Hey! Did you see my article about my Search Gizmos in ONLINE SEARCHER? Go look! https://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/jan23/Calishain–Creating-Search-Gizmos-to-Simplify-Web-Searching.shtml

NEW RESOURCES

Brussels Times: Tracing Belgian family trees made easier by massive new archive. “On this new platform, you can search for useful sources to learn more about your ancestors, provided they lived in Belgium. In total, millions of pages of documents have been digitised: birth, baptism, marriage, death or burial certificates, as well as all the registers (called decennial tables) that list these documents. You will be able to browse more easily through no less than 28,527 parish registers and 36,780 civil registers, which have a total of 2.2 million pages. Consultation of these digitised archives is free of charge, but limited to ten downloads per day.”

University of Stirling: Burns’ influence on working class English writers revealed after the discovery of ‘lost’ works. “The influence of Robert Burns saw poets in the north of England writing verse in Scots, say researchers who have uncovered a host of ‘lost’ literary works penned by industrial workers in the 19th Century. The team, led by Professor Kirstie Blair of the University of Stirling, has discovered a deluge of poems, songs and short stories penned by navvies, shipbuilders, railwaymen, factory workers and miners, from Scotland and the north of England, which give unique, first-hand accounts of their lives in the late 1800s and early 1900s.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Cosmos: Trove in trouble: why does it cost money to keep the resource online?. “The online database Trove may go offline in the middle of the year without additional funding. Trove, which is owned and operated by the National Library of Australia (NLA), is a free resource which provides access to billions of digital documents, images, media and records of physical documents. It also contains millions of digitised Australian newspaper pages and issues.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 6 Free Job Tracking Templates to Organize Your Job Search . “Do you need help tracking your job applications? When looking for a job, it’s common to feel overwhelmed or miss out on an important task. To avoid the stress of job hunting, use a pre-made template. Here are some job-tracking templates that you can download for free.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Michigan Daily: Nichetok/Corecore: TikTok’s trendy nihilistic echo chamber. “Calling someone ‘scenecore’ is the same as saying ‘you look scene’ in an adapted, chronically online way. There exist dozens of these -core terms, creating an almost absurd amount of micro-niche aesthetics and tastes. So now that we understand the -core suffix, what does ‘corecore’ mean? What does it look like? The answer is rather simple: Its purpose seems to be against this hyper-specific trend culture. It doesn’t fit any defined look or aesthetic, it just exists to compile feelings.”

Wall Street Journal: The Chess World’s New Villain: A Cat Named Mittens. “Mittens—or technically the chess bot known as Mittens—might look cute. Her listed chess rating of a single point seems innocuous. But her play over the past few weeks, which has bedeviled regular pawn-pushers, grandmasters, and champions who could play for the world title, is downright terrifying. And as it turns out, people are gluttons for punishment.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNN: DOJ sues Google over its dominance in online advertising market. “The Justice Department and eight states sued Google on Tuesday, accusing the company of harming competition with its dominance in the online advertising market and calling for it to be broken up. The move marks the Biden administration’s first blockbuster antitrust case against a Big Tech company. The eight states joining the suit include California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Virginia.”

Washington Post: Ex-Twitter engineer tells FTC security violations persist after Musk. “The former employee has told members of Congress and staff at the Federal Trade Commission that any Twitter engineer can activate an internal program until recently called ‘GodMode’ and tweet from any account today, three months after Musk’s takeover. The allegation was also made in a complaint filed in October by the nonprofit law firm Whistleblower Aid with the FTC, which is continuing to interview former employees.”

Bleeping Computer: GoTo says hackers stole customers’ backups and encryption key. “GoTo (formerly LogMeIn) is warning customers that threat actors who breached its development environment in November 2022 stole encrypted backups containing customer information and an encryption key for a portion of that data. GoTo provides a platform for cloud-based remote working, collaboration, and communication, as well as remote IT management and technical support solutions.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Larry Ferlazzo: How I’m Using AI Art Generation To Teach English To Newcomers. “I’ve previously shared THE BEST RESOURCES FOR TEACHING & LEARNING WITH AI ART GENERATION TOOLS, which included some preliminary ideas on how to us AI art creation sites in the classroom. I thought I would share how I’ve been using them in my ELL Newcomers class over the past few weeks, and hope that readers will share even better ideas.” I have a great deal of respect for Larry, but this time I want to disagree with him about terminology. I don’t think we should call them “art generators”. I think we should call them “image generators.” Referring to the output as “art” gives it a cultural credibility it does not deserve.

ABC News (Australia): Murray River flood photos on social media to help create archive for future planning. “When water levels along the South Australian stretch of the river started increasing in mid-to-late 2022, so too did the number of photographs capturing the changing landscape. Multiple social media pages dedicated to sharing visual updates of floodwaters have gained thousands of audience members far and wide.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

New Lines Magazine: Who Invented Paper?. “A new discovery at a long-neglected site suggests the ancient Egyptians used it more than 2,000 years before the Chinese.” Good morning, Internet…

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