NEW RESOURCES

Towards Data Science: Explore a database of the most popular “Florida Man” headlines. “For almost a decade, ‘Florida Man’ has been a mainstay antihero of internet culture. Headlines like ‘Florida man too fat for jail’ and ‘Florida man steals dinosaur bones’ are easy fodder for meme-ification. In early 2013, ‘Florida Man’ was canonized on Twitter with @_FloridaMan and on Reddit with the r/FloridaMan subreddit. And after seven years of retweeting and upvoting, we can gather the most popular headlines to see what makes a ‘Florida Man’ headline successful.”

Smithsonian: You Can Now Download 1,700 Free 3-D Cultural Heritage Models. “During the first manned lunar landing mission in July 1969, Apollo 11’s crew lived in a command module dubbed the Columbia. Currently a priceless artifact in the National Air and Space Museum’s collections, the module was the only portion of the spacecraft to return to Earth. Now, thanks to a new open access initiative spearheaded by Sketchfab, the web’s largest platform for immersive 3-D content, anyone with an internet connection can ‘re-use, re-imagine and remix’ the vessel—as well as nearly 1,700 other historic artifacts—without limitation.”

Columbia University Libraries: Just Launched: Vaccination in Modern America: Misinformation vs. Public Health Advocacy Web Archive. “Developed by librarians within the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation, the archive preserves webpages representing the current state of public discourse and contrasting approaches to authority on vaccination in the United States, with a focus on sites that are both pro- and anti-vaccination. The purpose of this collection is to capture potentially ephemeral information about vaccination that could be used by health service researchers, information scientists, sociologists, and others to understand the motivations, practices, and outcomes of health information and information on the web.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bleeping Computer: SETI@home Search for Alien Life Project Shuts Down After 21 Years. “SETI@home has announced that they will no longer be distributing new work to clients starting on March 31st as they have enough data and want to focus on completing their back-end analysis of the data. SETI@home is a distributed computing project where volunteers contribute their CPU resources to analyze radio data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).”

British Library: 10 years of the Medieval Manuscripts Blog. “This month is an exciting anniversary for us: it has been ten years since the British Library’s award-winning Medieval Manuscripts Blog began back in February 2010. It’s a decade that has seen large-scale digitisation, blockbuster exhibitions, exciting acquisitions and fascinating discoveries, and the Blog has been our main way of letting you know about them all. We aim to be inspiring, informative and amusing and above all to share with you the manuscripts love. To celebrate our big anniversary, join us in looking back at some of the Blog’s highlights over the years.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: How to Add Branching in Microsoft Forms. “Microsoft Forms is a great tool for creating free, easy-to-use surveys, polls, quizzes, and questionnaires. It includes branching, which allows you to send users to different questions depending on their previous answers. Here’s how to add branching to your form.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CNET: US officials in contact with TikTok over political disinformation. “To take on the next generation of disinformation, the US government has started reaching out to TikTok, senior government officials said on Tuesday. The Chinese-owned platform has grown increasingly popular in the US among teens, and has frequently been used for sharing political memes.”

Core77: Social Adhesion: New Museum Dedicated to the History of Stickers. “To several generations’ worth of youth, stickers were the fastest way to prettify something, vandalize something or establish some attempt at identity by slapping favorite brands or subversive messages onto notebooks and laptops….To celebrate their stock-and-trade, StickerYou is launching the History of Stickers Museum at their home base in Toronto (which is the largest sticker store in the world), kicking it off with a permanent art exhibition called Stickers: RePEELed.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ABC News (Australia): Fears private details of Defence Force members compromised in database hack . “A highly sensitive military database containing the personal details of tens of thousands of Australian Defence Force (ADF) members was shut down for 10 days due to fears it had been hacked.”

BBC: Millions of websites face ‘insecure’ warnings. “Some well-known websites could stop functioning properly on Wednesday, 4 March, after a bug was found in the digital certificates used to secure them. The organisation that issues the certificates revealed that three million need to be immediately revoked.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

ZDNet: Coronavirus misinformation spreading fast: Fake news on COVID-19 shared far more than CDC, WHO reports. “The vast majority of coronavirus information shared across social media comes from fake news sites, according to Newsguard, a service that rates the credibility and transparency of web news content. Meanwhile, official sources like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) receive only a tiny fraction of the social engagement concerning COVID-19.”

Los Angeles Times: Column: COVID-19 could kill the for-profit science publishing model. That would be a good thing. “Of all the ways the current coronavirus crisis has upended commonplace routines — such as disrupting global supply chains and forcing workers to stay at home — one of the most positive is how it demonstrates the value of open access to scientific research. Ferreting out a silver lining in an event that has produced the infection of more than 90,000 individuals and taken the lives of more than 3,000 — and is certain to wreak further destruction before it is quelled — is a delicate matter.” Good morning, Internet…

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