can be accessed for free.”

State Library of Ohio: Ohio Digital Library Now Includes a Deaf Culture and American Sign Language Collection. “The State Library of Ohio is pleased to announce the Ohio Digital Library now includes a collection of eBooks and videos about Deaf culture and American Sign Language (ASL). The collection includes fiction and non-fiction for children and adults and covers many aspects of Deaf culture and ASL including language, history, education and instruction. The Deaf culture and ASL collection was developed by an Overdrive Account Analyst with a B.S. in American Sign Language Interpretation. With nearly 200 titles, the collection provides a beneficial resource to help increase awareness with the goal of bridging the gap between hearing cultures and Deaf cultures in today’s society.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

WordPress 4.9.2 is now available. This is a security and maintenance release so you know what to do. “An XSS vulnerability was discovered in the Flash fallback files in MediaElement, a library that is included with WordPress. Because the Flash files are no longer needed for most use cases, they have been removed from WordPress.”

New York Times: YouTube Adds More Scrutiny to Top-Tier Videos. “On Tuesday in a blog post, YouTube said it had altered the threshold for which videos can accept advertisements and pledged more human oversight of its top-tier videos. If that sounds familiar, that’s because YouTube has made similar promises in the past.”

Libraries and Archives Canada: Images of Boxing now on Flickr. ” Bareknuckle fisticuffs were the norm during the early 19th century, with some bouts lasting 40 rounds. Outside of the military and a few men’s clubs, boxing was not sanctioned in the provinces of Canada, as the sport did not have a great reputation for fair play or honest promotion. Respectability for the sport came slowly, and views changed during the 1890s. The popularity of the sport grew steadily during the early 20th century.” This is a small collection but the pictures are quite dramatic.

USEFUL STUFF

Valerie Hawkins has created a nifty Twitter list to aggregate Twitter accounts which offer photographs. I did a quick look at it and it’s vintage photography, artwork, surrealism, a bit of everything. Only 29 members at the moment and already a rabbit hole.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

NBC News: Facebook is a ‘living, breathing crime scene,’ says one former tech insider. “With more than 2 billion users, Facebook’s reach now rivals that of Christianity and exceeds that of Islam. However, the network’s laser focus on profits and user growth has come at the expense of its users, according to one former Facebook manager who is now speaking out against the social platform.”

QNotes: LGBTQ archivist, professor Josh Burford sets off for Alabama to record the state’s queer history. “[Josh] Burford, who helped create an LGBTQ community archive at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, says he has been ‘itching’ to get back to the state where he was born and raised. ‘I mean, there have been more studies done on Mississippi’s LGBT history than Alabama’s, so it’s this totally untapped resource,’ he observes. ‘I think that potentially people don’t see Alabama as a queer enough place to focus on.’ Burford, as usual, sees potential where others do not.”

CNET: Google expands network with new data centers, subsea cables. “Google is expanding its existing cloud network with new data centers this year and new subsea cables in 2019, the search giant said Tuesday in a blog post. It will add data centers to five regions in 2018, including Montreal and the Netherlands in the first quarter, followed by Los Angeles, Finland and Hong Kong later in the year. This brings its worldwide total to 18 regions on five continents.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TechCrunch: TWiT is suing Twitter, alleging breach of contract and copyright infringement. “TWiT, officially known as This Week in Tech, is suing Twitter. The audio and video media platform alleges breach of written contract, breach of oral agreement, intentional interference with prospective economic advantage and trademark infringement. As the story goes, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams had previously told Leo Laporte Twitter was simply a text-based microblogging service, the lawsuit states.”

Mashable: Police charge 1,000 people sharing videos of nude teens on Facebook . “According to Danish police, two videos and a sexually explicit image involving two 15-year-olds were originally posted to Facebook Messenger, the platform’s private chat service. The video was then shared hundreds of times across the platform, and now, a total of 1,004 young people have been charged — and about 800 are male, reports Bloomberg. While the content was posted by someone within Denmark, it’s unclear if everyone accused of sharing it are from the country.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Oh man, is this important. From Tim Bray: Google Memory Loss . “I think Google has stopped in­dex­ing the old­er parts of the We­b. I think I can prove it. Google’s com­pe­ti­tion is do­ing bet­ter. Ev­i­dence · This isn’t just a proof, it’s a rock-n-roll proof. Back in 2006, I pub­lished a re­view of Lou Reed’s Rock n Roll An­i­mal al­bum. Back in 2008, Brent Sim­mons pub­lished That New Sound, about The Clash’s Lon­don Calling. Here’s a chal­lenge: Can you find ei­ther of these with Google? Even if you read them first and can care­ful­ly con­jure up exact-match strings, and then use the ‘site:’ pre­fix? I can’t.” Good morning, Internet…

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