NEW RESOURCES

Sunlight Foundation: National Archives publishes online dashboard of its investigations into lost, altered or destroyed public records. “To engage in a monumental understatement, it’s a big deal for the public’s information to be altered or disposed of without justified intention and public notice of the removal. In spring 2018, for the first time the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) has begun using the Internet to inform the American public about its ongoing investigations of unauthorized dispositions in an online dashboard. In a year that continues to be marked by regression on transparency and accountability under the Trump administration, this is a welcome development that shines a bright light on a matter of significant public concern and shows continued commitment by NARA to its open government plan.”

H-NET: “La Gazette Royale d’Hayti” by Marlene L. Daut. “The La Gazette Royale project, which I first began to develop in 2014, is designed to gather together and in one place for the first time all of the known issues of the two newspapers published during Henry Christophe’s rule of northern Haiti, as well as the six different versions of the Almanach Royal d’Hayti issued by the royal press. The most comprehensive collection of La Gazette Officielle d’Hayti and La Gazette Royale d’Hayti to appear in a single repository, there are 81 separate issues gathered on this website. They have been collected from archives located around the Atlantic world, including France, Haiti, England, Ireland, Denmark, and more than a half dozen U.S. states. This project is not solely designed to be an archive of these materials, however. It also proposes to take visitors on a digital journal through Haiti’s early print culture by providing brief descriptions and commentaries to accompany each publication. ”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

New Scientist: Biggest ever 3D map of the galaxy pinpoints 1.7 billion stars. “We’re building a map of our galaxy, one star at a time. The European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite orbits Earth 1.5 million kilometres away, staring at millions of stars every day to make a 3D map of our galaxy. On 25 April it released its second batch of data. In 2016, Gaia first released data from its star catalog spanning 14 months of constant observation. It included information about the brightness and positions in the sky of 1.1 billion stars, and more detailed data on the distances and motions of the brightest two million of those. This new data release is even more robust, covering another 22 months of observation time. It includes more stars than the first release, and the colours, temperatures, and radii for some of those stars.”

Nextgov: Google Maps Unveils Tool to Locate Drug Disposal Sites. “The opioid crisis continues to have a grim effect on millions of Americans. Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control revealed that 63,632 people in the U.S. died from a drug overdose in 2016, with two-thirds of those overdoses involving some form of opioid. Google announced Wednesday it will be partnering with the Drug Enforcement Agency to create a new tool to help reduce opioid consumption.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

SEO Roundtable: Google Shows Date Of Content In Search Results From The Future. “Many people think Google is able to predict the future now, based on how much data they have and their AI work. But here is an example of Google showing a date snippet a couple weeks in the future from today, in their search results. A search for [may 2018 ps plus games] returns a snippet that has the date May 5, 2018.” Anyone who’s used Google knows its date results can be goofy, but I don’t remember seeing a future date too many times.

Tahawul Tech: UAE Federal National Council calls for stricter social media regulations. “Members of the Federal National Council has reportedly called for stricter regulations for social media platforms. The FNC endeavours to combat online misinformation, fake news and hate speech through stricter regulations on the platform.”

Government Technology: How Government Can Deal with Tangled Webs of Agency Social Media Accounts. “Until fairly recently, the government social media landscape was essentially a veritable Wild West of hundreds of ‘rogue’ agency accounts, little to no oversight and even questions as to who was responsible for messages going out to the public. During two separate sessions at the Government Social Media Conference April 25 and 26 in Denver, experts from state and county governments discussed how they are overseeing their respective channels and how they decide when it’s time to shut them down.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Tom’s Hardware: US Senators Introduce Social Media Privacy And Consumer Rights Act. “U.S. Senators John Kennedy of Louisiana and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota introduced the Social Media Privacy and Consumer Rights Act of 2018, which is supposed to improve transparency, strengthen consumers’ recourse options in case of a data breach, and ensure that companies are compliant with privacy policies that protect consumers.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

PLOS: Under the Weather? How social media sentiments reflect weather patterns. “Grey skies getting you down? Research suggests that weather may impact our emotional state. But in a new PLOS ONE study, Patrick Baylis from the University of British Columbia, Nick Obradovich from MIT, and colleagues wanted to find out if specific weather conditions are associated with the positive or negative feelings expressed via social media. The researchers gathered 2.4 billion posts from Facebook and 1.1 billion from Twitter between 2009 and 2016. They used a categorization tool to analyze the sentiment for each post based on its positive and negative keywords. They also examined weather data for the location and date of each post to look for any associations.” 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!