NEW RESOURCES
Scottish explorer David Livingstone now has an online archive. “The site, Livingstone Online, http://www.livingstoneonline.org, is the digital home for the documents chronicling the life and work of Livingstone, a missionary, physician and abolitionist best known for his travels in Africa in the mid-19th century…. More than 7,500 original images of Livingstone’s writings can be found on the site and the archive is expected to expand to more than 12,000 images by 2016. The archive also includes drawings and illustrations depicting Livingstone’s work and findings.”
Akron, Ohio has a new online photo archive. And unlike many photo archives I cover, this one is recent. “An online treasure trove of photographs of Akron is now available — for free use by anyone — thanks to local photographer Shane Wynn and two nonprofits who work to give the city a boost. Wynn spent more than 40 hours last year taking the shots, capturing more than 1,400 images of the city, including wide-angle photos taken from the tops of parking decks and a ladder.”
A professor and a hashtag has turned into a crowdsourced list of readings on the Charleston shootings. “The professor [Chad Williams] reached out to the historians Kidada E. Williams (no relation), a professor at Wayne State University; Keisha N. Blaine, an incoming professor at the University of Iowa; and Christopher Cameron, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who is the founder of the African American Intellectual History Society. The four scholars solicited suggestions on Twitter under the hashtag #CharlestonSyllabus, and the project quickly took off.” Note that the list at http://aaihs.org/resources/charlestonsyllabus/ is no longer accepting suggestions, but contributors are asked to continue to use the #CharlestonSyllabus hashtag; a TheCharlestonSyllabus.com Web site is under development.
NASA images have been aggregated into one big collection. “The NASA Images collection, built and unveiled last week by Luna Imaging, combines over 70 NASA Image galleries into a single, searchable source. These includes familiar collections such as NASA’s Image of the Day Gallery and the Jet Propulsion Image Gallery, but also plenty of obscure treasures. In total, the collection contains over 100 thousand photographs that range from historic documentation of the Apollo moon missions to the latest shots of distant quasars by the Hubble Space Telescope.”
32 years of the LGBT publication Dallas Voice are now available online. “University of North Texas digitized and put online 32 years of Dallas Voice from Volume 1, Issue 1 as part of its North Texas LGBT history archives. UNT also has been working on the project in conjunction with The Dallas Way and Resource Center, which donated its Phil Johnson Archives. Thousands of pages of Dallas Voice articles and ads are searchable.” Also, the archive is a lot, lot more readable than the screen shots in the blog post make it out to be.
SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES
Adobe has released a patch for a zero-day security flaw. “In an advisory issued Tuesday morning, Adobe said the latest version of Flash — v. 18.0.0.194 on Windows and Mac OS X — fixes a critical flaw (CVE-2015-3113) that is being actively exploited in “limited, targeted attacks.” The company said systems running Internet Explorer for Windows 7 and below, as well as Firefox on Windows XP, are known targets of these exploits.”
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
Reddit is ten years old and has released a bunch of stats. “In addition to detailing that the site now receives nearly 230 million unique monthly visitors, the blog post also specified that the site has received a staggering 16 billion upvotes (and surprisingly only 2.5 billion downvotes) since it was founded in 2005. What was also impressive was the sheer amount of page-view volume that the small crew at Reddit has had to deal with. The post said that there were 334,626,161 monthly page views per each of the 30 Reddit engineers.”
Googler Matt Cutts has extended his Google leave until the end of 2015. For those of you playing along at home, that’s about 17 months of leave from Google.
Google’s got a new health wearable, and it sounds like it’s going straight into a vertical market. Which is how they should have done Glass, but anyway. “The health wristband can monitor pulse, heart rhythm, skin temperature, light exposure and noise levels, providing valuable data not just about a patient, but about their surroundings, too. Where this niche wearable differs from those aimed at the more broad consumer market is mostly in accuracy; the readings it takes are more scientifically rigorous than those achieved by the current crop of Android Wear-powered devices, and the dedicated medical wearable unveiled today also monitors and reports information continuously, for better delivery of real-time actionable info to researchers and medical professionals.”
Bing’s homepage now has sound. This is cool as long as it’s not autoplay. “…when you visit us for your daily dose of surprise and delight, look for the audio icon on the bottom-right of screen to know if you can hear the homepage that day—sound is off by default so you can choose when and where to listen. If you want to learn more about today’s video and the geese calls captured by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, click on the camera icon, also on the bottom-right. This will take you to Bing’s Backstage, where we give you more information about the daily image.”
RESEARCH AND OPINION
Major Internet providers are being accused of slowing traffic speeds. “Major internet providers, including AT&T, Time Warner and Verizon, are slowing data from popular websites to thousands of US businesses and residential customers in dozens of cities across the country, according to a study released on Monday. The study, conducted by internet activists BattlefortheNet, looked at the results from 300,000 internet users and found significant degradations on the networks of the five largest internet service providers (ISPs), representing 75% of all wireline households across the US.” Good afternoon, Internet…
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