NEW RESOURCES

Michigan State University: MSU Libraries’ Turfgrass Information Center TGIF database now open access. “The TGIF database indexes material from a wide variety of sources including governments, higher learning institutions, professional organizations and private publishers. Materials include articles from peer-reviewed publications, technical reports and conference proceedings, trade and professional publications, local professional newsletters, popular magazines, monographs, theses and dissertations, fact sheets and brochures, images, software, and web documents.”

McKnights Senior Living: First national directory of university-associated retirement communities launches. “The website provides a comprehensive list of the university retirement communities, or URCs, in the country, with information on the history, services and costs of those communities. Carle said the goal of the site is to provide a one-stop directory and information resource for consumers, a membership resource site for academic institutions and senior living providers, and a certification program.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

How-To Geek: Some Chromebooks Will Now Get 10 Years of Updates. “Sustainability starts with tech that actually lasts a long time. After all, the best way to produce less e-waste is to avoid replacing technology that still works. While a smartphone can last 2-4 years, PCs can last much longer, and this also extends to laptops as long as you take good care of them. If you have a Chromebook, however, you’re in luck, as Google has just announced a notable extension to the lifespan of Chromebooks.”

Associated Press: Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signs law restricting release of her travel, security records. “Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law Thursday restricting release of her travel and security records after the Legislature wrapped up a special session marked by a fight to more broadly scale back the state Freedom of Information Act.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Search Engine Roundtable: Advertiser Lost Thousands Of Dollars Lost During Google Ads Experimental Test. “A respected advertiser in the PPC community said that a Google Ads experiment that the customer did not opt in to or have the option to opt out of cost the company thousands of dollars in lost ad spend.”

WIRED: How to Take Back the Internet . “ON THIS WEEK’S episode of Have a Nice Future, Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode talk to Cory Doctorow, a writer, internet activist, and author of The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. As the US government takes Google to court in an antitrust case this week, Doctorow explains why he believes monopoly power has made the internet a miserable place and what we can do to get our digital lives back.” A podcast with show notes and transcription.

El País: ‘When regulating artificial intelligence, we must place race and gender at the center of the debate’. “One of the most recent research projects organized by 32-year-old Brazilian anthropologist Fernanda K. Martins found that platforms such as Spotify recommend more male artists to users than women, regardless of the musical genre being searched for. This is what academics call ‘algorithmic discrimination.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: US judge will not order DOJ official to exit Google advertising case. “U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema on Friday declined to order a Justice Department official to stay out of the government’s advertising antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet’s Google but said the department ‘should think about it.'”

TechCrunch: TikTok fined $379M in EU for failing to keep kids’ data safe. “It’s been a long time coming but TikTok has finally been found in breach of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in relation to its handling of children’s data. Under the decision issued today by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), the video sharing platform has been reprimanded and fined €345 million (~$379 million). It has also been ordered to bring its offending data processing into compliance within three months.”

Ars Technica: “Most notorious” illegal shadow library sued by textbook publishers [Updated]. “Publishers suing include Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education. They claimed that Library Genesis (aka Libgen) is operated by unknown individuals based outside the United States, who know that the shadow library is ‘one of the largest, most notorious, and far-reaching infringement operations in the world’ and intentionally violate copyright laws with ‘absolutely no legal justification for what they do.'”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Penn State University: Penn State team to triple size of forensic database of mitochondrial DNA. “In circumstances where potential crime scene evidence such as hair or bone might be old or degraded, forensic scientists rely on DNA from a cell’s mitochondria — an organelle that has its own genome separate from the ‘human genome’ in the cell’s nucleus. Now, the National Institute of Justice has awarded a team of researchers from Penn State $770,000 to sequence the mitochondrial genomes of 10,000 Pennsylvanians. This will more than triple the size of the existing database and provide a crucial point of reference for use in human identification cases.”

National Library of Medicine: Introducing Pebblescout: Index and Search Petabyte-Scale Sequence Resources Faster than Ever. “NCBI is excited to introduce Pebblescout, a pilot web service that allows you to search for sequence matches in very large nucleotide databases, such as runs in the NIH Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and assemblies for whole genome shotgun sequencing projects in Genbank – faster and more efficiently!” Good morning, Internet…

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