NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, from Spectrum News 1: Website helps people with disabilities find rentals. “Lorraine Woodward was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy at the age of 2. For the last 21 years, she’s lived in a house she helped create to be wheelchair-friendly. She says homes like hers are few and far between, especially among vacation rentals….She’s using designs from her home to model other vacation properties in Raleigh, Tennessee and Arkansas. She also created the website Becoming RentABLE for people with disabilities to find rentals that fit their needs.”

Daily Hampshire Gazette: Listening with his camera: The late photographer Don Hunstein captured a golden age of music . “Along with taking many shots of [Bob] Dylan in his early career, Hunstein, who died in 2017, photographed a huge array of stars on Columbia’s roster from the late 1950s into the 1980s: Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Barbara Streisand, Simon and Garfunkel, Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin, Billy Joel. The photographer also shot hundreds of album covers, including Loretta Lynn’s memorable ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’ from 1970, as well as the records of classical musicians including pianist Glenn Gould.”

Rappler: CCP to launch new digital museum ’21AM’. “The Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) will be launching a special 50th Anniversary project, a digital museum website called 21AM, on Friday, February 25, via live stream on CCP’s Facebook page. The CCP said in a press statement that 21AM will recall their original visual arts department in 1969 called Arts Museum, which was known to form the mid-20th century visual arts avant-garde in the early years. The new online museum will present a new contemporary arts exhibition.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

University of Arkansas: University of Arkansas Libraries Join HathiTrust. “The University of Arkansas Libraries have joined HathiTrust, a non-profit global collaborative of more than 200 research and academic libraries with a mission of ensuring that the cultural record is preserved and accessible in the future. The U of A campus will benefit from an increase in digital resources as well as enhanced accessibility. Specialized features facilitate access by persons with print disabilities and allow users to gather subsets of the digital library into collections that can be searched and browsed.”

Ars Technica: Google.com tests a busier homepage with a row of info cards. “Check out this totally wild Google homepage experiment spotted by 9to5Google: the search page suddenly has a row of cards at the bottom. If this design is widely adopted, it would easily be the biggest google.com design change ever.” Reminds me of the circa-1999 portal pages that Google’s original clean design was a rebuke against. Everything old is new again.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Washington Post: Google lowered its salaries in North Carolina. Now workers are protesting.. “Employees raised concerns that Google cut wages in the ‘Triangle’ area of Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh in 2020 for new employees and those who moved there to lower levels than comparable metro areas, according to a letter posted this week on an internal forum obtained by The Washington Post and confirmed by employees there. That is a problem, they say, because the company is using the area as a place to help recruit more Black engineers.”

Fast Company: Is Reddit a better search engine than Google?. “The core argument is that many people have become so disappointed in—or distrustful of—good old Google search results that they now append the term ‘reddit’ to the end of their queries. So instead of searching the world of information that Google and its web-crawler bots see, you get information and links from the world of things that have been discussed in Reddit land, which are a lot.” Better than Google for some kinds of searches? Absolutely. Better than Google for all kinds of searches? Absolutely not.

Downtown Los Angeles News: Library to preserve photographer’s theater shots. “For four decades, photographer Ed Krieger was the go-to theater guy in the Los Angeles area. Before he died on Dec. 16, 2020, he snapped production stills and headshots for such venues as The Fountain Theatre, Skylight Theatre, Boston Court, El Portal, Laguna Playhouse, Rubicon Theatre, Downey Civic Light Opera, Ford Amphitheatre, Hollywood Bowl and others.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ZDNet: Eight countries jointly propose principles for mutual recognition of digital IDs. “An international working group, consisting of eight countries, found most government-led digital identity initiatives have been designed with mutual recognition and interoperability thus far.”

Los Angeles Times: Trump White House didn’t preserve social media records, National Archives warns. “The Trump White House did not preserve the former president’s social media accounts, the national archivist told Congress Friday, warning lawmakers some of the missing records may not be retrievable.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Nebraska-Lincoln: Husker researcher building database to help farmers breed hardier sheep. “The project, funded by a $650,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, will develop a database of traits for robustness and climatic resilience. Researchers will assemble current and additional genetic data, as well as performance records, for several major U.S. sheep breeds: Katahdin, Polypay, Rambouillet and Suffolk.”

University of Illinois: Study examines accuracy of arrest data in FBI’s NIBRS crime database. “As more police agencies transition to the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System for crime reporting, a study of one state’s data found that a design flaw in NIBRS, the timings of arrests and human factors can lead to discrepancies. When the authors of the current study compared the statuses of a statewide sample of 480 cases in NIBRS with data they collected directly from the Massachusetts jurisdictions where the crimes occurred, they found that about 16% of the cases incorrectly indicated in NIBRS whether arrests were made or summonses were issued.” Good morning, Internet…

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