NEW RESOURCES

New Hampshire Public Radio: Was Your Seafood Caught With Slave Labor? New Database Helps Retailers Combat Abuse. “The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, known best for its red, yellow and green sustainable seafood-rating scheme, is unveiling its first Seafood Slavery Risk Tool on Thursday. It’s a database designed to help corporate seafood buyers assess the risk of forced labor, human trafficking and hazardous child labor in the seafood they purchase.”

WGRZ: College creates state’s first slavery history database. “The New York Slavery Index, created by CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, provides records dating back to the year 1525 all the way through the American Civil War. WNBC-TV reports the database includes records, documents, narratives and other sources that identify individual enslaved people and their owners.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Twitter now says 1.4 million people interacted with Russian trolls during 2016 presidential campaign. “Twitter has now updated the number of people engaging with Russian trolls during the 2016 presidential campaign to 1.4 million. That’s more than double the initial 677,775 Twitter originally said had seen, followed or retweeted one of these accounts earlier this month. The new number reflects those who may have also replied to or @ mentioned these accounts.”

Google Blog: Even better translations in Chrome, with one tap. “Today, neural machine translation improvement is coming to Translate in Chrome for nine more language pairs. Neural machine translation will be used for most pages to and from English for Indonesian and eight Indian languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu. This means higher quality translations on pages containing everything from song lyrics to news articles to cricket discussions.”

USEFUL STUFF

National Library of Medicine: Want to do more with PubMed?. “Want to extract just the PubMed data you need, in the format you want? Dreaming of creating your own PubMed tool or interface, but don’t know where to start? Check out the NLM Webinar ‘Insider’s Guide to Accessing NLM Data—Welcome to E-utilities for PubMed’ on February 13, 2018.”

Lifehacker: How to Find Out If a Twitter Bot Is Impersonating You Online. “Twitter bots have been around for almost as long as Twitter itself, and plenty of them are funny, provocative, or downright useful. But just like everything else online, there’s a dark side to the world of Twitter bots, as a recent report from The New York Times made clear. Here’s why you need to be watching out for Twitter bot impersonators, how to find them, and what you can do about it.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Sounds about par. From The Next Web: Facebook banned cryptocurrency ads but it still shows them anyhow . “In an interesting turn of events, Facebook announced that it is removing all cryptocurrency and ICO-related ads from its platform claiming such content is ‘frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices.’ But it turns out the some of these ads continue to slip past the social media titan.”

Business Insider: Google’s parent company Alphabet is exploring a relationship with Saudi Arabia’s oil giant to build a ‘tech hub’ in the Middle East. “Google’s parent company Alphabet is exploring a deal with Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Aramco to build data centers in the Middle East, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. The report says Alphabet wants to help Aramco build a ‘tech hub’ in the region as competition from other companies like Amazon heats up. The tech hub could reportedly include data centers built as a part of the partnership, though the specifics of which company would construct and operate the cloud servers isn’t clear.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Vanderbilt: New database to help children who are deaf or hard of hearing. “The multi-center study, called LSL-DR for Listening and Spoken Language Data Repository, is overseen by Tamala Bradham, DHA, PhD, a quality and safety adviser in VUMC’s Center for Quality, Safety and Risk Prevention. Educators, hearing healthcare providers and researchers will be able to use the database to assess educational, speech and language outcomes in children who are deaf or hard of hearing, with the goal of having comparable speech and language skills as their typical-hearing peers, she said.”

Phys .org: Instagram users less likely to engage with political or controversial images, study finds. “Although an average of 4.2 billion ‘likes’ occur on the popular media-sharing app Instagram every day, researchers still are trying to understand why certain types of content attract more engagement than others. News organizations in particular are trying to determine what strategies work best for cutting through social media clutter to get the news out to their audiences. A new study from the University of Missouri recently found that although Instagram users vary on their purposes for using the platform, the majority are drawn to Instagram for social news and entertainment and are less likely to engage with political or controversial images.” Good afternoon, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!