NEW RESOURCES
Now available: an online archive (via Instagram) of movie ticket stubs. “[Ben] Smith has collected some real gems so far such as a ticket to The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night at the Century’s Huntington in New York and a 1977 ticket for the Orchard Theatre in Singapore. His personal favourite, however, is a Hunger Games Odeon ticket.”
A library in New Zealand has created a Web site with 300 letters from World War I. “The work, which took the eight volunteers more than two years, follows the stories of Charlie McIntyre, Ernie McIntyre, Len Shepard and John Hall, with a combined total of more than 1700 pages of letters transcribed.” The Web site will launch March 1.
A new Web site provides information about public parks in Delaware. “Play Outside is a single online information source that allows users to find public parks as well as exact locations of outdoor recreation facilities within parks and wildlife areas throughout the state. It includes all areas in the public trust managed by towns, cities, counties and state agencies in Delaware. The website is designed to serve those looking for outdoor recreation opportunities, places to be immersed in nature or to conduct active lifestyles. Users can locate parks close to home or in less-developed places such as wildlife areas.”
Washington Post: Google fights online trolls with new tool. “On Thursday, the company publicly released an artificial intelligence tool, called Perspective, that scans online content and rates how ‘toxic’ it is based on ratings by thousands of people. For example, you can feed an online comment board into Perspective and see the percentage of users that said it was toxic.” Because I’m into recursion, I fed this writeup into Perspective to see how toxic it was considered. It got 10%.
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Digital NC has added a bunch of materials from the Masons and there’s a bit of World War I in there.. From the blog post: “New materials from out partner The Grand Lodge of Ancient, Free and Accepted Masons of North Carolina are now online. This batch includes several Minute Books and an Account book from St. John’s Lodge no. 1, Minute books and an account book from Zion Lodge no. 81, speeches from well known North Carolina Free Masons such as William Lander and J.M. Lovejoy, letters of correspondence, and more. One item that may be of particular genealogical interest is a collection of lists of masons who died in World War I. ”
Engadget: Instagram’s carousel-style photo sets are now available to all . “Sometimes one photo just doesn’t tell the whole story. That’s why Instagram has just introduced a new feature where you can combine up to 10 photos and videos in a single post (It’s been teased for awhile, but now it’s finally here). Think of it as a slideshow of different images that your friends can swipe through, be they step-by-step DIY instructions or simply a collection of moments taken at your buddy’s birthday party.”
USEFUL STUFF
From Portent: Don’t Panic: Google Site Search Replacements. “Google’s Site Search product has been around a long time. Pay $100, and you can embed a little Google search engine on your site. They’re keeping Google Custom Search. Sounds great, but there’s a problem…” Ads, specifically. This article lists some options for replacing Google Site Search, but there aren’t many; Google killed a lot of ’em. Does this remind you of anything? LIKE GOOGLE READER?
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
Federal News Radio: How Twitter became an outlet of resistance, information for federal employees. “When a former employee of Badlands National Park took over the park’s official Twitter account to tweet climate change facts in direct defiance of the Trump administration, they couldn’t have known that they were starting a movement. Almost one month later, more than 80 accounts claiming to represent various federal organizations and employees, many of them national parks, exist in opposition to the Trump administration and its policies.”
SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES
ZDNet: Android ransomware attacks have grown by 50 percent in a year. “Ransomware targeting Android users has increased by over 50 percent in just a year, as cybercriminals increasingly take aim at what they view as an easy ecosystem to penetrate. This, the highest number of attempts to infect Android smartphones and tablets with malicious file-encrypting software so far, comes as users increasingly turn to mobiles as their primary devices, storing more and more valuable data on them.”
Hurriyet Daily News: Over 1,700 arrested over ‘terror propaganda’ via social media across Turkey. “Some 1,734 people have been arrested for ‘making terror propaganda’ on social media since the failed July 2016 coup attempt, state-run Anadolu Agency has reported. ‘Cyber-police’ working on identifying suspects making terror propaganda online have so far detained at least 3,894 people out of 22,088 identified by police since the coup attempt. ”
RESEARCH AND OPINION
TechCrunch: Google’s latest research aims to make mixed reality videos a little less alien. “Game publishers like Owlchemy Labs and Radial Games have done some of the most extensive work on mixed reality setups and have shared their findings with the greater VR game dev community. Many of the issues of reckoning a human avatar in a digital world have been accounted for in these efforts but today, Google revealed in a blog post that its been working on a strange little project to go the last mile in making these MR videos even more realistic by bringing the user’s face back into these videos.”
From Bloomberg, and the article is way better than the headline: Social Media Are Driving Americans Insane. “Social media use has skyrocketed from 7 percent of American adults in 2005 to 65 percent in 2015. For those in the 18-29 age range, the increase is larger, from 12 percent to a remarkable 90 percent. But while an increase in social media usage is hardly surprising, the number of people who just can’t tear themselves away is stark: Nowadays, 43 percent of Americans say they are checking their e-mails, texts, or social media accounts constantly. And their stress levels are paying for it: On a 10-point scale, constant checkers reported an average stress level of 5.3. For the rest of Americans, the average level is a 4.4.” Good morning, Internet…
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