NEW RESOURCES

WBNS: Online database connects public with artwork around Columbus. “On the site, users can search by category (mural, sculpture, fountain), attribute (free parking, indoors, ADA accessible) or by location via an interactive map. Each entry includes a picture of the public artwork, information about it and the location.”

Boing Boing: Open archive of 240,000 hours’ worth of talk radio, including 2.8 billion words of machine-transcription. “A group of MIT Media Lab researchers have published Radiotalk, a massive corpus of talk radio audio with machine-generated transcriptions, with a total of 240,000 hours’ worth of speech, marked up with machine-readable metadata.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Amazon now lets you stop human review of your Alexa recordings. “Amazon said Friday it will now let customers disable human review of their Alexa recordings, following similar steps by Apple for Siri and Google for its Assistant.”

CBR: Adobe Gets Serious about Data Science, Pulls Two Tools out of Beta Mode. “You might associate Adobe with creative software suites, but the company’s bid to help business users deliver the kind of personalised marketing most brands now crave, is leading it ever deeper into the data science realm – with the company today making two tools generally available that were first teased in a beta release late last year.”

Engadget: Facebook wants Quill to be a one-stop shop for VR animators. “Facebook’s Quill is a tool that helps artists create virtual reality illustrations and animations, and the latest version will offer them more ways to realize their visions.”

USEFUL STUFF

Genealogy’s Star: The Ultimate Digital Preservation Guide, Part Seven — Technological Challenges: Cameras. “There are two main ways to digitize paper records: cameras and dedicated scanners. In this post, I am going to write about digital cameras as they may be used for document preservation.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Texas Tech Today: Vietnam Center & Archive Oral Histories Will Soon Be More Accessible. “Thanks to a $95,740 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Vietnam Center & Archive (VNCA) will now be able to transcribe, edit and publish online its entire backlogged collection of oral history interviews conducted by the VNCA Oral History Project, which includes a diverse array of Vietnam veterans and their family members.”

Techdirt: Don’t Let This Get Lost In The Shuffle: The Data Transfer Project Is Expanding, And Could Help Create Real Competition Online. “While lots of people are angling to break up the big internet companies in the belief that will lead to more competition, we’ve long argued that such a plan is unlikely to work. Instead, if you truly want more competition you need to end the ability of these companies to lock up your data. Instead, we need to allow third parties access so that the data is not stuck in silos, but where users themselves both have control and alternative options that they can easily move to. That’s why we were quite interested a year ago when Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter officially announced the Data Transfer Project (which initially began as a Google project, but expanded to those other providers a year ago).”

The Verge: TikTok turns one: its first 12 months, as told through TikToks. “The short clips can originate from anywhere: it might be a snippet from a song (which can go on to live in a Spotify playlist of popular TikTok songs), the audio from a Vine (RIP), or a clip from a viral YouTube video. The best (or cringiest) challenges might get edited into TikTok compilations on YouTube. It’s all part of a beautiful content circle of life. These are the top hashtags for every month that TikTok has been in our lives, and the TikToks encapsulate how the platform has grown in the past year.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TechCrunch: A newly discovered hacking group is targeting energy and telecoms companies. “There’s a new hacking group on the radar targeting telecommunications and oil and gas companies across Africa and the Middle East. Industrial security company Dragos, which discovered the group, calls it ‘Hexane,’ but remains largely tight-lipped on its activities.”

Tampa Bay Times: Florida launches school security database with student discipline, health, social media info . “The Florida Department of Education rolled out its database of student information, called the Florida Schools Safety Portal, late Thursday, designed to enhance school security in the wake of last year’s shooting in Parkland.”

Irish Legal News: Lawyers claim man’s legal entitlement to anonymity breached by Google. “Lawyers for a man acquitted of rape last year have told a court that his legal entitlement to anonymity is being breached by Google search results of his name.” Good morning, Internet…

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