NEW RESOURCES

PennState University Libraries: Libraries launches ROAM, an expanded open educational resources repository. “Penn State University Libraries’ Open Publishing unit recently launched ROAM, a newly expanded online publication service for openly licensed educational materials authored by Penn State faculty. Short for “Repository of Open and Affordable Materials,” the platform builds on a service created and previously hosted by the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (EMS) that published most of the college’s courseware free of charge for anyone to access. ROAM will extend EMS’ vision to include content from all disciplines and campuses across the University.”

New-to-me, from Oprah Daily: The Black Beauty Archives Are Preserving an Important Piece of Black History. “The Black Beauty Archives is a digital and physical library of vintage beauty products, media, recorded oral histories, transcribed beauty rituals, and images of, by, or for Black women from the 1950s to the present. ‘This is the beginning of a snowball effect that will transform how Black beauty is not only documented and preserved but discussed with nuance from a scholarly perspective,’ says makeup artist and makeup historian Michela Wariebi, who serves as beauty historian of the Black Beauty Archives.”

PR Newswire: Junior League of Fort Worth Launches Organization’s First Digital Museum (PRESS RELEASE). “Junior League of Fort Worth has launched the first digital museum within the Association of Junior Leagues International, Inc. to preserve over 90 years of serving their community. Through a partnership with the digital preservation experts at HistoryIT, details from decades of projects completed by the women’s charitable nonprofit can now be accessed via a fully searchable, interactive digital experience. The story of how the organization has impacted and shaped the greater Fort Worth area unfolds through online exhibitions, image galleries, a dynamic timeline and more.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: FCC unanimously approves ‘nutrition labels’ for broadband services. “The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously on Thursday to press forward on a new plan that would require internet providers, like Comcast and Verizon, to offer new labels disclosing an internet plan’s price, speed, data allowances, including introductory rates and later price hikes, as well as network management practices, like throttling, at the point of sale.”

PC Magazine: Google Brings Its VPN to iOS Devices. “Google’s virtual private network (VPN) service is now available on iOS devices. The descriptively named VPN by Google One, which was exclusive to Android smartphones when it debuted in October 2020, is now available to Apple smartphone owners who pay for at least 2TB of storage via the cloud backup service, the company says.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: Americans Can’t Quit SMS. “The continued prevalence of SMS in the U.S. is a reminder that the most resilient technologies aren’t necessarily the best ones. It’s also another way that America’s smartphone habits are unlike the rest of the world’s in ways that can be helpful but can also hold us back. I know that many Americans use whatever text app is on their phone and don’t think too hard about it. Fine! But let me explain why we should reflect a bit on this communications technology.”

KUCB: Preserving Aleutian history: collection of 1970s audio reels finds new home online. “The recordings were part of a school project that started in 1977 when a group of Unalaska students and their teacher Ray Hudson started collecting texts about the culture, language and history of the Aleutians. They called themselves the ‘Cuttlefish Class’ – a name they picked out together – and they called their project the ‘Cuttlefish Series.'”

Reuters: Alphabet, Google beat sales estimates for holiday quarter. “Alphabet’s overall quarterly sales jumped 32 per cent to $US75.3 billion ($106 billion), above the average estimate of $US72 billion among financial analysts tracked by Refinitiv. Total Google revenue was $US74.9 billion, above estimates of $US71.652 billion.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

US Department of Justice: Justice Department Establishes Initiative to Strengthen States’ Use of Criminal Justice Data. “Justice Counts is being created in response to calls from policymakers and public safety professionals for more actionable data on crime, incarceration, community supervision and related topics. State leaders are making budgetary and policy decisions based on data that are inconsistently collected and reported across the comparable agencies in their jurisdictions…. Justice Counts will deliver a set of key recommended criminal justice metrics as well as aggregation tools that make the most of data already collected to help leaders reach informed decisions without requiring costly upgrades.”

TechCrunch: Behavioral ad industry gets hard reform deadline after IAB’s TCF found to breach Europe’s GDPR. “A piece of compliance theatre that the behavioral ad industry has for years passed off as ‘a cross-industry best practice standard’ — claiming the consent management platform allowed advertisers to keep tracking and surveilling European Internet users without having to worry about pesky EU privacy laws — has today been confirmed to breach the bloc’s rules. The decision puts a ticking time-bomb under the behavioral ad industry’s regional ops — with the IAB Europe having been given just two months to submit an action plan to its Belgian regulator explaining how exactly it will fix the mess it helped create.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Japan News: Vietnam: Big data firm launches nation’s biggest gene database . “The genomes of over 1,000 people have been analyzed to form a gene database that will serve medical research and practices for the first time in Vietnam. The project by VinBigData sets out to help with the diagnosis and treatment of genetic diseases, and provide data for the application of precision medicine in the country. It also aims to establish a gene database for the Vietnamese, according to Dr. Vu Van Ha, VinBigData scientific director.”

News@Northeastern: Free Speech On Social Media Doesn’t Mean The Same Thing Around The World. “A Northeastern survey of four diverse democracies found that people in other countries differ from Americans when it comes to opinions as to how social media companies should be regulated, with respondents in the United Kingdom, South Korea, and Mexico favoring stricter content moderation than people in the U.S.—especially in cases that cause harm or distress.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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