Center for Data Innovation: “Web scraping—the use of automated tools to extract data from websites—helps businesses, researchers, and others quickly and efficiently gather publicly available information from the Internet, such as consumer product reviews or social media posts, that would otherwise require significant labor to collect. Unfortunately, uncertainty about the legality of scraping under the… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: July 2021
Histomap: Visualizing the 4,000 Year History of Global Power
Virtual Capitalist: “Today’s infographic, created all the way back in 1931 by a man named John B. Sparks, maps the ebb and flow of global power going all the way back to 2,000 B.C. on one coherent timeline. Histomap, published by Rand McNally in 1931, is an ambitious attempt at fitting a mountain of historical… Continue Reading
Identity Theft 101: Tips to Protect Yourself Against Identity Theft
Law Technology Today: “What identity theft comes down to is that your personal and confidential information ends up in the wrong hands and gets used without your permission for purchases and all kinds of fraudulent activities. The scary part is that most of us willingly make our personal information available online, and it is easy… Continue Reading
Don’t be that employee: How to avoid ransomware attacks at work
Washington Post -“…Ransomware, which locks down a target’s computers and data, can infect a network a few different ways, including through employee accounts. Click the wrong link, open the wrong attachment or log into the wrong website, and you could put your company in a perilous position. Depending on their roles, some employees find their… Continue Reading
Beyond Goodreads: Four tools that help readers track their books
Washington Post – “Serious readers, much like sports fans, often relish keeping track of stats. Many turn to Goodreads, a large social cataloguing website that allows users to log, discuss, review and rate the books they read. (Goodreads is owned by Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.) But increasingly, there are websites… Continue Reading
The state of American friendship: Change, challenges, and loss
Survey Center on American Life: “Coming out of a once-in-a-generation global pandemic, Americans appear more attuned than ever to the importance of friendship. However, despite renewed interest in the topic of friendship in popular culture and the news media, signs suggest that the role of friends in American social life is experiencing a pronounced decline.… Continue Reading
Word learning dogs provide an animal model for studying exceptional performance
Fugazza, C., Dror, S., Sommese, A. et al. Word learning dogs (Canis familiaris) provide an animal model for studying exceptional performance. Sci Rep 11, 14070 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-93581-2 “Exceptional performance is present in various human activities but its origins are debated and challenging to study. We report evidence of exceptional performance and qualitative variation in learning… Continue Reading
A Glowing Shrine to the Printed Word
The New York Times – “A mighty wall of books impresses in the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, a transformed branch that bursts with new services and technology… That’s why the Stavros Niarchos now delights book obsessives but also offers lines of computers atop long tables and a dizzying array of technology training, career exploration, life-skills… Continue Reading
US COVID-19 Vaccination Tracking
“This tracker compiles spatial and demographic data on COVID-19 vaccination coverage in the United States. To characterize US county-level COVID-19 vaccination patterns accurately we integrated data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with data provided by state health departments. We collate these disparate data sources to produce a single estimate of cumulative vaccination… Continue Reading
ALA Committee on Diversity Scorecard for Library and Information Organizations
ALA Committee on Diversity: “The DEI Scorecard for Library and Information Organizations, developed by theALA Committee on Diversity, is an evaluative tool that centers accountability and transparency in determining organizational effectiveness in diversity, equity, and inclusion in the recruitment, hiring, retention, and promotion of people of color. Additionally, the Scorecard includes areas that impact these… Continue Reading
New York City’s new biometrics privacy law takes effect
Mondaq – “Following the municipal ban on the use of facial recognition technology in Portland, Oregon, New York City’s more expansive “biometric identifier information” law, set to go into effect July 9, 2021, will ban the sale of biometric data but permit the use of biometric identifying technologies with posted notice to customers in “simple language”… Continue Reading
More cell phone data use is negatively affecting Wi-Fi performance, study finds
Citation: “Hidden-nodes in coexisting LAA & Wi-FI: a measurement study of real deployments.” – UChicago researchers find competition between networks decreases performance – “If service becomes slow when you’re trying to send a quick email on your smartphone, you might scroll through your network options and discover how many Wi-Fi networks there are. In fact,… Continue Reading
