NEW RESOURCES

Curbed: New tool helps LGBT community parse local non-discrimination housing laws. “Trulia, the real estate website, has released a new tool to help the LGBT community understand non-discrimination laws when it comes to housing, employment, and public accommodations. While national housing and employment non-discrimination laws protect classes like sex, race, age, color, religion, and national origin, they do not offer explicit protection for people who identify as LGBT.”

New-to-me: a database of baseball pitcher GIFs. “Pitcher List is a baseball analytics site created by Nick Pollack. It houses the Pitcher GIF database, which features GIFs of every pitcher’s repertoire in the majors, and weekly rankings of the top fantasy players each week.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Medium: Medium + Unsplash. “Today is an exciting day for storytellers. The 400,000+ high-resolution photos on Unsplash are now available in Medium. If you’re writing a story on Medium and you want to add a photo, simply click the search icon and select the photo you want.”

SEO Roundtable: Bing Multi-Perspective Answers – Like Two Featured Snippets. “Bing wrote about their new Multi-Perspective Answers for their Intelligent Answers set. This is similar to what Google calls ‘featured snippets,’ in case you were wondering. In this case, Bing may show two different answers from two different perspectives side by side. ”

Reuters: Google eyes gaming with ‘Yeti’ streaming service: report. “Alphabet Inc’s Google is developing a subscription-based game streaming service that could work either on its Chromecast or a Google-made console, which is still being developed, the Information website reported on Wednesday.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BuzzFeed: Overseas Fake News Publishers Use Facebook’s Instant Articles To Bring In More Cash. “While some mainstream publishers are abandoning Facebook’s Instant Articles, fake news sites based overseas are taking advantage of the format — and in some cases Facebook itself is earning revenue from their false stories. BuzzFeed News found 29 Facebook pages, and associated websites, that are using Instant Articles to help their completely false stories load faster on Facebook. At least 24 of these pages are also signed up with Facebook Audience Network, meaning Facebook itself earns a share of revenue from the fake news being read on its platform.”

The Verge: Facebook hired a full-time pollster to monitor Zuckerberg’s approval ratings. “Tavis McGinn applied for a job at Facebook last year hoping to work in market research. He had previously spent three years at Google, where he helped large advertisers refine their marketing campaigns across the company’s family of products. But part way through the interview process at Facebook, the recruiter told McGinn the company had something else in mind for him. How would he like to track the public perception of Mark Zuckerberg?”

News BTC: Regulators Pressuring Google To Follow Facebook In Banning Ads Related To Binary Options, ICOs, And Cryptocurrencies . “Following Facebook’s announcement last week that it was banning all advertising for binary options, cryptocurrencies, and initial coin offerings (ICOs), a Canadian regulator has called on Google to do the same.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TechCrunch: Google’s bug bounty programs paid out almost $3M in 2017. “Bug bounty programs are designed to sic security researchers on software and pay them to find vulnerabilities and report back to the sponsor. In return, the researchers are richly rewarded for their findings. In fact, Google’s bug bounty paid out a hefty $2.9 million in bug bounties in 2017.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Emory University: Twitter reveals how future-thinking Americans are and how that affects their decisions. “Individuals who tend to think further into the future are more likely to invest money and to avoid risks, finds a new paper by psychologists at Emory University. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published the research, which tapped big data tools to conduct text analyses of nearly 40,000 Twitter users, and to run online experiments of behavior of people who provided their Twitter handles.”

UC Santa Barbara: Where’s the Bear?. “Consider Sedgwick Ranch Reserve, part of UC Santa Barbara’s Natural Reserve System. A sprawling and pristine 6,000 acres and nine square miles, the protected land used for research and teaching is a veritable nirvana for animals of all kinds. Mountain lions and black bears and deer, oh my. And they are all represented many times over in the reserve’s massive image archive — millions of pictures of thousands of animals, captured by multiple camera traps and dating back more than a decade. But who has time to sort them all? Cue the computer scientists.” Good morning, Internet…

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