NEW RESOURCES

Scottsbluff Star-Herald: Nebraska unveils Open Educational Resources Hub. “Nebraska is furthering its commitment to equitable access to open educational resources and services with the launch of the Nebraska OER Hub, a collaboration between the Educational Service Unit Coordinating Council and the Nebraska Department of Education.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

University of California: UC terminates subscriptions with world’s largest scientific publisher in push for open access to publicly funded research . “As a leader in the global movement toward open access to publicly funded research, the University of California is taking a firm stand by deciding not to renew its subscriptions with Elsevier. Despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s key goal: securing universal open access to UC research while containing the rapidly escalating costs associated with for-profit journals.”

ProPublica: Want to Start a Collaborative Journalism Project? We’re Building Tools to Help.. “Today we’re announcing new tools, documentation and training to help news organizations collaborate on data journalism projects. Newsrooms, long known for being cutthroat competitors, have been increasingly open to the idea of working with one another, especially on complex investigative stories. But even as interest in collaboration grows, many journalists don’t know where to begin or how to run a sane, productive partnership. And there aren’t many good tools available to help them work together. That’s where our project comes in.”

USEFUL STUFF

Popular Science: How to block toxic comments all over the web. “Some corners of the internet act as bastions of healthy discussion, but out there on the wild web, discourse appears worse than ever before. If you’re tired of feeling your blood boil every time you get to the bottom of an article or open up your social media app of choice, here’s how to clean up your internet conversations.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Atlantic: Momo Is Not Trying to Kill Children. “To any concerned parents reading this: Do not worry. The ‘Momo challenge’ is a recurring viral hoax that has been perpetuated by local news stations and scared parents around the world. This entire cycle of shock, terror, and outrage about Momo even took place before, less than a year ago: Last summer, local news outlets across the country reported that the Momo challenge was spreading among teens via WhatsApp. Previously, rumors about the challenge spread throughout Latin America and Spanish-speaking countries.”

CTV News Winnipeg: Province digitizing centuries-old trading post records to mark Manitoba 150. “The province of Manitoba will celebrate its sesquicentennial in 2020 and plans to mark the anniversary are well underway. The Hudson’s Bay Company Archives (HBCA), which is part of the Archives of Manitoba, is getting help from The Hudson’s Bay Company History Foundation for a mass digitization project, one of the first Manitoba 150 projects. HBCA is digitizing over 1000 reels of microfilm copies of pre-1870 trading post records, making them available to the world online.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Billings Gazette: Montana Senate nixes funding to establish database for missing Native people. “A Busby lawmaker’s proposal for a grant program to establish a database of missing Native people among Montana’s Indian reservations failed to advance from a state legislative panel Wednesday.”

SC Magazine: Dow Jones database holding 2.4 million records of politically exposed persons. “A cybersecurity researcher found the Down Jones Watchlist residing in an open Elasticsearch database containing 2.4 million records of politicians, criminals and national and international sanction lists. Independent researcher Bob Diachenko reported on his Security Discovery blog that he came across the 4.4GB dataset on February 22. The files were not secured and could be found using any public IoT search engine, he said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CNN: Instagram is leading social media platform for child grooming. “More children are being groomed on Instagram than on other social media platforms, new figures suggest, leading to calls for tech companies to face stronger child welfare regulations. Overall, police in England and Wales have recorded more than 5,000 cases of online grooming since having sexual communications with a child became a crime in April 2017, child protection charity the NSPCC found.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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