NEW RESOURCES

Air Quality News: New database looks to reduce healthcare’s ‘5% of global emissions’. “Dalhousie University and Brighton and Sussex Medical School have developed a major new resource which will make it easier for medical trusts to make carbon-friendly decisions. The HealthcareLCA database is billed as an ‘up-to-date evidence repository, bringing together new and existing assessments into one publicly accessible location’.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Lifehacker: You Can Now Stream Games Directly From Your Google Results. “Google Chrome users in the U.S. can now launch select video games directly from Google Search results, much like you already could for movies, music, and TV shows.”

The Verge: Google is letting businesses try out client-side encryption for Gmail. “Google has launched a beta of its client-side encryption for Gmail, letting businesses apply to test out the feature meant to make ‘sensitive data’ and attachments unreadable even to Google. The company announced the beta, which Workspace administrators can sign up for until January 20th, in a blog post on Friday.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: The 9 Best Ways to Check if a Website Is Offline. “If you’ve ever tried to open up a website just to find that it isn’t loading, you’ve no doubt wondered if the website is down just for you, or if it’s a problem that others are facing as well. Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to figure out, with the right tool. There are a ton of different websites out there that let you quickly and easily check if a website is actually down for everyone, or if it’s just a problem on your end. Here are nine of the best options for you to have a look at.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Library of Congress Blog: Even More Fun with File Formats!. “As usual, we’ve been hard at work with our file format descriptions or (FDDs) which include many hours of technical research, fact checking and generally nerdy deep dives into format specifications and standards. For the first time, we’ve decided to publish our 2022-2023 workplan which lists format descriptions that are expected to be added to the site in the coming months. It is not definitive as sometimes priorities change but, instead, is an overall indication of planned work.”

Billboard: TikTok Is Launching Careers for Tomorrow’s Music Executives. “Plenty of headlines have espoused the merits of using TikTok to promote new artists and songs, but less has been said about the new class of music business executives beginning to break on the app too, circumventing the notoriously exclusive path into the industry usually required.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Techdirt: Getty Images Watermark Shows Up In Latest Square ‘Final Fantasy’ Game. “Square Enix, the game studio behind famous video game franchises like the Final Fantasy series, is well known to be a big believer in intellectual property enforcement. … As we’re always careful to mention, Square Enix can do this, but it doesn’t mean it should or has to handle its intellectual property concerns in the most draconian manner possible. Plus, it’s always fun when the shoe is suddenly on the other foot.”

TechCrunch: GitHub brings free secret scanning to all public repos. “Every developer knows that it’s a bad idea to hardcode security credentials into source code. Yet it happens and when it does, the consequences can be dire. Until now, GitHub only made its secret scanning service available to paying enterprise users who paid for GitHub Advanced Security, but starting today, the Microsoft-owned company is making its secrets scanning service available for all public GitHub repos for free.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Indiana University: Equitable Giving Lab being developed by Lilly Family School of Philanthropy will provide new insights into equity and gaps in funding for under-resourced populations. “The Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at IUPUI is creating a new digital resource, The Equitable Giving Lab, that will bring an equity lens to philanthropy by measuring funding for under-resourced groups. The Equitable Giving Lab will address the current lack of centralized data on charitable giving to diverse communities and is made possible through anchor funding from Google.org.”

UCLA: When using virtual reality as a teaching tool, context and ‘feeling real’ matter. “Researchers asked 48 English-speaking participants to try to learn 80 words in two phonetically similar African languages, Swahili and Chinyanja, as they navigated virtual reality settings. Wearing VR headsets, participants explored one of two environments… Subjects who had learned each language in its own unique context mixed up fewer words and were able to recall 92% of the words they had learned.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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