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Daily Archives: September 24, 2017

Socrata launches Find Shelter application for victims of disasters

GCN: “…The Federal Emergency Management Agency puts out information on hurricane shelters every 20 minutes during natural disasters through its application programming interface. Socrata decided during Hurricane Irma to input the information into its geographic information system for a new web-based platform called Find Shelter. This week, capabilities were added to the platform to include Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands as a result of Hurricanes Jose and Maria. More work is planned to expand the platform to include shelters from other natural disasters such as forest fires, tornadoes and flooding in the near future…”

Beyond Words: help discover pictures in LC historical newspaper collections

“The Library of Congress invites you to help us in the effort to take newspapers Beyond Words. Join us to identify and improve information about illustrated newspapers in the Chronicling America digital collection. This brand new pilot project offers you the opportunity to explore historical newspaper coverage of World War I and contribute to Library… Continue Reading

Library of Congress launches Digital Labs

“Welcome to Labs! A place to encourage innovation with Library of Congress digital collections. Labs will have a growing and changing selection of experiments, projects, events and resources to encourage creative use and connections with the Library of Congress. This is a space for us to try things in public, create community, and invite you… Continue Reading

Discover Which Corporations are Biggest Regulatory Violators Throughout the US

Discover Which Corporations are the Biggest Regulatory Violators Throughout the United States  – Now with data back to 2000 “Violation Tracker is the first national search engine on corporate misconduct. It covers banking, consumer protection, false claims, environmental, wage & hour, unfair labor practice, health, safety, employment discrimination, price-fixing, bribery and other cases initiated by 43… Continue Reading

Discover Where Corporations are Getting Taxpayer Assistance Across the United States

SUBSIDY TRACKER is the first national search engine for economic development subsidies and other forms of government financial assistance to business. Subsidy award entries: 540,000 (341,000 state/local; 199,000 federal) Subsidy programs: 974 (836 state/local; 138 federal) Parent companies covered: 2,844 Uncle Sam’s Favorite Corporations (report on federal data) Megadeals (largest state and local subsidy awards)… Continue Reading

Times Literary Supplement review – how emojis are moving us away from written communications

Times Literary Supplement: “…Both Evans [The Emoji Code, Vyvyan Evans] and Danesi [Marcel Danesi, The Semiotics of Emoji] set out to explain why emoji are an important development, why it is interesting to study them, and why we can ignore naysayers who cite them as another example of the erosion of standards. For Evans they… Continue Reading

Are VPNs really protecting your privacy and security?

An Analysis of the Privacy and Security Risks of Android VPN Permission-enabled Apps. MC 2016, November 14-16, 2016, Santa Monica, CA. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2987443.2987471. “Millions of users worldwide resort to mobile VPN clients to either circumvent censorship or to access geo-blocked con- tent, and more generally for privacy and security purposes. In practice, however, users have… Continue Reading