NEW RESOURCES

Sandia National Laboratories: Sandia creates global archive of historical renewable energy documents. “Sandia’s solar researchers and librarians have spent the past few years collecting, digitizing and cataloging a host of reports, memos, blueprints, photos and more on concentrating solar power, a kind of renewable energy produced by using large mirrors to reflect and concentrate sunlight onto a receiver on a tower to generate electricity. These historical research documents are now in a publicly accessible digital archive for other concentrating solar power researchers, historians, corporations and citizens to view.”

Jewish News: Extensive new online archive of ‘The Boys’ launched. “Grandchildren of ‘The Boys’ — the young Jewish men and women who arrived in Britain after liberation in 1945 — have put together a groundbreaking online archive about their grandparents’ experiences.”

The Guardian: Historic England to offer virtual flights over ancient landscapes. “The Aerial Archaeological Mapping Explorer contains thousands of sites identified on half a million aerial photographs covering more than half the country. Further archaeological remains have been identified using airborne laser scanning technology known as lidar (light, detection and ranging), which creates 3D images of the Earth’s surface.”

Google Blog: Expanding access to computer science education with Code.org. “Last month, 35 classrooms and over 1,000 students signed up to hear from Taylor Roper, a Program Manager on Google’s Responsible AI team…. These virtual chats and field trips are part of Code.org’s new CS Journeys program to help students use their computer science (CS) knowledge and skills beyond the classroom, and discover CS in unexpected places. Students hear directly from professionals who use computer science in unique and creative ways, like modeling the universe, building robots, or — in Taylor’s case — helping to build responsible artificial intelligence tools for products used by millions of people.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

KnowTechie: This tool lets you take Facebook off your Oculus Quest 2. “Called ‘Oculess‘, the tool enables users to remove the Facebook requirement so they can keep using their headsets, sans Facebook. Previously, you had to spend an extra $500 to get an enterprise version of the headset to get around the Facebook requirement.”

The Verge: Google Search adds guitar tuner to its smorgasbord of built-in features. “Google Search now has a handy built-in tuner, letting you use the microphone on your phone or computer to tune a guitar, Android Police reports.”

CNET: YouTube’s Rewind annual trend-recap videos are officially dead now. “YouTube’s annual Rewind videos — which evolved over nearly a decade into elaborate collabs with the biggest online stars and influencers recapping the trends of the year — are officially dead now. Last year, YouTube skipped Rewind, saying it was taking ‘a break’ from the clips that were always widely anticipated, heavily watched and (often) viciously mocked. On Tuesday, the company said it was ending the annual practice entirely.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNN: Russian hackers behind SolarWinds hack are trying to infiltrate US and European government networks. “The Russian hackers behind a successful 2020 breach of US federal agencies have in recent months tried to infiltrate US and European government networks, cybersecurity analysts tracking the group told CNN.”

ZDNet: JFTC starts another antitrust probe against Apple and Google on smart devices: Report. “According to Nikkei, the Japanese competition watchdog will conduct interviews and surveys with OS operators, app developers, and smartphone users to assess whether Apple and Google have created anti-competitive market conditions in the smartphones, smartwatches, and other wearables sectors.”

Washington Post: Read that link carefully: Scammers scoop up misspelled cryptocurrency URLs to rob your wallet. “Wwwblockchain.com isn’t a typo. Nor is hlockchain.com or blpckchain.com. Those sites are set up to dupe Internet users trying to reach Blockchain.com, a website that lets users buy and sell cryptocurrency. And there’s big money in little typos.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Oxford University Press Blog: Fragmentology: bits of books and the medieval manuscript. “So many fragments of manuscripts exist that a new term—Fragmentology—has recently been applied to the study of these parts and parcels. Librarians, archivists, and academics are paying more attention to what can be learned about textual culture from a folio cut, say, from a twelfth-century manuscript and later used by a binder to line the oak boards of a fifteenth-century book. Scholars are thinking through ways that single leaves preserved in libraries across the world can be digitally reconstructed into a virtual representation of the (or part of the) original book as it might have been first produced.”

Slate: Facebook Banned Me for Life Because I Help People Use It Less. “If someone built a tool that made Facebook less addictive—a tool that allowed users to benefit from Facebook’s positive features while limiting their exposure to its negative ones—how would Facebook respond? I know the answer, because I built the tool, and Facebook squashed it. This summer, Facebook sent me a cease-and-desist letter threatening legal action. It permanently disabled my Facebook and Instagram accounts. And it demanded that I agree to never again create tools that interact with Facebook or its other services.” Good morning, Internet…

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