NEW RESOURCES

Online Journalism Blog: Building the first central database of victims of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime. “125,000 people died, disappeared or were repressed in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and during the Franco dictatorship, according to historians. Many of their families still do not know, 40 years later, what exactly happened to them. Now the Innovation and Human Rights (IHR) association has created the first central database of casualties, missing persons and reprisals during the Spanish Civil War and under Francoism.”

University of Arkansas: World Trade Center Arkansas Releases First Arkansas Exporter Directory. ” The World Trade Center Arkansas has compiled and released the first comprehensive Arkansas Exporter Directory . The directory is a catalog of exporting Arkansas companies and companies with exportable products and services. The directory is organized by industry and is a tool to organize business-to-business meetings with Arkansas companies and foreign clients interested in the products and services of these companies.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ubergizmo: Instagram Adding GIF Support To Stories. “If you’re digging the weird and wonderful world of animated GIFs, then you might be interested to learn that Instagram seems to be rolling out support for adding GIFs in its Stories. This is according to a report from The Verge in which some users from certain parts of the world are reporting that they are now able to add GIFs via Giphy to their Stories.”

USEFUL STUFF

Search Engine Journal: 28 Free Tools to Help You Find What People Search For . “Getting into the groove of keyword research doesn’t just happen overnight. You need to know how people search and what they search for before you can even start to think about mapping your keywords. And with more than 6 billion searches a day worldwide, how do you know where to start It’s about finding the deepest, darkest, secret corners of the user’s search intent to find ‘the right stuff’ in a bowl full of ‘meh’s.'” Now obviously I couldn’t care less about using these tools for SEO. But I always want to learn more about how other people craft their search language, because it can give me ideas.

Hongkiat: Desktop Blogging Software, The Ultimate List. “Blogging is a demanding job that requires your time and dedication. But even as a pro blogger you have to move around and travel which often leaves you with a weak or low internet connection and other such hurdles. In such a case some useful blogging tools and applications can do wonders, and desktop blogging software are one of them.” A bit shocked there are so many options for desktop blogging. Not complaining though!

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Wired: Our Best Hope For Civil Discourse Online Is On … Reddit . “CHANGE MY VIEW was the brainchild of Kal Turnbull, a musician who was just 17 when he launched the subreddit in 2013, roughly three years before intransigence became the guiding principle of all debate everywhere. As a high school senior, Turnbull could have been forgiven for digging in his heels on teen truisms like punk’s not dead or—he’s Scottish—alba gu bràth. Instead he rebelled against all sloganeering and groupthink.”

British Library: BL Labs 2017 Symposium: Data Mining Verse in 18th Century Newspapers by Jennifer Batt. “Dr Jennifer Batt, Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol, reported on an investigation in finding verse using text and data-mining methods in a collection of digitised eighteenth-century newspapers in the British Library’s Burney Collection to recover a complex, expansive, ephemeral poetic culture that has been lost to us for well over 250 years.” A ~23 minute video of her presentation and her slide deck is available at the URL I linked to.

The Next Web: I trained an AI to copy my voice and it scared me silly. “Over the past year, I wrote about a bunch of companies working on voice synthesis technology. They were very much in the early stages of development, and only had some pre-made samples to show off. Now, researchers hailing from the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms at the Universite de Montreal have a tool you can try out for yourself. It’s called Lyrebird, and the public beta requires just a minute’s worth of audio to generate a digital voice that sounds a lot like yours.”

Particle: The Secret History Of Facebook Depression. “The key to understanding social media depression lies in the social norm that has emerged around how we manage Facebook’s context collapse in a way that is acceptable in all contexts. That social norm is being your perfect self. And the consequence of that is we are all performing our perfect selves, thus all making each other feel depressed and inadequate.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Zach Whalen: A Python Script That Writes 800-Page Children’s Books. “You may have heard of NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Mo — which is an even where aspiring authors attempt to start and finish a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. NaNoGenMo is a similar event that simply challenges aspiring authors to write code that will generate a 50,000 word novel. This blog post is the story of my NaNoGenMo effort for 2017, which culminated in The Several Houses of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, and Alex, an 800-page novel (PDF download) generated by a Python script. I’m sharing this because I’m pretty happy with the outcome, and I learned a lot about Python in the process.” This is a little outside the ResearchBuzz beam, but I loved reading about it, and figure anyone working in AI can combine this work with AI and have a great time.

Boston Globe: Chan Zuckerberg philanthropy taps UMass Amherst to create AI scientific research tool. “A philanthropy started by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan has awarded a $5.5 million grant to the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Center for Data Science to create a free tool that would make millions of published scientific and medical findings easily accessible to researchers worldwide. The project, called Computable Knowledge, would use a branch of artificial intelligence known as knowledge representation and reasoning to create a navigable map of scientific findings from millions of new and historical research articles. The project aims to help scientists stay current on new research and to make it easier to find previously unknown connections between findings in genetics, diseases, drugs, and treatments.”

The Guardian: Just one in four Britons trust news on social media, finds survey. “Only 24% of the UK population trust the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram when looking for news and information, a survey has found. The Edelman trust barometer, published on Monday, suggests the days when social media was championed as an enabler of citizen journalists and for its role in the Arab Spring have passed.” Good morning, Internet…

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