NEW RESOURCES

Thanks to Esther S. for hipping me to this one. From Business Insider: 2 pregnant cofounders raised $9 million for a startup that tackles a universal problem for millennial parents. “Winnie is a tool for finding daycares and preschools nearby. Parents can access tuition rates, licensing status, and reviews left by other parents, as well as search openings at local centers. The startup has raised a fresh $9 million in Series A funding to build more tools for providers on the service, after reporting a year of explosive growth.”

Atlanta Studies: A Powerful New Community Resource to Explore Atlanta’s 1960s History: Introducing the Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. Digital Archive. “‘With unflinching courage, he guided this city through some of its most turbulent waters,’ Coretta Scott King once said of Ivan Allen Jr., Atlanta’s 52nd mayor who oversaw her husband’s funeral before the eyes of the world.1 In office from 1962-1970, Allen governed during a transformative period in the city’s history, a crucial phase of development marked by economic dynamism.”

Spectrum: Decades-old collection of monkey brain tissue goes virtual. “The material comes from Pasko Rakic and the late Patricia Goldman-Rakic, who began studying brain development in macaques more than 50 years ago. Their original collection contains roughly 300 brains. About 10,000 slides from 185 of these sectioned specimens have been digitized so far, says Alvaro Duque, a research scientist in neuroscience at Yale University.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Patreon’s CEO is launching a $50,000 annual grant for creators. “Patreon CEO and co-founder Jack Conte touts his crowdfunding platform (as Patreon describes it, ‘membership’ platform) as a place where ‘creators get paid’ instead of being subject to the whims of advertisers or recommendation algorithms. Today, Conte is announcing a much more individual attempt to fund creators that’s not formally related to Patreon but fits squarely into its vision for how artists work today.”

Tubefilter: IGTV Rolls Out Tools Enabling Creators To Publish Videos As An Episodic Series. “The update includes: the ability to turn on notifications for clips within an IGTV series; an organizational tool that will allow creators to add a series title badge to videos (so that they’re differentiated from standalone IGTV videos); and a ‘continued viewing’ feature, which will automatically play the next episode in a series after the previous installment concludes.”

Engadget: Google wants to be your guide to Champions League soccer. “Search for ‘Champions League’ on Google and you now get a whole suite of tools to follow the competition, including the usual scores, schedules and standings as well as video recaps and detailed news like club lineups and trade rumors. A new wheel makes it easy to see who’s facing who.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: How to Tell What Everyone Is Talking About on Social Media. “If you combine FOMO with aphasia, you get the feeling of going on Twitter or Reddit or Facebook, seeing everyone clearly talking about something, but not knowing what that thing is. You check the trending topics, but they’re just full of posts saying ‘Why is #EatMyBlempglorf trending!?’ Here’s how to figure out what the hell is going on.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: Facebook Pledges $1 Billion to Ease Housing Crisis Inflamed by Big Tech. “Facebook said on Tuesday that it would give $1 billion in a package of grants, loans and land toward easing California’s severe crunch by building an estimated 20,000 housing units for middle- and lower-income households.”

Mashable: As big climate trial starts, Exxon buys Google ads to defend itself . “Though the oil giant’s scientists have understood the consequences of emitting prodigious amounts of carbon into the atmosphere since the 1950s, Exxon began to sow doubt about climate science in the 1980s. This latest Google ad campaign is a continuation of Exxon’s decades-long efforts to influence the public’s perception of climate change.”

AdAge: Gmail hooked us on free storage. Now Google is making us pay. “Google lured billions of consumers to its digital services by offering copious free cloud storage. That’s beginning to change. The Alphabet Inc. unit has whittled down some free storage offers in recent months, while prodding more users toward a new paid cloud subscription called Google One. That’s happening as the amount of data people stash online continues to soar.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Facebook must face $35B facial-recognition lawsuit following court ruling. “Facebook’s most recent attempt to extricate itself from a potentially landmark lawsuit has come to a dead end, as a federal court declined to hear another appeal to stop the $35 billion class action.”

University of California Davis: Hobbyist DNA Services May Be Open to Genetic Hacking. “… Professor Graham Coop and postdoctoral researcher Michael ‘Doc’ Edge at the University of California, Davis, Department of Evolution and Ecology warn that these ‘direct to consumer’ services could be vulnerable to a sort of genetic hacking. By uploading selected DNA sequences, they said, it may be possible, for example, to pull out the genomes of most people in a database or to identify people with genetic variants associated with specific traits such as Alzheimer’s disease.” Good morning, Internet…

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