NEW RESOURCES

Bank for International Settlements: Crypto trading and Bitcoin prices: evidence from a new database of retail adoption. “We study the drivers of crypto trading app adoption using a novel database on the daily use of crypto exchange apps for 95 countries over 2015–22. We make this database available as a resource for researchers, policymakers and practitioners. We answer the following questions: do more people join crypto markets when the price of Bitcoin rises? If so, who are these new users? And what country characteristics matter more for crypto adoption?”

Mississippi State University: MSU Libraries takes Mississippi Republican Party papers online for first time. “Historical papers of the Mississippi Republican Party, held by Mississippi State Libraries since 1980, are available online for the first time. A new finding aid—or descriptive guide—now helps researchers in electronically examining and understanding the content of the collection which dates back to 1928.”

USA Today: Over 80 schools changed their names in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. See our database. “Using public school directory files from the National Center for Education Statistics, USA TODAY built a comprehensive database and interactive map of school name changes nationwide since 2020. Reporters analyzed thousands of rows of data and reviewed local news publications to put together a picture of what happened in each case. The database includes schools that changed names through the end of 2021. But the list of schools shedding old names keeps growing.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

American Legion: Get ready for a new experience on American Legion Digital Archive. “The American Legion Library and Museum will launch a new interface for the American Legion Digital Archive in early December, featuring the new Legion branding with a more simplified layout to enhance access.”

Sky News: Cambridge Dictionary reveals word of the year – and Wordle frustration has played a key role. “The Cambridge Dictionary has revealed its word of the year for 2022, with editors crediting disgruntled Wordle players whose winning streak was ended by an unfamiliar American English term.”

USEFUL STUFF

ZDNet: The best Twitter alternatives . “As Twitter continues to circle the drain, many people are already heading for the doors looking for a new online home. The good news is there are many other social networks. The bad news is none of them are complete Twitter replacements.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

News Australia: Billionaire calls on Google to ‘aggressively’ cut staff and pay. “The billionaire owner of a hedge fund that is a major investor in Google and YouTube’s parent company Alphabet has made an extraordinary demand for the company to make ‘aggressive’ cuts to staff numbers and reduce the pay of remaining employees. Christopher Hohn, who owns London-based hedge fund TCI which holds a $6 billion stake in the company, wrote to Alphabet’s boss Sundar Pichai urging him to follow in the footsteps of its other tech rivals such as Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft and lay-off staff.”

Motherboard: Libraries Are Launching Their Own Local Music Streaming Platforms. “Over a dozen public libraries in the U.S. and Canada have begun offering their own music streaming services to patrons, with the goal of boosting artists and local music scenes. The services are region-specific, and offer local artists non-exclusive licenses to make their albums available to the community.”

Columbia Journalism Review: Journalists want to re-create Twitter on Mastodon. Mastodon is not into it.. “No one controls Mastodon—or rather, everyone controls their own version of it. There are thousands of servers running the software, and each one chooses which servers it ‘federates,’ or exchanges information with. Don’t like the users who belong to a specific server? Just block them. Unfortunately for some of the journalists who have joined the service, this mass-blocking (or ‘defederation’) approach is now being applied to them.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Google struck $360-million Activision deal to block rival app store, lawsuit says. “Alphabet Inc’s Google has struck at least 24 deals with big app developers to stop them from competing with its Play Store, including an agreement to pay Activision Blizzard Inc about $360 million over three years, according to a court filing on Thursday.”

Politico: Egypt’s COP27 summit app is a cyber weapon, experts warn. “Western security advisers are warning delegates at the COP27 climate summit not to download the host Egyptian government’s official smartphone app, amid fears it could be used to hack their private emails, texts and even voice conversations. Policymakers from Germany, France and Canada were among those who had downloaded the app by November 8, according to two separate Western security officials briefed on discussions within these delegations at the U.N. climate summit.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Washington Post: Google searches are not a great indicator of electoral success. “This is the era of having more data at our disposal than we know what to do with. And so it is that I came to wonder: Do Google searches correlate well to election results?” Good morning, Internet…

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