NEW RESOURCES

Asbarez: ‘The Christian Architecture of the Levant’ Website Launched. “The initial 3,300 photographs, plans and maps of 118 sites presented on the Website are composed of secular, ecclesiastical and military construction within Turkey, from the Byzantine, Cilician Armenian and late Medieval periods. By exposing this material to the widest possible audience, the donors hope to encourage dialogue, provide documentation for publications, and facilitate efforts for the preservation of these endangered monuments.”

Natural History Museum Blog: Digitising Butterfly types of the 21st century |Digital Collections Programme. “Some of the Museum’s invaluable butterfly reference material, previously only accessible to a handful of scientists, has been released onto the Museum’s Data Portal. Over 90% of these specimens were designated as types in the 21st Century, but this is the first time that images of many of these species have been freely accessible to the global community.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Neowin: Telegram 5.10 released with silent messages, slow mode, admin titles and more. “Telegram has announced the availability of version 5.10 of its app for Android and iOS. The new update brings a slew of features including silent messages, slow mode, admin titles, video timestamps and thumbnail scrubbing, animated emoji, a new attachment menu on Android, and customisable accent colours on iOS.”

The Register: Bit of a time-saver: LibreOffice emits 6.3 with new features, loading and UI boosts. “The Document Foundation has made some tweaks to improve file loading and save times in its word processor and spreadsheet programs in the latest version of LibreOffice, 6.3.”

USEFUL STUFF

Make Tech Easier: 7 Free Alternatives to Microsoft OneNote. “Microsoft OneNote is an easy go-to for those looking to bring some organization into their lives. It’s a recognizable brand, it’s free, and it’s integrated into the world’s most popular operating system. But maybe you want to break out of Microsoft’s watchful ecosystem and try something a little different?”

MakeUseOf: 5 Time Trackers to Stop Wasting Time and Improve Time Management . “It can be difficult to estimate time wastage if you aren’t religiously tracking your minutes and hours. But if you start looking at your day as 10-minute time blocks instead of 24 full hours, then you might be able to pinpoint the time leakage. Or instead of writing off 10 wasted minutes every day, a smart calculator can show how that adds up to days or weeks of missed vacation time.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CNN: Facebook offers media outlets millions to license content, WSJ reports. “Facebook has reportedly offered several news outlets millions of dollars in exchange for the rights to display their content in a news section it plans on adding.”

CNBC: Google employees weighed free speech concerns before the 2016 elections, internal emails show. “Google employees appear to have foreseen many of the company’s political challenges in the run-up to Donald Trump’s presidential election, according to an internal email discussion obtained by CNBC.”

NLM In Focus: Meet the PubMed Central Team: Perfectionists with a Sense of Humor. “Data constantly comes in from publishers and vendors that need to be processed by the PubMed Central (PMC) team. These data add up quickly, adding more than 40,000 articles each month to NLM’s full-text digital archive of journal literature. In order for the article data to be publicly accessible as quickly as possible, the PMC team needs to work with precision and perfection.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Motherboard: Exclusive: Critical U.S. Election Systems Have Been Left Exposed Online Despite Official Denials. “The top voting machine company in the country insists that its election systems are never connected to the internet. But researchers found 35 of the systems have been connected to the internet for months and possibly years, including in some swing states.”

Bloomberg BusinessWeek: I Tried Hiding From Silicon Valley in a Pile of Privacy Gadgets. “As the spy gear piles up on my desk, my 10-year-old son asks me what my mission is. ‘I’m hiding,’ I whisper, pointing in the direction I think is north, which is something I should probably know as a spy. ‘From Silicon Valley.'” Quite a read.

RESEARCH & OPINION

IOL: Fresh hope for African big cat populations – database. “‘These records provide some hope that lion populations are beginning to establish and increase in areas where hope was lost,’ said Samantha Page-Nicholson, the co-ordinator of the African Lion Database, a platform to consolidate critical data on the iconic species. It was launched in October by the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT) under the auspices of the Cat Specialist Group of the IUCN’s Species Survival Commission.” Good morning, Internet…

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