NEW RESOURCES

Biodiversity Data Journal: The MOBIOS+: A FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) database for Mindanao’s terrestrial biodiversity . “This initiative seeks to enhance our comprehension of biodiversity trends in Mindanao over temporal and spatial dimensions, while also creating an openly-accessible database. The database we present here is the first of its kind and currently the most comprehensive attempt to establish the largest consolidated database for Mindanao biodiversity, based on publicly available literature.”

Brown University Library News: The Ocean State Spatial Database . “Frank Donnelly (Head of Library GIS and Data Services) and his team of student workers at GeoData@SciLi recently released the Ocean State Spatial Database (OSSDB), a geodatabase for conducting basic geographic analysis and thematic mapping within the State of Rhode Island. This open source database is intended to serve as a foundation for contemporary mapping projects, and as an educational tool for supporting GIS coursework and introducing spatial databases and SQL.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Land: Google Search officially stops indented results. “Google has stopped showing indented results in the Google search listings. Google has historically showed an indented search result under the main result when it was from the same domain but over the past few weeks, Google stopped indenting those results.”

Irish Times: Social media firms deploying ‘crisis teams’ to combat Gaza ‘misinformation’. “Ireland’s Digital Services Commissioner, John Evans, has said there has been a ‘heightened sense of activity” among social media platforms in response to misinformation about the conflict in Israel and Gaza. He said some of the platforms had deployed crisis response teams and experts with specific language skills to respond to posts about the conflict in Gaza.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Make Your TikTok Videos More Accessible: 5 Essentials. “TikTok is one of the most popular platforms for short-form video. But how can you ensure that your videos can be enjoyed by everyone? Here are some tips on how to make your TikTok videos more accessible so that people with disabilities and certain medical conditions can watch them comfortably too.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Boing Boing: Firefox to have built-in “fake review detector”. “The web browser Firefox will warn users when they’re looking at fake reviews online. The feature follows the foundation’s acquisition of Fakespot, a web service that specializes in doing just that.”

CNBC: Google is opening a cafe, store and event space to the general public near its headquarters. “Google is opening a sliver of its main campus to the general public starting this week. The company opened its doors to what it’s calling its ‘Visitor Experience’ center the public Thursday, following a ceremony where Google executives and local leaders gathered hear its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Apple AirTags stalking led to ruin and murders, lawsuit says . “Since the lawsuit was initially filed in 2022, plaintiffs have alleged that there has been an ‘explosion of reporting’ showing that AirTags are frequently being used for stalking, including a spike in international AirTags stalking cases and more than 150 police reports in the US as of April 2022. More recently, there were 19 AirTags stalking cases in one US metropolitan area—Tulsa, Oklahoma—alone, the complaint said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Stuff (New Zealand): Stuff Group withdraws from X (formerly Twitter). “Stuff, New Zealand’s biggest independently owned news business, will stop sharing content to X (formerly Twitter), effective immediately. The company, which owns this website, has flagged it is increasingly concerned about the volume of mis- and disinformation being shared, and the damaging behaviour being exhibited on and enabled by the platform.”

Nature: AI reads text from ancient Herculaneum scroll for the first time. “A 21-year-old computer-science student has won a global contest to read the first text inside a carbonized scroll from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, which had been unreadable since a volcanic eruption in AD 79 — the same one that buried nearby Pompeii. The breakthrough could open up hundreds of texts from the only intact library to survive from Greco-Roman antiquity.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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