NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, from NOAA: Back to school: Find NOAA resources with our new online database . “With a new school year just around the corner, teachers and educators are gearing up to create lesson plans and find engaging activities for their students. We have a tool to make it easier than ever to include NOAA resources in your classroom: NOAA Sea to Sky, a new education resource database that houses over 1,200 educational resources created by NOAA and our partners.”

Public News Service: New Tool Emerges in Helping IA Communities Map Out Wind, Solar . “Iowa is seen as a leader in renewable energy for sources like wind power, but tension is building in how to site such projects. The rapid growth of wind and solar has led to policy debates at the state level on whether to add regulations, as some landowners and farm groups fight certain plans. A new guide aims to give local officials a better grasp of proposals coming their way.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 16 Free Portable Apps for Students They Can Carry Everywhere. “Whether you need your preferred writing program or rely on desktop management apps to stay productive, portable apps for Windows are some of the most useful out there. Here is a collection of portable apps that students can’t pass up.” Blender Portable?

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

BBC: Horniman Museum to return 72 artefacts to Nigeria. “A London museum says it has agreed to return to Nigeria artefacts looted in the 19th Century from the Kingdom of Benin. The Horniman Museum said ownership of 72 objects would be transferred to the Nigerian government. Items include 12 brass plaques, known as Benin Bronzes, a brass cockerel and a key to the king’s palace.”

Search Engine Journal: Google Algorithms & Updates Focused On User Experience: A Timeline. “In this article, I examine a combination of some (not all) Google updates and technological advancements that significantly reflect the search engine’s focus on the human user and their experiences online – from Panda in 2011 through to Page and Product Experience in 2021 and 2022.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Indie devs outraged by unlicensed game sales on GameStop’s NFT market [Updated]. “In the first week of GameStop’s recently launched NFT marketplace, the NiFTy Arcade collection stood out from the pack. Instead of offering basic JPEGs, the collection provided ‘interactive NFTs’ linked to HTML5 games that were fully playable from an owner’s crypto wallet (or from the GameStop Marketplace page itself). There was only one problem: Many of those NFT games were being minted and sold without their creators’ permission, much less any arrangement for the creators to share in any crypto profits.”

Mother Jones: A Crypto Giant Froze Their Accounts. Now Customers Are Begging a Judge for Their Money Back.. “According to a presentation filed in court, Celsius now hopes to offer its customers a choice: accept a cash payment worth just a fraction of their investments, or opt to ‘remain “long” crypto’—that is, continue to hold their digital currency on Celsius’ books in the hopes of eventually being able to recover their money.”

Wall Street Journal: Phones Know Who Went to an Abortion Clinic. Whom Will They Tell? . “In May, shortly after the draft of the Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade became public, location-data specialist Tapestri Inc. received unusual requests from two companies. Each wanted to purchase mobile-device data that would reveal users who had visited abortion clinics along the Illinois-Missouri border, said Tapestri Chief Executive Walter Harrison.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Laptop: Google results for ‘Eragon’ author showed borderline porn — I’m officially fed up with the search engine . “…over the course of the last two weeks, my trust in Google has waned. It’s not uncommon to find issues with the company’s services every once in a while, but with the way these inconveniences have been stacking up recently, I’m baffled by how awful Google has been for me lately. This piece will highlight the issues I’ve had with Google’s search engine, which has frequently offered borderline offensive search results when looking up otherwise innocuous queries.”

New York Daily News: Editorial: Open the NYC 9/11 files: The city must release its archives on air quality during the rescue and recovery efforts. “Lawyers for the City of New York are sitting on a hidden library of documents about the environmental and health hazards from Ground Zero dating back to 2001 that must be published. Survivors and responders want to know what the city knew, and Reps. Jerry Nadler and Carolyn Maloney have been pressing for years for City Hall to release the archive.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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