Wednesday, November 4, 2015

October 13, 2015  For more than a decade, retired engineer Tom Tryniski has been digitizing old newspapers from microfilm and making their full text available and searchable online.  Tryniski's site, which he created in his living room in upstate New York, has grown into one of the largest historic newspaper databases in the world, with 22 million newspaper pages.  By contrast, the Library of Congress' historic newspaper site, Chronicling America, has 5 million newspaper pages on its site.  

FROZEN PEAS  and how to use them.  Add them to pasta, salad, soup, mixed vegetables.  Mash them with egg yolks, yogurt and mustard as filling for deviled eggs.

WHO IS HE?  He was born in 1912 in Prievidza, Hungary (now Slovakia), although his year and place of birth are usually and inaccurately given as 1915 in New York City.  A talented linguist and an astute mimic, he had an ear for languages which became apparent later in his acting career.  He attended the City College of New York as a pre-med student, completing the four-year course in three years and winning a scholarship to the Physicians and Surgeons College at Columbia University.  He qualified for the United States fencing team prior to the 1936 Summer Olympic Games, but quit the team just prior to the games in order to take a role in the theater.

November 2, 2015  Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society has changed its Chilling Effects project's name to “Lumen,” and can be found at www.lumendatabase.org.  The name borrows from the unit of measurement for visible light, highlighting the use of data for transparency reporting.  “Since Chilling Effects was founded in the wake of the passage of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the project has been essential to the collection and study of notices sent to online platforms requesting the removal of content,” said Chris Bavitz, Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Center and Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.  Started in 2001 by then-Berkman fellow Wendy Seltzer and current Berkman Faculty Director Jonathan Zittrain, Chilling Effects was founded to provide a database of requests for content removal, to assist scholars and others in understanding trends in content removal demands and practices, and to facilitate research into how online intermediaries make their content removal decisions.  Over time, the project has expanded in the types of notices it hosts, the sources they come from, and the sheer volume of requests it receives.  In addition to DMCA notices, request types now include removal demands grounded in trademark, patent, locally-regulated content, and private information removal claims.  Companies sharing notices they receive include Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, WordPress, and Reddit.  The number of notices collected has grown from a few notices per week, to approximately 4,000 per day.  As of July 2015, the Chilling Effects database contains more than three million notices and is the definitive source for online content removal requests.

Jean Catherine Coulter (born December 26, 1942) is an American author of romantic suspense thrillers and historical romances who currently resides in northern California.  Coulter grew up on a horse ranch in Cameron County, Texas.  Her grandmother, who died at the young age of 37, was also a writer.  Her father was a painter and singer, and her mother is a retired concert pianist.  Coulter wrote her first two novels, fifteen pages each, when she was fourteen.  While a freshman at the University of Texas, Coulter wrote poetry.  After earning her undergraduate degree from the University of Texas, Coulter attended Boston College and earned a Master's degree in early 19th-century European history.  She took a job as a speech writer for a Wall Street executive.  One night, when she found herself in the middle of a particularly bad romance novel she threw it across the room, asserting that even she could do better.  When Coulter finished writing her novel she sent it to an editor at Signet.  Three days later Signet offered her a three-book contract.  That first novel, The Autumn Countess, was published by Penguin Books in 1978.  By 1982, she was earning enough to quit her job and become a full-time writer.  Since then she has written over fifty books and has had forty-two consecutive New York Times Bestsellers since 1988.  Her thriller The Maze was her first book to place on the New York Times Hardcover Bestseller list, while The Cove spent nine weeks on the New York Times Paperback Bestseller list and sold over one million copies.  Coulter generally publishes one historical romance and one suspense novel each year, and has been busily rewriting many of her earlier Regency romances to turn them into longer historical romances.  Coulter sits down at her computer every morning at 6:30 a.m. to review her email before beginning writing at 7:30 a.m.  She normally finishes writing by 11 a.m.

Saturday, November 7, 2015  1-4 p.m.  Toledo-Lucas County Public Library  McMaster Center  325 Michigan St.   It has been 40 years since the Edmund Fitzgerald, a ship considered the largest, strongest and fastest vessel of its time, the "Queen of the Great Lakes," sank in a violent storm on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975.    
Thomas Walton, retired Editor and Vice President of The Blade and a member of the Fitzgerald crew as a young man, will present "10 November, the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,"  followed by the documentary,  "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."  The program will also feature maritime-themed musical pieces performed by the Toledo School for the Arts Studio Winds.  This program is FREE and open to the public.  Free on-site parking.  Sponsored by the Library Legacy Foundation

2015’s Best and Worst Cities to Retire
2015’s Best & Worst Cities to Find a Job
2015’s Best & Worst Small Cities in America

November 2015  When Google launched Inbox, its most recent email app from the Gmail team, it touted the app's ability to act almost like an assistant.  Now, a year later, Google is making the app more like an aide than ever.  The company will soon be rolling out a new feature called "Smart Reply," which uses artificial intelligence to suggest replies for your messages. The Smart Reply feature works a bit like predictive text in keyboard apps, except that it predicts phrases you're most likely to use when replying to messages.  The feature will show up to three short sentences based on the message and how people have responded to similar emails in the past.  Karissa Bell  http://mashable.com/2015/11/03/google-inbox-smart-reply/#Dhn0qh_1j8ql

The  latest version of Mozilla Firefox browser (v42) came out on November 3, 2015 with safety upgrades to the Web security controls and Private Browsing.  Tracking Protection in Private Browsing stops  trackers that have the habit of monitoring your searches, spamming you with ads or discreetly monitoring your online behavior without consent.  Horia Ungureanu  http://www.techtimes.com/articles/102967/20151104/mozilla-firefox-42-rolls-out-with-tracking-protection-lets-you-block-trackers-in-private-browsing.htm


http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1373  November 4, 2015  On this date in 1861, the University of Washington opened in Seattle as the Territorial University.  On this date in 1922, in Egypt, British archaeologist Howard Carter and his men found the entrance to Pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings.

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