NEW RESOURCES

US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: EEOC Launches New Data Tool to Track Employment Trends. “EEOC Explore allows users to analyze aggregate data associated with more than 56 million employees and 73,000 employers nationwide. The user-friendly tool enables stakeholders to explore and compare data trends across a number of categories, including location, sex, race and ethnicity, and industry sector without the need for experience in computer programming or statistical analysis.”

Orthodox Times: “Athonite Digital Ark”: Worldwide project to highlight the treasures of Mount Athos. “The ‘Athonite Digital Ark’ is the largest project in Greece in the field of digital culture. It is an ark of knowledge that includes in digital form the cultural stock of the Holy Monasteries of Mount Athos. This multi-level project lasted four years.”

Ham & High: ‘You can almost hear the music’: Bringing back the legacy of a Hampstead photographer. “Laelia Goehr was born in Russia in 1908, but fled the country during its revolution in the early 1920s for Berlin at age 13. While in Germany, Laelia performed in a cabaret duo, The Stone Sisters, and even played in the Moulin Rouge in Paris. However, Laelia was Jewish and later escaped Berlin for Britain in the build-up to World War Two. The move to London with her husband brought her burgeoning cabaret career to an end – but allowed her to start her prolific career in photography.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

DigitalNC: DigitalNC Works from Home: Closed Captions. “While at home, the NCDHC staff has been working on increasing accessibility to users through the addition of closed captions. Closed captions provide audiences with the text version of what is being spoken as well as relevant sound information–such as music, applause, and laughter–written out and synchronized with the audio of the video. Unlike open captions that are always present on a video, closed captions can be turned on and off by the viewer. The use of captions is not limited to those who have difficulty hearing, but encompass a large percent of the population who use them for diverse reasons which include helping people to focus, retain information, being in a sound-sensitive environment (e.g. a library), and more.”

CNN: The best apps of 2020 prove just what a long, strange year it’s been. “Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOGL) released their lists of the best apps of 2020 this week, and they are stark reminders of the crucial role tech has played in helping us adapt to living, working, celebrating, exercising and doing pretty much everything else from home this year.”

University of Windsor: Virtual celebration to bring together theatre scholars to launch digital archive. “International scholars, researchers, and performers will soon be able to access the works and methods of Michael Chekhov through a new digital archive available through the Leddy Library. Chekhov is famous in the theatre community for his psychophysical style of performance that favours the actor’s imagination and takes the primacy away from the director to the focus on the actor. The Actor is the Theatre is a collection of manuscript notes by Deirdre Hurst du Prey’s documenting the work of the Chekhov Theatre Studio from 1936 to 1942.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Government of Australia: Bottle label directory to protect wine industry. “Legislation passed parliament yesterday enabling Wine Australia to establish a Wine Export Label Directory to help wine brand owners protect their export wine labels against copycat labelling. Minister for Agriculture David Littleproud said the passing of the Wine Australia Amendment (Label Directory) Act 2020 will lead to the creation of an online database of all Australian export wine labels.”

The Register: ‘Malwareless’ ransomware campaign operators pwned 83k victims’ MySQL servers, 250k databases up for sale. “A ‘malwareless’ ransomware campaign delivered from UK IP addresses targeting weak security controls around internet-facing SQL servers successfully pwned 83,000 victims, according to Israeli infosec biz Guardicore.”

TechCrunch: Spotify resets passwords after a security bug exposed users’ private account information. “In a data breach notification filed with the California attorney general’s office, the music streaming giant said the data exposed ‘may have included email address, your preferred display name, password, gender, and date of birth only to certain business partners of Spotify. ‘The company did not name the business partners, but added that Spotify ‘did not make this information publicly accessible.'”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory: New Machine Learning Tool Tracks Urban Traffic Congestion. “Currently, publicly available traffic information at the street level is sparse and incomplete. Traffic engineers generally have relied on isolated traffic counts, collision statistics and speed data to determine roadway conditions. The new tool uses traffic datasets collected from UBER drivers and other publicly available traffic sensor data to map street-level traffic flow over time. It creates a big picture of city traffic using machine learning tools and the computing resources available at a national laboratory.”

Maryland Today: Rethinking ‘Hey, Google’ for Seniors. “Remembering to pick up their prescriptions and take the medication. Keeping up with loved ones. Developing meaningful hobbies. These are activities millions of elderly Americans—and particularly those diagnosed with cognitive impairments—deal with daily. Now, a University of Maryland researcher is exploring whether smart devices and innovative uses of information technology could help them handle such challenges—and more broadly, be tools to help seniors age independently, remain in their own homes or fulfill other goals.”

Thanks to Tish for sending this to me, I’m still freaking out about it days later. Mashable: Half of U.S. adults don’t know that Facebook does not do original news reporting. “Social media is increasingly a primary source of news for U.S. adults. According to a new survey from the Pew Research Center, however, almost half of U.S. adults don’t realize that Facebook is merely disseminating news — not reporting it. That’s right, a large portion of the adults in the United States either actively believe that Facebook — the company itself — reports original news stories, or aren’t sure whether it does or does not.” Good morning, Internet…

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