Historical images are online

The Library of Congress has an impressive collection of historical photos, prints and documents related to the Northwest.

Its online Prints and Photographs Online Catalog contains catalog records and digital images covering the building and settling of the region, from about 1880 onward.

The collection is at loc.gov/rr/print, and once there, search by state or city.

Nearly all of the vast collection can be downloaded, meaning regular people can reuse the images (provided there are no copyright exclusions attached to a picture).

The picture here is one example from the collection; it shows a circa 1930 photo of the Long Lake Hydroelectric Plant in the vicinity of Ford, in Stevens County.

  •YouTube search: Not well known is the recently added location search option at YouTube. Of course anyone already could search videos there by location, but doing that produces mixed results. If you search for “Moscow” you’d get plenty of results from Russia rather than the city in Idaho.

Now, when you submit a YouTube search with a specific area in mind, the first result will be a Google map in a thumbnail.

Click that thumbnail and you’ll see a larger map with flags noting where recent YouTube videos were made or recorded. You can even search for “hotels” or other points of interest. If there are multiple videos fitting that query, they’ll show up in the result map.

 

•SimplyNoise, auditory Zen : When you want to mask your audio surroundings with some white noise, use the free white noise generator at http://simplynoise.com.

White noise, as you likely know, is a background tone or audio signal that masks or filters the other sounds around you. White noise is considered analogous to white light which contains all frequencies.

SimplyNoise allows you to generate standard “white noise” or “pink noise,” a slightly different version of auditory signal.

 

CLIPPINGS

U.S. leads in mobile Web use: A research firm has found the United States has the most number of people using mobile devices to connect to the Internet.

Nielsen Mobile’s new report, “The Worldwide State of the Mobile Web,” says adoption of the mobile Web has reached a critical mass and can now support “large-scale mobile marketing efforts.” Which means, they’re going to start annoying us with more cell phone ads.

As of May 2008, 15.6 percent of mobile subscribers in the United States make regular use of the mobile Internet on their devices, totaling some 40 million subscribers. The UK and Italy weren’t far behind, with 12.9 percent and 11.9 percent actively using the Net on mobile devices.

 

•Tracking worldwide outbreaks: The medical profession has started using the Web more effectively to track real-time reports of outbreaks of infectious diseases.

A new site, HealthMap.com, tracks the latest medical data and generates a map summary of reports of recent disease outbreaks.

HealthMap collects information from various sources, including alerts from the World Health Organization, discussions on public-health listservs, and breaking news from thousands of Web sites in six languages from around the world.

A series of text-processing algorithms then picks out the disease being reported and the location of the event, and tries to determine its relevance. For example, the software must distinguish between a breaking news item on tuberculosis and an article about a TB vaccination campaign.

John Brownstein, cofounder of HealthMap and an assistant professor at the Informatics Program at Children’s Hospital Boston, says the algorithms rate reports correctly about 95 percent of the time.

The data is plotted on a world map, with different colors indicating the most recent reports.