NEW RESOURCES

Lancaster Online: Introducing the James Buchanan Presidential Library (The Scribbler) . “The library is a collection of materials at LancasterHistory, Dickinson College (Buchanan’s alma mater), the Library of Congress, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and Penn State University. LancasterHistory’s materials — letters, personal and political papers, and ephemera associated with Buchanan — now are centralized… thanks to LancasterHistory’s initiative and a grant from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.”

Federal Trade Commission: FTC Announces New Fraud Reporting Platform for Consumers: ReportFraud. ftc. gov. “At ReportFraud.ftc.gov, consumers will find a streamlined and user-friendly way to submit reports to the FTC about scams, frauds, and bad business practices. The FTC has long encouraged consumers to report these issues to the FTC when they encounter them—whether or not they lost money to the fraud.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Neowin: Google raises its sustainability goals, will make plastic-free packaging by 2025. “Google is stepping up its sustainability game with new goals for its own hardware products, the company announced today. Last year, the search giant had already set some goals in this regard, such as using recycled materials in all of its new products by 2022, but it reached that goal early, as all Pixel and Nest devices released this year use recycled materials to some extent. In that light, Google is setting some more ambitious goals.”

Library of Congress: Law Library of Congress Signs Preservation Steward Agreement with Government Publishing Office. “The Law Library of Congress has signed an agreement with the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) to become a preservation steward. Through the agreement, the Law Library of Congress will preserve its collection of the daily Congressional Record and Federal Register, which are produced by GPO.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Chronicle of Higher Education: What Does a College Student Look Like? Stock Images From the Quad Are Getting an Update.. “For decades, a disproportionate number of stock images have portrayed the experience of one kind of student: the 18- to 22-year-old attending a residential four-year college. But all those fresh-faced kids on tree-shaded quads are, in fact, the minority. (Did you know that only about 15 percent of undergraduates live in campus dorms?) Now, more than ever, some higher-education experts say, the world needs to see more images of students who fit a different description.”

Dezeen: Virtual fashion will allow people to “go completely crazy”. “Interest in virtual fashion has exploded during the coronavirus pandemic as people explore ways of dressing their online avatars, according to digital fashion designer Amber Jae Slooten. ‘We got huge interest,’ said Slooten, co-founder of The Fabricant, a virtual fashion house based in Amsterdam. ‘I’ve never dressed so many people in my life’.”

CNN: McDonald’s social media person cries for help: I am more than just the McRib. “Many companies have tried injecting more personality into their Twitter feeds to humanize their brands. Companies often interact with each other on Twitter. Many of them are competitive: Dunkin’ and Wendy’s got into a Twitter spat in mid-October. But the McDonald’s Twitter conversation was actually heartwarming. Here’s how it all went down.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Register: Why, yes, you can register an XSS attack as a UK company name. How do we know that? Someone actually did it . “Companies House has blocked someone who registered a new biz with a name that contained the right characters arranged in the right order to trigger a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack against users of the service’s API.”

Vox: 2 models for regulating social media giants, explained. “…while there are antitrust issues in the technology world, the question posed by the Hunter Biden email story is not really a question of competition policy. Forcing Facebook to divest Instagram and WeChat, for example, would not really eliminate anyone’s concern about social networks being used to algorithmically supercharge misinformation or becoming a vector for foreign intelligence operations. Nor would it alleviate conservatives’ concerns that tech companies run by mostly left-of-center coastal professionals will try to selectively censor conservative speech, or progressives’ concerns that algorithms are being rigged against them to placate congressional Republicans.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EurekAlert: National campaign to capture stories of hope and transformation through living donation. “The Transplant Research and Education Center (TREC), in partnership with the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation and One Lambda, Inc. (onelambda.com), part of Thermo Fisher Scientific and leading producer of in vitro diagnostic products for the HLA transplant community, has launched a six-month mass media campaign for kidney and transplant patients, living donors, and medical providers to raise awareness about the innovative resources available through the Living Donation Storytelling Project. The campaign aims to capture the stories of 500 living donors and inspire, educate and promote living donor kidney transplant (LDKT).” Good evening, Internet…

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