NEW RESOURCES

Education Week Teacher: New Public Data Tool Lets You See What Curricula Schools in Nebraska Are Using. “The interactive instructional materials map, which Nebraska’s education department debuted on Thursday, shows what curricula districts are using for English-language arts, math, and K-8 science. The map is a project of the Nebraska Instructional Materials Collaborative, an ongoing effort to support districts in implementing high-quality, standards-aligned resources.”

FoodNavigator-LATAM: Keeping compliant: Online archive tracks Brazil’s ‘complex’ food regulations. “Alimentus Consultoria is an open-access archive of Brazilian food legislation that can help manufacturers navigate the country’s complex and often over-lapping regulatory landscape, says one expert.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Salon: Federal Toxmap shutters, raising the ire of pollution researchers. “Earlier this year, with little explanation, the NLM announced that it would be ‘retiring’ the Toxmap website on Dec. 16, 2019. The library did not respond directly to queries on Monday about what was meant by “retiring,” but by Tuesday morning, the Toxmap website had been taken down and visitors to the former URL were met with a message acknowledging the closure and pointing visitors to other potential sources of information.” Toxmap was an online app that aggregated pollution data from government agencies.

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: How to Concatenate Data from Multiple Cells in Google Sheets. “In Google Sheets, if you want to link data from multiple cells together, you don’t have to merge them. You can use the CONCAT, CONCATENATE, and JOIN functions to combine them in one cell. These functions range from the simplistic (CONCAT) to the complex (JOIN). CONCATENATE offers the most flexibility, as it allows you to manipulate the linked data with operators and additional content.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Men’s Health: These Influencers Unwittingly Promoted Literal Poison to Their Instagram Followers. “This week, Irish performer and satirist Blindboy Boatclub decided to test out just how uncritical some influencers are of the products they flog on their platforms. In a segment of his BBC program Blindboy Undestroys the World, he selected three British celebrities who got their break on reality TV before making the natural progression to Instagram personalities: Zara Holland from the dating phenomenon Love Island, and Mike Hassini and Lauren Goodger from structured reality show The Only Way Is Essex. Each of these influencers with a fictitious product: a beverage called Cyanora, which included packaging prominently featuring an unusual ingredient: hydrogen cyanide.”

BBC: Hong Kong and mainland China gamers clash on GTA V. “The Hong Kong protests are being played out on Grand Theft Auto (GTA) V online. Players in Hong Kong realised they could dress up as protesters after a new update for the game was released earlier this month. They spread the word on LIHKG – which has been called the Hong Kong version of social news site Reddit – and started organising violent expeditions.”

Yonhap News Agency: Gov’t to integrate databases on victims of Japan’s forced labor . “South Korea will integrate databases on Koreans conscripted as forced labor or soldiers during Japan’s colonial rule, the National Archives of Korea (NAK) said Monday. At present, the databases containing lists of Korean victims of Japan’s wartime forced labor and military conscription are spread among several state institutions, including the NAK, the National Memorial Museum of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Occupation and the National Institute of Korean History.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Yahoo News: Exclusive: Pentagon warns military members DNA kits pose ‘personal and operational risks’. “The Pentagon is advising members of the military not to use consumer DNA kits, saying the information collected by private companies could pose a security risk, according to a memo co-signed by the Defense Department’s top intelligence official.”

New York Times: How Your Phone Betrays Democracy. “In the United States, and across the world, any protester who brings a phone to a public demonstration is tracked and that person’s presence at the event is duly recorded in commercial datasets. At the same time, political parties are beginning to collect and purchase phone location for voter persuasion.”

The Intercept: How ICE Uses Social Media To Surveil And Arrest Immigrants. “EMAILS SENT BY Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials expose how ICE used social media and information gleaned by for-profit data brokers to track down and arrest an immigrant in Southern California. In the emails, which were disclosed in federal court filings, officials discussed the relationship status of the person, noting that he was ‘broken hearted,’ according to Facebook posts, and confirmed his identity through pictures posted at his father’s birthday party.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

KMTR: UO scholar explores evolving ‘linguistic ecosystem’ of 2019 on social media. “Zachary Jaggers is a postdoctoral scholar of linguistics at the University of Oregon. He wrote an article describing the internet trends of 2019. He says new words and phrases popping up on our screens are a lot more than just words, but a way that people are expressing themselves.”

Ars Technica: Trump could mandate free access to federally funded research papers. “The Trump White House is rumored to be working on a beefed-up open access mandate. The potential executive order would require all scientific papers that are based on federally funded research to be made available online free of charge as soon as they are published. That would supersede a 2013 rule issued by the Obama White House that required federally funded papers to become freely available one year after publication.” Good morning, Internet…

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