NEW RESOURCES

EurekAlert: New platform by NYU Tandon, Frick, brings art history research into the digital age . “Can 21st century data science and visualization revolutionize the impact of art created millennia ago? Experts in the VIDA (Visualization Imaging and Data Analytics) research center at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering and art historians at the Frick Art Reference Library, one of the most prestigious art institutions in New York City, answered in the affirmative – and decided to offer the fruits of their digital collaboration free of charge to art historians, curators, and researchers worldwide.”

Glasgow Live: Glasgow University makes Gaelic audio archive freely available. “Their songs and stories speak of a different time. Living memories passed down from parent to child over generations. Now audio recordings of the traditions of crofters, farm workers and fishermen, in English and Gaelic, along with some Scots, were today (27 August) put online by the University of Glasgow.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bing Blog: Bing helps you learn more about the news in less time. “Being an informed consumer of the news is more challenging today than it used to be. We live in a busy world where dozens of headlines compete for our attention every day. On top of that, it’s difficult to know if you’re getting all sides of a story or just leaning into an echo chamber, and it can feel like a full-time job to seek out various points of view. At Bing, we want to empower users to get an overview of the news in less time. That’s why we built the Bing spotlight that provides overviews of news topics that you can see right in the Bing search results when you search for major developing news stories.”

Mashable: Facebook bans Myanmar military commander for inciting violence. “Facebook has just removed a number of Facebook pages belonging to individuals and groups in Myanmar for spreading hate speech and fake news against Rohingya Muslims in the country. In a post titled ‘Removing Myanmar Military Officials From Facebook’ on its Newsroom site, Facebook announced it had removed 52 Pages,18 accounts, and an Instagram profile related to spreading the type of misinformation used to incite violence and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. ”

Digital North Carolina: Call for Nominations – North Carolina Newspaper Digitization, 2018. “It’s time to announce our annual round of microfilmed newspaper digitization! As in previous years, we’re asking cultural heritage institutions in the state to nominate papers from their communities to be digitized.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 9 Simple Tweaks to Speed Up Firefox Immediately. “Nearly all web browsers have similar speeds when actually browsing the web, so ‘speed’ actually comes down to the performance and how you use the program. Whether you’re already a Firefox user or switching from Chrome to Firefox, this guide will tell you how to speed it up.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BBC: What is ‘primitive technology’ and why do we love it?. “‘Hi guys, welcome to my YouTube channel. Make sure you like and subscribe.’ This is the familiar opening patter of hundreds of fresh-faced YouTubers waving down the camera to their legions of fans. However, in an altogether quieter corner of the site, millions of people are watching a silent man banging rocks and sticks together. Welcome to the world of primitive technology videos.”

Quartz: The lucrative new world of YouTube celebrity boxing. “The fight scene is looking pretty good for the rest of this year. Next month, we have the boxing rematch between Saúl ‘Canelo’ Álvarez and Gennady Gennadyevich Golovkin. Then, WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder will face the unorthodox Tyson Fury. And in mixed-martial arts, Conor McGregor returns to the Octagon after two years to face the undefeated Russian Khabib Nurmagomedov in October. But for millions of casual fans, the only fight they care about is a clash between two non-athletes who made their names talking nonsense on YouTube.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Verge: How An International Hacker Network Turned Stolen Press Releases Into $100 Million. “Newswires like Business Wire are clearinghouses for corporate information, holding press releases, regulatory announcements, and other market-moving information under strict embargo before sending it out to the world. Over a period of at least five years, three US newswires were hacked using a variety of methods from SQL injections and phishing emails to data-stealing malware and illicitly acquired login credentials.”

Canadian Lawyer: How to use Google’s ‘My Activity’ to your advantage in litigation. “In an effort to spearhead the process prior to bringing the motion to compel production before a judge, given that Google’s My Activity has been in the news quite a bit of late, here are some of the ways that lawyers can profit from access to Google’s platform. The possibilities in knowing what plaintiffs and defendants purport to know, where they are and what they’re up to are endless.”

Ars Technica: Fortnite’s Android vulnerability leads to Google/Epic Games spat. “Epic Games’ popular shooter Fortnite has been out on Android for just a few weeks, and already there are concrete examples of some of the security fears brought about by the game’s unique distribution method. Google disclosed a vulnerability in the Fortnite Installer that could trick the installer into installing something other than Fortnite.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Atlantic: Online Bettors Can Sniff Out Weak Psychology Studies. “Consider the new results from the Social Sciences Replication Project, in which 24 researchers attempted to replicate social-science studies published between 2010 and 2015 in Nature and Science—the world’s top two scientific journals. The replicators ran much bigger versions of the original studies, recruiting around five times as many volunteers as before. They did all their work in the open, and ran their plans past the teams behind the original experiments. And ultimately, they could only reproduce the results of 13 out of 21 studies—62 percent. As it turned out, that finding was entirely predictable.” What a fascinating story. Good morning, Internet…

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