Open Culture: “Nearly two and a half centuries after its founding, the United States of America is still both celebrated and derided as a young country. Examined on the whole, the US may or may not seem less mature than other lands in any obvious way, but the difference manifests much more clearly on the… Continue Reading
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Author Archives: Sabrina I. Pacifici
US GPO Webinars – Health Stats and Govt Info
Webinar: Health Statistics on the Web; Date: Thursday, February 15, 2024; Time: 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. (EST) Register – https://secure.icohere.com/registration/register.cfm?reg=10482&evt=20240215-Health-Stats&t=1707829397055 Recording and closed captioning are available. All webinars are free of charge. Speakers: Katie Pierce Farrier, Data Science Strategist, Region 3, Network of the National Library of Medicine, Christine Nieman, Data Education Librarian, Region… Continue Reading
RSS Parrot – Turn Mastodon into your feed reader
“This is the browser home of RSS Parrot, a Fediverse service that lets you turn Mastodon into your feed reader. The Parrot follows the RSS or Atom feeds of a large number of websites, and sends out a toot whenever a new post is published on one of them. Every feed has a dedicated account.… Continue Reading
6 Ways to Use Old Hard Drives
How to Geek: ” You can buy an enclosure to convert internal hard drives into external USB drives for easy data transfer and storage. Hard drives can be used as archival storage for game consoles, USB boot drives, storage for DVRs, and more. Hard drives can be used for easy file backups with File History… Continue Reading
OpenAI Gives ChatGPT a Memory
Wired [read free]: “…The promise and peril of the internet has always been a memory greater than our own, a permanent recall of information and events that our brains can’t store. More recently, tech companies have promised that virtual assistants and chatbots could handle some of the mnemonic load, by both remembering and reminding. It’s… Continue Reading
The unsettling scourge of obituary spam
The Verge: “…“Obituary scraping” is a common practice that affects not just celebrities and public figures, but also average, private individuals. Funeral homes have been dealing with obituary aggregator sites for at least 15 years, says Courtney Gould Miller, chief strategy officer at MKJ Marketing, which specializes in marketing funeral services. The sites trawl news… Continue Reading
See What Charles Darwin Kept in His ‘Insanely Eclectic’ Personal Library Revealed for the First Time
Smithsonian: On the English naturalist’s 215th birthday, more than 9,000 titles from his expansive collection are now accessible online: “After nearly two decades of sleuthing and meticulous archival research, academics this week marked the 215th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday on February 12 with a gift for the world: the English naturalist’s complete personal library,… Continue Reading
FCC gets tough: Telcos must now tell you when your personal info is stolen
The Register: “The FCC’s updated reporting requirements mean telcos in America will have just seven days to officially disclose that a criminal has broken into their systems. After releasing a proposed rule in early January and giving the industry 30 days to respond, the FCC’s final rule was published today. It solidifies what the agency… Continue Reading
Amazon hides cheaper items with faster delivery, lawsuit alleges
Ars Technica: “Amazon rigged its platform to “routinely” push an overwhelming majority of customers to pay more for items that could’ve been purchased at lower costs with equal or faster delivery times, a class-action lawsuit has alleged. The lawsuit claims that a biased algorithm drives Amazon’s “Buy Box,” which appears on an item’s page and… Continue Reading
How AI Works
How AI Works. An entirely non-technical explanation of LLMs by Nir Zicherman, January 29, 2024. “For all the talk about AI lately—its implications, the ethical quandaries it raises, the pros and cons of its adoption—little of the discussion among my non-technical friends touches on how any of this stuff works. The concepts seem daunting from… Continue Reading
American Local Government Elections Database
“The study of urban and local politics in the United States has long been hindered by a lack of centralized sources of election data. We introduce a new dataset of about 78,000 candidates in 57,000 electoral contests that encompasses races for seven distinct local political offices in most medium and large cities and counties in… Continue Reading
How to Take a Screenshot on Your iPad
MakeUseOf: Key Takeaways You can press your iPad’s top and Home/Volume buttons simultaneously to take a screenshot. You can also use gestures, Siri, and Assistive Touch to take screenshots on an iPad. iPad accessories like the Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil also make it easy to take screenshots. Whether you want to send your lecture… Continue Reading
