NEW RESOURCES

Rutgers University: Rutgers Digitizes Roman Coin Collection, Making it Accessible to the World. “The Rutgers University Libraries have digitized an invaluable collection of 1,250 coins from the ancient Roman Republic, some dating to the beginning of coinage – and just time for the Ides of March.”

India Times: Digital archive brings rare Carnatic compositions to life. “Thanks to [KM] Soundaryavalli’s great granddaughter Bhargavi Raman, a lawyer and musician, students and lovers of Carnatic music will now have access to her 500 original compositions in Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit via a digital archive … Born in 1914, KM Soundaryavalli is one of the few women composers of Carnatic music, a tribe that never got its due recognition during its time.” If you’d like a bit more information on Carnatic music, you can get an overview here.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Memeburn: Google Lens is now available on iOS via Google Photos. “Last week, Google slapped its AI-powered camera feature Google Lens onto all Android phones running its Photos app. Now, the company is peeking over the fence towards Cupertino, and giving its rival platform some of the augmented reality love. Google Lens is now available to ‘preview’ on the Apple iOS version of Google Photos, the company announced in a tweet.”

SEO Roundtable: Google Promises To Review Feedback On Zero Results. “As you know, Google is now sometimes showing no search results on the search results page – instead, Google is just showing answers for queries related to time, conversions and calculations. Then, if you want to see search results on the search results page (I keep saying that because it sounds like an oxymoron to not show search results on a search results page – sorry), you need to click ‘show all results.'”

USEFUL STUFF

Family Tree Magazine: Photo Detective: Dating Women’s Clothing. “Having trouble identifying the women in your family photos? Clothing can help you date the photos and narrow your search. Here are three details to look for.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Globe and Mail: How social media is driving the culture of public art. “If you live in a major metropolis, you’ve most likely seen those aggressively colourful walls cropping up near coffee houses, gastropubs and boutiques, some with a riot of pastel hearts, others with stencilled angels’ wings to be “worn” by anyone who positions their shoulders underneath. There are graphic walls, too, with feel-good aperçus such as ‘Love Life’ and ‘You Are a Goddess Living in a City of Angels.’ These walls are Grandma’s corny crochet pillows writ large, yet people by the thousands flock to them every month to snap photos. In my neighbourhood, one such wall – full of iridescent pink, orange and blue hearts – can be found kitty-corner to a high-end coffee house, but you can barely see the wall for the crowds that gather like selfie supplicants making pilgrimage. This is not guerrilla street art, or murals commissioned by local government. This is Instagram art, which exists solely to be photographed and posted to social media.”

Huffington Post: The Secret Struggles Behind Instagram’s Most Beautiful Pies. “Social media has given us a bottomless thirst for symmetry, beauty and unattainable perfection, and one medium in particular speaks to that desire. It comes in the form of something one might call Instagram ‘pie porn.’ It’s the art of taking beautiful photos of perfectly made pies, which admittedly sounds delightfully easy. But calling it easy would be doing its creators an injustice. While bakers may be kind souls by nature, bakers who bake for Instagram are also forced to battle some truly weird demons of both science and social media varieties.”

USA Today: Russian Twitter trolls stoked racial tension in wake of Milwaukee rioting before 2016 election. “The fires of the Sherman Park unrest in Milwaukee had barely burned out in August 2016 before Russian Twitter trolls sought political gain by stoking the flames of racial division. A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel review found that Russia-linked accounts — including one named in a recent federal indictment — sent more than 30 tweets to spread racial animus, blame Democrats for the chaos and amplify the voices of conservatives like former Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. who were commenting on Sherman Park.”

Washington Post: Has Twitter tainted the public intellectual?. “Wednesday, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, announced in the Wall Street Journal that he would be stepping down in the summer of 2019. This announcement led to a tsunami of encomiums on Twitter…”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Las Vegas Review-Journal: Long-public Nevada arrest database made secret after RJ request. “A database of Nevada arrest records that was open to public inspection for decades has been made secret by a new state law. The Nevada Department of Public Safety, which collects the information from law enforcement agencies across the state, won approval of the new law after the Las Vegas Review-Journal requested arrest and conviction records last year.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CNBC: Social media may be making you overspend—and it’s not just because of the ads. “Rent, credit card bills and student loans call can make it more difficult to save money, especially for younger people. Now, according to a new study from the Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America, you can add social media to that list, too.”

Google Research Blog: Using Deep Learning to Facilitate Scientific Image Analysis. “In ‘Assessing Microscope Image Focus Quality with Deep Learning’, we trained a deep neural network to rate the focus quality of microscopy images with higher accuracy than previous methods. We also integrated the pre-trained TensorFlow model with plugins in Fiji (ImageJ) and CellProfiler, two leading open source scientific image analysis tools that can be used with either a graphical user interface or invoked via scripts.” Good morning, 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!