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East Texas Oil Museum, Twitter, Internet Archive, More: Friday Evening ResearchBuzz, February 5, 2021

NEW RESOURCES

Longview News-Journal: East Texas Oil Museum announces launch of digital photograph archives. “The East Texas Oil Museum in Kilgore has been preserving city, local and regional history for more than 40 years. And now, the museum has announced a new, more modern step in its mission to collect and share items, photographs and more from the East Texas Oil Boom. In addition to viewing historical photos inside the museum, visitors can now view digital copies — carefully cataloged and researched — online.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNBC: NBCUniversal is bringing its live events to Twitter users globally. “Comcast’s NBCUniversal and Twitter on [January 25] announced a multi-year global content partnership, in an effort to expand both the media company’s and social media giant’s advertising and audience reach.”

Internet Archive: Library Futures: New Nonprofit Launches to Support a Technology-Positive Future for Libraries. “A coalition of advocacy and public interest groups has joined forces to launch the Library Futures Institute, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) committed to upholding the right of libraries to provide users with materials in the new digital environment. The new organization launched its website on January 25 and will work to empower libraries to fulfill their mission of providing equal and equitable access to culture for the public good.”

USEFUL STUFF

Wired: How to Back Up Your Most Important Emails. “It might not matter for all those newsletters, special offers, and account notifications that clog up your inbox, but what about emails and documents you really need access to? It helps to have at least some of your emails backed up in another location so that you can always get at them, offline or otherwise.”

Distractify: Hive Social Is a New Social Media App That Apparently Blew up Over Night. “The Hive Social app is apparently the newest, trendiest social media platform for Gen Z. Based on Hive’s Twitter account, it aims to be similar to Instagram, but without the annoying ads and finicky algorithm. And a lot of people who are sick of Facebook and Twitter’s social networking monopoly are excited to join. But what exactly is Hive Social? We did a deeper dive.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

PetaPixel: Fire Destroys 70-Year Photo Archive of Famous Venezuelan Explorer. “A renowned Venezuelan explorer and naturalist lost a lifetime of work last week after a house fire broke out and burned down his studio. Among the losses were photographs captured during over 200 expeditions spanning roughly 70 years.”

The North Wind: UPLINK makes history for the Upper Peninsula. “The [Northern Michigan University] archives recently launched the development of The Upper Peninsula Digital Network or, UPLINK, which will enable heritage organizations around the UP to digitize their collections of historical media. This is thanks to a $100,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Brookings Institution: Do not expect too much from the Facebook antitrust complaints. “The need to please advertisers will inevitably frustrate the widespread expectation that a Facebook breakup will lead to better privacy protections for users. True, there will be a one-time benefit for user privacy as Facebook’s integrated data base is ripped apart into separate profiles of WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook users. But each of these companies will rapidly rebuild their user profiles with new data and continue their efforts to exploit this data to personalize services and advertising.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EurekAlert: New tool facilitates inclusion of people of diverse ancestry in large genetics studies. “Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have typically excluded diverse and minority individuals in the search for gene variants that confer risk of disease. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and other institutions around the world have now developed a free-access software package called Tractor that increases the discovery power of genomics in understudied populations. A study of Tractor’s performance and accuracy was published in Nature Genetics.”

Phys .org: Pace of prehistoric human innovation could be revealed by ‘linguistic thermometer’. “Multi-disciplinary researchers at The University of Manchester have helped develop a powerful physics-based tool to map the pace of language development and human innovation over thousands of years—even stretching into pre-history before records were kept.” Good evening, Internet…

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