NEW RESOURCES

EurekAlert: A new site for banana-related research. “MusaNet, the global collaborative network for Musa-related research, was created in 2011 to implement the Global Musa Strategy established with the banana research community. MusaNet is excited to announce the launch of a new website that collects and shares information on all aspects of banana, be it diversity, conservation or current threats.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

National Archives: National Archives Releases Recommendations from Internal Task Force on Racism. “Last year, as our nation was confronting ongoing issues related to racial justice, Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero established a task force of National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) employees to identify issues of racial inequality in both our customer-facing operations and internally within our workplaces, in pursuit of an equitable and inclusive environment for all employees and customers.”

Neowin: OpenDocument Format 1.3 becomes approved as an OASIS Standard format. “The Document Foundation, the body behind the popular LibreOffice suite, has announced that Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF, also known as OpenDocument Format) 1.3 has been approved as an OASIS Standard after receiving 14 affirmative consents and no objections. With the standardisation of the format, other office suites, including Microsoft Office, can add support for the format according to defined specifications that boost compatibility between different suites.”

USEFUL STUFF

Online Journalism Blog: What are regular expressions — and how to use them in Google Sheets to get data from text . “In an extract from a new chapter in the ebook Finding Stories in Spreadsheets, I explain what regular expressions are — and how they can be used to extract information from spreadsheets. The ebook version of this tutorial includes a dataset and exercise to employ these techniques.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: Tech Giants, Fearful of Proposals to Curb Them, Blitz Washington With Lobbying. “Executives, lobbyists, and more than a dozen groups paid by Big Tech have tried to head off bipartisan support for six bills meant to undo the dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.”

NDTV Education: National Library To Upload Books On Indian Culture On Web. “As part of its outreach drive for young generation readers, the National Library plans to upload on the web a select part of its voluminous collection, including books on Indian culture, a top official said Tuesday. Of the 20 lakh odd books in its possession, 5,000 titles under the Indian Culture section will be uploaded on the web in the coming months, the new officiating director general told reporters here.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: House Judiciary Committee debates antitrust legislation to rein in Big Tech. “The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday began debate on a series of bills aimed at reining in the power of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and other tech giants. The first of the five bills advanced out of committee by early afternoon on Wednesday.”

Reuters: Brazilian Senate to hear Google, Facebook, Twitter in pandemic probe. “A Brazilian Senate committee on Wednesday formally approved a request to call representatives of Google, Facebook and Twitter to testify in an ongoing probe into the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Senators want to look into what role the companies had in helping to spread potentially dangerous misinformation during the pandemic.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

BBC: AI helps restore Rembrandt’s Night Watch masterpiece. “For the first time in more than 300 years, Rembrandt’s masterpiece The Night Watch can again be seen in its entirety in the Netherlands. Created in 1642 by the Dutch master, the huge picture was trimmed on all four sides in 1715 to fit between two doors in Amsterdam town hall. The city’s Rijksmuseum has now added the missing scenes from a small, early copy of the original. It used artificial intelligence (AI) to mimic Rembrandt’s style.”

Open Access Government: Big data: With great data comes great responsibility. “Personal data stored within large repositories of companies are regularly exfiltrated in data breaches. Almost every individual in Western society has been subject to their data being exposed in almost always multiple data breaches. Nation-state actors have been exposed to conduct cyber-espionage on individuals and companies. Although it is 2021, George Orwell’s novel 1984 is a distinct possibility nowadays. So, we must ask ourselves: How do we combine Western civil liberties with the advance of ubiquitous data collection technologies?” Good evening, Internet…

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