NEW RESOURCES

The Sunday Times: Photographer raises the bar by snapping every Irish pub. “Leopold Bloom, the fictional protagonist in James Joyce’s Ulysses, mused that a good puzzle would be to ‘cross Dublin without passing a pub’. Far from trying to solve it, one photographer from the city is setting off on a six-year quest to visit and snap every pub in the country.” The article is paywalled, but enough is visible for you to get the salients.

DiverNet: Sealife Collection Wants Your Photos . “Hoping that underwater photographers will be moved to contribute their images to form the ultimate marine-life database is a new Spanish-based online platform called the Sealife Collection. The initiative is being run in partnership with the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), which ‘provides the taxonomic backbone to the database and daily updates to the taxonomy’, according to Sealife Collection’s Director Bernat Garrigós.”

Imperial & Global Forum: Amazing new digital archive of political maps for imperial and global historians. “In case you missed it (I was tweeting about it A LOT last week), Cornell Library’s Digital Collections have just made available an amazing archive – the PJ Mode Collection – consisting of around 800 political maps that should be on the radar of anyone working on imperial and global history. They. Are. Awesome.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Reuters: Russia plans stiffer fines for tech firms that break rules – sources. “Russia plans to impose stiffer fines on technology firms that fail to comply with Russian laws, sources familiar with the plans said, raising the stakes in the Kremlin’s fight with global tech giants such as Facebook (FB.O) and Google.”

Ahval News: Turkish journalists turn to social media to escape state crackdown. “More journalists in Turkey are turning to social media platforms such as YouTube and Periscope to broadcast and share their take on the latest news amid a harsh media landscape. Since the July 2016 coup attempt, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has shut down more than 175 news outlets, leaving more than 12,000 media workers without a job. Unemployment in journalism is among the highest rates of all sectors, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request. “Recently, I found a typo in the District of Columbia’s legal code and corrected it using GitHub. My feat highlights the groundbreaking way the District manages its legal code.”

The Verge: Google settled with a contractor after complaints of racial profiling. “Google settled a racial discrimination claim brought by a contractor who says that the company failed to adequately protect him from being ‘treated as a terror suspect,’ while on the job for Google Maps, reports The Guardian.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Economist: Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history. “The social-networking giant, which runs Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger as well as its own core service, was thriving. But since January it has become mired in a series of controversies, misjudgments and missteps. It became clear that it had done too little to stop Russian interference in America’s election in 2016. It had to admit that it had shared the personal data of 90m users with outside firms without permission. It later suffered a data breach affecting 50m users.”

New Scientist: Time to break academic publishing’s stranglehold on research. “HERE is a trivia question for you: what is the most profitable business in the world? You might think oil, or maybe banking. You would be wrong. The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent. The reason it is so lucrative is because most of the costs of its content is picked up by taxpayers. Publicly funded researchers do the work, write it up and judge its merits. And yet the resulting intellectual property ends up in the hands of the publishers.”

TechCrunch: Tech giants offer empty apologies because users can’t quit . “true apology consists of a sincere acknowledgement of wrong-doing, a show of empathic remorse for why you wronged and the harm it caused, and a promise of restitution by improving ones actions to make things right. Without the follow-through, saying sorry isn’t an apology, it’s a hollow ploy for forgiveness. That’s the kind of ‘sorry’ we’re getting from tech giants — an attempt to quell bad PR and placate the afflicted, often without the systemic change necessary to prevent repeated problems. Sometimes it’s delivered in a blog post. Sometimes it’s in an executive apology tour of media interviews. But rarely is it in the form of change to the underlying structures of a business that caused the issue.” 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!