NEW RESOURCES

EurekAlert: Unique digital archive of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution now online. “A new digital archive co-created by University of Warwick researcher Dr Nicola Pratt gathers art, music and film created during the 2011 Egyptian revolution into a unique new multimedia resource for scholars, students and the general public alike. ‘Politics, Popular Culture and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution’ documents the 25 January 2011 uprising and its aftermath through the prism of popular culture, showing how Egyptians have narrated their own histories of the revolution through graffiti, music, satire, TV drama series and film.”

SoraNews 24: Japan’s poo museum opens online, offers turds of virtual fun worldwide during stay-home period . “It’s been just over a year since Japan opened a pop-up museum dedicated to all things poop in Yokohama, in Tokyo’s neighbouring Kanagawa Prefecture. Called the Unko Museum (literally ‘Poo Museum’), the pop-up proved to be so successful that it even slid into Tokyo afterwards, where it attracted crowds of turd lovers…until COVID-19 showed up in the capital, causing the facility to close its doors as a safety precaution. However, where one sphincter closes, another opens, and for the Unko Museum that means the Internet has opened up a new portal for the ‘Max Unko Kawaii’ extravaganza to be delivered to the poop-loving public.”

DigitalNC: The Tryon Daily Bulletin Now on DigitalNC. “Another new newspaper title, The Tryon Daily Bulletin, is now accessible on DigitalNC thanks to our partners, Polk County Public Library. Known as ‘The World’s Smallest Daily Newspaper’, The Tryon Daily Bulletin delivered the news in Polk County, N.C., Monday through Saturday, as it continues to do to this day. Over 2000 issues spanning the years 1928 to 1942 are available to view, advertising local events such as church gatherings, political meetings, and events around town.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Pipe Dream: SUNY ends contract with ScienceDirect. “The future of ScienceDirect as a source for scholarly articles is bleak with State University of New York (SUNY) canceling its subscription after a deal could not be made with its publishing company, Elsevier.”

MakeUseOf: Netflix Will Now Cancel Your Account Unless You Use It. “If you pay for Netflix but don’t actually use the streaming service, you should probably cancel your subscription. After all, that’s several dollars leaving your account each month for nothing. Just like a gym membership for people who no longer work out. However, even if you don’t cancel your own Netflix you may have it cancelled for you. This is because Netflix has announced it’s going to start cancelling inactive accounts automatically in order to stop people spending money on something they don’t use.”

USEFUL STUFF

Digital Inspiration: Find the Exact Date When a Google Maps Image was Taken. “Curious to know the exact date when Google cameras captured those aerial and street view photographs of your home (or any other address) on our beautiful planet? Well, you can find the dates easily both in Google Maps and Google Earth.”

Make Tech Easier: 4 Best Reader Extensions for Chrome Reviewed . “The Internet is a simultaneously informative and distracting place, replete with information but also with a thousand panes, links, sidebars and banners that try to pull you away from what you’re reading at a given moment. A reader extension helps keep you focused by removing all the extraneous bits and just leaving you with the stuff you’re reading. These extensions also let you change font sizes, styles, and backgrounds for optimized reading. They’re handy, so we’ve decided to test four of the best reader extensions for Google Chrome and tell you just how good they really are.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Sierra Sun Times: National Park Service Awards More than $3.1 Million in Grants to Preserve and Interpret World War II Japanese American Confinement Sites. “The National Park Service is pleased to announce more than $3.1 million in Japanese American Confinement Sites grants that will fund preservation, restoration and education projects throughout the country. The 22 projects funded will help tell the stories of the more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, imprisoned by the U.S. government during World War II following the attack on Pearl Harbor by the nation of Japan in 1941.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: Facebook Restructures Its Security Teams. “The changes… affected Facebook’s detection-engineering and alert-response teams, said three current and former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss workplace issues. The employees, whose duties included anticipating cyberattacks and preventing hackers from breaching the platform, were in Facebook’s offices in London, Seattle and Menlo Park, Calif.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EurekAlert: Do privacy controls lead to more trust in Alexa? Not necessarily, research finds. “Giving users of smart assistants the option to adjust settings for privacy or content delivery, or both, doesn’t necessarily increase their trust in the platform, according to a team of Penn State researchers. In fact, for some users, it could have an unfavorable effect.”

The Next Web: Algorithms associating appearance with criminality have a dark past. “‘Phrenology’ has an old-fashioned ring to it. It sounds like it belongs in a history book, filed somewhere between bloodletting and velocipedes. We’d like to think that judging people’s worth based on the size and shape of their skull is a practice that’s well behind us. However, phrenology is once again rearing its lumpy head. In recent years, machine-learning algorithms have promised governments and private companies the power to glean all sorts of information from people’s appearance.”

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health: Google Street View Derived Built Environment Indicators and Associations with State-Level Obesity, Physical Activity, and Chronic Disease Mortality in the United States. “We utilized 31,247,167 images collected from Google Street View to create indicators for neighborhood built environment characteristics using deep learning techniques. Adjusted linear regression models were used to estimate the associations between aggregated built environment indicators and state level health outcomes. Our results indicated that the presence of a crosswalk was associated with reductions in obesity and premature mortality. Visible wires were associated with increased obesity, decreased physical activity, and increases in premature mortality, diabetes mortality, and cardiovascular mortality (however, these results were not significant). Non-single family homes were associated with decreased diabetes and premature mortality, as well as increased physical activity and park and recreational access. Single-lane roads were associated with increased obesity and decreased park access.” Good morning, Internet…

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