NEW RESOURCES

Newswise: UF/IFAS Launches Gulf Marine Animal Tracking Website. “Animal migrations are some of the most dramatic natural events on the planet, from wildebeest on the Serengeti to monarch butterflies traveling to Mexico. In fish, an iconic example of migration is salmon returning to their birth sites in huge numbers to spawn before they die. However, there are still many unknowns in marine animal movement patterns, as their travel occurs underwater and often far offshore. Scientists at the University of Florida are changing this through a collaborative movement ecology research program that started in 2014. It’s called Integrated Tracking of Aquatic Animals in the Gulf of Mexico (iTAG).”

Washington Post: Tracking a sensitive topic: Menstrual health in women. “Girls in low- and middle-income countries lack information about puberty and periods, and affordability, availability and disposal challenges mean that many ­people go without adequate ­hygiene during menstruation. It’s an issue in the United States, too, where ‘menstrual equity’ is a growing policy issue. The website gathers information on menstrual health education and products and innovations designed to address these challenges. Highlights include a database of research studies related to menstrual health management and a thoughtful roundup of settled issues and ongoing debates in the field.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

WordPress 5.2 Beta 3 is now available. “WordPress 5.2 is slated for release on April 30, and we need your help to get there! Thanks to the testing and feedback from everyone who tried beta 2, nearly 40 tickets have been closed since then. Here are the major changes and bug fixes…”

USEFUL STUFF

Quartz: How to create a Twitter feed that will make you a better employee. “The corrosive effect of online filter bubbles are by now well understood. So if you want to challenge your biases for the sake of being a wiser person, you’d better stay abreast of what’s on the minds of people who don’t think like you.” The headline does not do justice to the amount of Twitter resources in this article.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Search Engine Roundtable: Should Google Index The Entire Web & Not Cherry Pick Pages To Index?. “For years and years Google has told us Google doesn’t index all the content and URLs they know about on the web. No just because there is a directive telling them not to but because Google chooses not to index those pages because of various factors like PageRank, duplication, other quality signals. But a WebmasterWorld thread is asking, should they index the whole web?”

RadioFreeEurope: Iran’s Social-Media Struggles Laid Bare By Telegram And Cleric’s Viral Moment. “About a year ago, Iran blocked the highly popular messaging app Telegram, an encrypted tool that half the country’s 81 million people used for sharing news and information, debating in private, and conducting business…. But polling cited by official media and an embarrassing gaffe on state TV suggest that the clerically dominated leadership’s policies on social media and other digital platforms might be missing their mark.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Center for Public Integrity: You Elected Them To Write New Laws. They’re Letting Corporations Do It Instead.. “USA TODAY and the [Arizona] Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law. The investigation examined nearly 1 million bills in all 50 states and Congress using a computer algorithm developed to detect similarities in language. That search – powered by the equivalent of 150 computers that ran nonstop for months – compared known model legislation with bills introduced by lawmakers.”

Engadget: An Instagram bug briefly showed Stories to strangers. “According to the company, the bug “caused a small number of people’s Instagram Stories trays to show accounts they don’t follow.” The full Stories did not load if the accounts were private. Instagram says it corrected the issue in a matter of hours and believes only a small percentage of accounts were impacted. But as TechCrunch points out, 500 million people use Instagram Stories daily, so even a small hiccup like this, could have a far-reaching impact.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EurekAlert: Heads in the cloud: Scientists predict internet of thoughts ‘within decades’ . “Imagine a future technology that would provide instant access to the world’s knowledge and artificial intelligence, simply by thinking about a specific topic or question. Communications, education, work, and the world as we know it would be transformed.” Two scenarios bloom in my mind. One is an amazing utopia of understanding. One is a hellscape. Guess which I’m betting on.

Nieman Lab: What kind of local news is Facebook featuring on Today In? Crime, car crashes, and not too much community. “…what kind of local news is Facebook providing in the places where Today In is live? Crime alerts and court decisions, mostly. The crime-and-courts-and-death beats — often just TEEN MISSING or SEXUAL PREDATOR ON THE LOOSE stuff, barely digested police alerts — represented more than half of the stories in Today In during a week-long experiment I ran recently.” Good evening, Internet…

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