NEW RESOURCES

The National: Scots Language Centre to offer new guide in writing in the leid. “THE Scots Language Centre is launching a new website with guidance for learning to write in Scots. Produced by a group of some of Scotland’s most established and accomplished Scots writers and performers, and with support from the Scottish Government, the move is inspired by the August 2020 controversy surrounding Scots Wikipedia, where it was discovered that the majority of content was written by a person with little experience of spoken Scots.”

Wolfram: New Wolfram U Course Explores Data Visualization. “After a few months of brainstorming ideas, developing notebooks and scripts and refining videos through several rounds of editing and refilming, we are pleased to announce that the Visual Explorations in Data Science massive open online course (MOOC) is now available. The two guiding principles of this course are visualization and an example-driven approach. We employ a hands-on methodology for teaching data science with examples that slowly introduce various technical features, all of which are supplemented with an emphasis on visualization. The course consists of a dozen case studies spanning geography to engineering and analyzing flag similarity to periodic trends.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas: Data journalism self-directed course in Spanish now available after MOOC reaches thousands of journalists around the world. “‘Introduction to data journalism: How to find and process large volumes of information’ is now available to take for free, at any time, as a self-directed course on the JournalismCourses.org online platform. The course was originally offered as a massive open online course (MOOC) from July 19 to Aug. 15 and attracted more than 4,100 students. ”

USEFUL STUFF

AZCentral: Looking to modernize your vinyl collection? Here are some digital options for your records. “Making sure it has a USB interface isn’t the only thing to consider because the cost of new vinyl records can be two to three times that of the comparable CD or digital download. Vinyl records suffer from an affliction that doesn’t apply to its digital counterparts – they slowly deteriorate with each play and buying a cheap turntable can accelerate the degradation.” A lot of the articles I see about digitizing records are affiliate program plays. This one lays out what you should look for and defines some terms you should know. You’ll take away knowledge without clicking a single product link.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Travel Voice Japan: Meta Tourism, a new tourism concept, kicks off in Japan, visualizing meanings and values of contents on a digital map. “Tomoe Makino, the Institute president and former TripAdvisor Japan manager, explained, ‘Old Japanese cafe “Takemura,” for example, is not only a cafe but also has a variety of meanings, such as a scene in a novel by a Japanese famous novelist, a location of popular TV program or a location of a big-hit animation. You see the same place, but each of you consume different meanings from the place.’ In other words, meaning of the big-hit animation is a fresh tourism content for a fan of the novelist. ‘If you can enjoy seeing a particular place from the different viewpoints, tourism will be more fun,’ Makino said.”

The English is a little hard to follow in a couple of places, but it’s more than solid enough to put across the idea of deliberately aggregating different cultural lenses and providing them all for a tourist to explore. It makes me wonder how that might work as search. We work so hard to delineate ambiguous meanings. What if we didn’t, or at least explored some way to provide those with meaningful commonality?

New Yorker: The Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-books. “Libraries can buy print books in bulk from any seller that they choose, and, thanks to a legal principle called the first-sale doctrine, they have the right to lend those books to any number of readers free of charge. But the first-sale doctrine does not apply to digital content. For the most part, publishers do not sell their e-books or audiobooks to libraries—they sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders, such as OverDrive, and people like Steve Potash sell lending rights to libraries.”

Wired: Twitch And Reddit Protests May Be Only the Beginning. “HOW MUCH POWER do users have to influence the ways tech companies govern their platforms? This week, prominent Twitch and Reddit users separately coordinated two platform-shaking actions with the goal of making the digital spaces they work and play in safer. In the latter case, at least, it appears they’ve already seen results.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TechCrunch: FBI says Chinese authorities are hacking US-based Uyghurs. “The FBI has warned that the Chinese government is using both in-person and digital techniques to intimidate, silence and harass U.S.-based Uyghur Muslims.”

France24: Bolsonaro issues decree limiting social media moderation. “Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro issued a decree Monday that changes the rules of content moderation on social media, a move that critics argue could hinder the fight against disinformation. The decree goes into effect immediately but must be ratified by Congress in order to become law. It aims to combat ‘the arbitrary and unjust deletion of accounts, profiles and content by providers,’ the federal communications secretariat said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Indiana University Kokomo: Sociology professors study podcasts as teaching tool. “Jamie Oslawski-Lopez, assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University Kokomo, teamed up with Gregory Kordsmeier, dean of the School of Social Sciences and associate professor of sociology at IU Southeast, for a research study about use of podcasts in their classrooms. Their findings, along with best practices for using podcasts as instructional material, will be published in the October 2021 Teaching Sociology, a top-tier research journal focused on the scholarship of teaching and learning in sociology.”

Newswise: NUS researchers develop AI-powered tool to map sustainable roofs globally. “Dr Filip Biljecki, Presidential Young Professor from the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore (NUS) School of Design and Environment, and NUS Master of Architecture graduate Mr Abraham Noah Wu developed an automated tool that uses satellite images to track how rooftops around the world adopt solar panels and/or vegetation. Known as Roofpedia, it uses a fully convolutional neural network (deep learning) which allows researchers and policymakers to study how cities worldwide are greening their rooftops and using them for photovoltaic installations.”

OTHER STUFF I THINK IS COOL

Engadget: NASA says the Mars Perseverance rover has collected its first sample. “After initially failing to capture a rock sample, NASA has confirmed that Perseverance succeeded in its second attempt. The space agency has verified that a pencil-width core of rust-colored rock is safely trapped in the rover’s sample tube tube, ready to be processed and sent back to Earth, CNET has reported.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!