The Scout Report -- Volume 24, Number 22

Lake Andes (Yankton name: Bde Ihanke) lies in southern South Dakota in an area that was declared a Yankton Sioux Reservation in 1858. Today, 160 years later, the lake is a National Wildlife Refuge. Casting Digital Nets is a project that "explores the long, strange journey of the lake -- as it moved from a Yankton possession to a state-supported bass bonanza, to a federal wildlife refuge -- with particular attention to land tenure, economic pursuits, and fishery ecology, all unfolding under a backdrop of evolving legal doctrine and international treaties." This project is headed by David Nesheim, Assistant Professor of History at Chadron State College in Nebraska, with contributions from staff and research assistance from the University of Nebraska Lincoln's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and Chadron State College. This project consists of two main components. Visitors may want to start by checking out the Map section, which provides a concise, yet rich, history of the region accompanied by eight historic maps. To learn more about the history of Lake Andes, visitors can explore a number of primary documents in the Browse section, including newspaper articles and correspondence. Alternatively, visitors may also conduct a keyword search of these items. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

Born in Egypt in the 1920s, Waguih Ghali was an essayist and novelist most well-known for his 1964 novel Beer in the Snooker Club. In this novel, set in 1950s Egypt, Ghali explored themes related to Gamal Abdel Nasser's regime and the 1956 Suez Canal Crisis. In addition to this novel, Ghali authored a number of essays for The Guardian before his death by suicide in 1969. For literary scholars, historians, and others interested in learning more about Ghali and his writing, Cornell University has digitized a number of the author's unpublished works. This collection of works were obtained by Deborah Starr, Associate Professor of modern Arabic and Hebrew literature and film at Cornell. The collection includes two unpublished fiction manuscripts, six diaries, and 51 pieces of correspondence, all available in PDF format. The correspondence included in this collection features letters between Ghali and his friend and romantic partner, literary editor Diana Athill. One highlight of this collection is the Literary influences section, which helpfully directs visitors to sections of Ghali's journals in which he discussed other writers, including Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, and James Baldwin. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

The Fab Lab is a website and YouTube series created by Lindsey Murphy that invites young scientists to explore the world through do-it-yourself experiments. Prior to launching The Fab Lab, Murphy worked in marketing for several years and also worked as a nanny. As a nanny, Murphy began conducting science experiments and projects with children, demonstrating a knack for engaging young learners with hands-on activities. Murphy eventually began recording these experiments and sharing some of these ideas in a column at Scientific American. As of this write-up, The Fab Lab features over two dozen videos that may appeal to science educators, out-of-school educators, parents, and caretakers. Visitors will find these videos by navigating to The show tab, which then directs visitors to the show's YouTube channel. In one recent video, Murphy explains the history and science behind donuts with a trip to Blue Star Donuts, a famous bakery in her current home of Portland, Oregon. Murphy also offers a free newsletter, which interested readers can subscribe to via a form at the bottom of this website's homepage. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

The New York State Department of Education and the City University of New York Adult Literacy/High School Equivalency (HSE) Program have collaborated to create CollectEdNY - a resource guide to free, online materials for adult educators. CollectEdNY was launched in 2015 by the aforementioned organizations and the Literacy Assistance Center. While aimed specifically for educators in New York state, adult educators across the United States, including General Equivalency Diploma (GED) instructors, HSE instructors, and Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), may find this website useful. Instructors may want to start by checking out the Resource reviews section, which features detailed evaluations of free online educational resources from a number of organizations. These reviews are authored by experienced adult educators and often include ideas and tips about how instructors might use or modify specific components of each resource. Another highlight of this website is the MathMemos section, which features a number of classroom activities designed to teach mathematical concepts and skills. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

Data Africa is a project that aims to provide data about African countries that are south of the Sahara. The project is a collaboration between three institutions: the University of Minnesota, the International Food Resource Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and Datawheel. Together, the University of Minnesota and IFPRI head HarvestChoice, an initiative that aims to "generate data and knowledge products to support strategic investments on agricultural research and development in Africa South of the Sahara (SSA)." Datawheel is a web design company that also worked on Data USA (see the 11-24-2017 Scout Report). As of this write-up, Data Africa includes thirteen country profiles. Each country profile contains information about agricultural output, climate, health (including a number of statistics about the health of children in each country), and poverty rates. In addition, visitors can view data pertaining to specific counties within each country by selecting the county of interest in the About us section. These statistics are presented through a series of easy-to-interpret infographics. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

Iowa State University Extension & Outreach offers a number of free, printable resources relating to childcare and child development. These resources, which are available in English and Spanish, are designed for parents and caregivers and may also be of interest to parent educators, health care professionals, early childhood educators, social workers, and others who work closely with families with small children. Many of these handouts provide information about "Ages and Stages" from birth through eleven years of age, providing information about the physical, emotional, linguistic, and cognitive development that children experience at each age. Other handouts provide guidance about topics including safe infant sleep, safe transportation, food allergies, and parenting teenagers. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

Getulio Vargas ruled Brazil between 1930 and 1945 - first as an interim president, then as an elected president, and then as a dictator of what he called the Estado Nova or New State. Although briefly ousted by a 1945 coup, he was elected again in 1951 and served as president until his death in 1954. On this website, which was designed by history professor James N. Green and graduate historian Daniel L. McDonald in 2015 for a Brown University course on the topic of "Brazil Under Vargas," readers can learn more about Vargas and his historical legacy through a number of primary documents and references to secondary resources. These documents include photographs, video clips, and newspaper articles. While the majority of these documents are in Portuguese, the website also includes a handful of English-language sources, including a link to the BBC's coverage of Vargas's 1954 death and a 1944 United Films documentary of the Brazilian armed forces during the nation's first Soldiers' Day in 1944. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

Based in London, the Institute of Physics (IOP) is an international organization that aims to "gather, inspire, guide, represent, and celebrate all who share a passion for physics." On the IOP website, visitors will find this collection of seven reports, authored between 2006 and 2017, that investigate the gender imbalance of students who pursue physics A-level studies. Although these reports specifically investigate the British education system, they may be of interest to K-12 educators and policymakers around the globe. The report "Improving Gender Balance-- Reflections of the impact of interventions in schools," investigated twenty schools that had introduced interventions that were intended to improve the confidence and physics classroom experience of girls and facilitate student and staff investigation of unconscious bias. The report is accompanied by a number of recommendations for educators and school administrators. Readers may download all seven reports in full on this website. In addition, interested readers can also sign up to receive a free "monthly newsletter with inspiration, easy-to-deliver ideas, and resources to help you investigate and tackle gender inequality in your school." [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

From National Geographic comes this collection of seven stunning videos that capture hummingbirds in flight. These videos were shot by photographer and videographer Anand Varma, who has worked at National Geographic for several years. Each of the videos in this collection provides insight into the aerodynamics behind the hummingbird's flight as well as insights into how researchers are learning more about these fascinating birds. For instance, one of the videos captures a hummingbird as it moves inside a wind tunnel that is illuminated with a patterned green light. As the caption to this video explains, "[b]y tracking the trajectory and speed of this hummingbird when it flies in front of different background patterns and colors projected in this tunnel, researchers hope to learn more about how hummingbirds process the world whizzing by." These videos accompanied a July 2017 article about hummingbirds authored by Brendan Borrell; readers will find a link to that story (available by subscription only) at the bottom of this website. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

Ivy Plus Libraries in a consortium of eleven university libraries that, in collaboration, curate thematic web archive collections using the Internet Archive's Archive It tool. The latest Ivy Plus Libraries Collection is the Webcomics Web Archive. Headed by Karen Green, a librarian at Columbia University and Sarah G. Wenzel, a librarian at the University of Chicago, the Global Webcomics Web Archive has been capturing screenshots of webcomics since March 2018. As of this write-up, the archive features seventeen comics websites, including websites from the United States, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom. Visitors may browse this collection by subject (including "business" and "cats"), creator, date launched, language, or country. For comics fans, this archive provides a fabulous way to learn about webcomics that may be of interest. Webcomic aficionados are also invited to suggest a website to be archived in this collection and may do so via a Google form, included in the introduction to this collection. This brand-new collection will likely grow tremendously in the months to come, so stay tuned. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

Launched in 1925 and published in London, international art magazine Apollo describes itself as "one of the world's oldest and most respected magazines on the visual arts." On the magazine's website, art fans will find a number of articles and features that may be of interest. For example, the magazine's homepage offers Art News Daily, a regular round-up of art news from around the globe. Another highlight is the Interviews section, which features profiles of contemporary artists from around the world accompanied by images of their work. Readers looking for information about up-and-coming artists will also want to check out the magazine's 40 Under 40 feature. The magazine currently offers three lists that highlight artists from different regions of the world: 40 Under 40 Asia Pacific (published September 2016); 40 Under 40 USA (published September 2015); and 40 Under 40 Europe (published September 2014). [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

AirVisual Earth is a project inspired by Cameron Beccario's "Earth: A Global Map of Wind, Weather, and Ocean Conditions" (which we re-featured in the 1-28-2018 Scout Report) that provides a real-time visualization of air pollution around the globe. The map was created by the Swiss company I.Q. Air and illustrates air quality data collected from a number of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) stations located around the globe. In addition, this map includes data about wind from the U.S. Global Forecast System (GFS). As visitors browse this map, they will see the Air Quality Index (A.Q.I.), represented by color. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

For readers interested in the history and evolution of the English language, the Inky Fool is a blog by Mark Forsyth, a London-based author who writes about language and etymology. Launched in 2009 and updated frequently, Inky Fool addresses topics including word origins, surname meanings, toponymy, and more. As of this write-up, recent posts have addressed the means of German surnames and the origins of the word "porcupine." For the past few years, Inky Fool has been updated a bit less frequently than it was during the first several years of the blog existence, perhaps because Forsyth has been working on his recently published book A Short History of Drunkenness. Fortunately, visitors can easily browse past blog posts by subject tags such as song lyrics, semantic shifts, and commonly confused words. Visitors may also want to start by checking out "The Most Popular Posts of the Inky Fool," which is a compilation of nine previously published blog posts. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

Letters from War is an eight-part podcast from The Washington Post that explores a collection of letters exchanged between four American brothers during the second world war. The Eyde brothers grew up in Rockford, Illinois as the sons of Norwegian immigrants. Frank Eyde joined the Marines in 1939 while his brother, George, joined the army in 1941. John Eyde, on the advice of his brothers, joined the Army Air Force, while Sanford Eyde worked as a carpenter in Rockford. Throughout the war and in the years following, the Eyde brothers wrote to one another about their experiences with battle and post-war life. These letters were recently uncovered in an abandoned storage unit by Joe Alosi, who passed them along to the Post. Reporter Dan Lamothe, who hosts this podcast, carefully read each of these letters and reached out to military historians and surviving members of the Eyde family to create a multipart series about these letters and what they reveal about the experiences of World War II soldiers. In this podcast, visitors can listen to some of these letters (which are read by modern U.S. military veterans) and learn more about the Eyde brothers and their experiences. Interested listeners may want to start by reading Lamothe's articles "Learn More About the Eyde Family" and "How This Story Came Together" to learn more about this project. [MMB]

Comment on or rate this resource

Google Arts & Culture editors have culled materials from over 30 museum and archival collections to compile this web feature on the legendary artist Frida Kahlo. Scrolling from the top, the first three sections encountered are an online exhibition, Frida Kahlo: Viva la vida!, curated by the Museo Dolores Olmedo. This is followed by two editorial features: an interview with author Frances Borzello titled "Why We Need To See Frida Kahlo Beyond Her Biography," and a second interview with historian Alejandro Rosas that discusses Frida's relationship with socialism and the Mexican revolution. "A Closer Look at Frida's Art" provides in-depth analysis of individual paintings such as Pitahayas, a 1938 still-life depicting a pile of Mexican fruit that Kahlo described as "fuchsia on the outside and hides the subtlety of a whitish-gray pulp flecked with little black spots that are its seeds inside. This is a wonder!" "I Paint My Reality" explores Frida's life events through her art, while other areas of the website allow visitors to browse all the artworks included in the web feature, discuss Frida's use of color, provide glimpses of Frida's writings from archival collections, and let viewers see how contemporary photographers depicted Frida Kahlo. [DS]

Comment on or rate this resource

The InterPlanetary FileSystem (IPFS) provides a peer-to-peer content-addressable distributed filesystem that can store and share linked hypermedia. In other words, it's a decentralized alternative to the web. The web is currently decentralized in the sense that anyone can add their own server to it. However, the servers themselves are often single points of failure. When a server goes away, it is not uncommon for all the content hosted on it to disappear. Organizations like the Internet Archive and Perma.cc seek to provide workarounds to this problem. IPFS seeks to solve it on a structural level, persistently building content into the network itself. As a side effect, IPFS is also highly resistant to denial of service attacks, is more bandwidth-efficient than HTTP, and provides some censorship resistance. For example, IPFS is currently being used to create a mirror of Wikipedia for people living in jurisdictions where access to Wikipedia is blocked. The Why and Uses sections of the IPFS site lists a number of additional advantages and applications. The reference implementation of IPFS (written in Google's Go language) is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Go-IPFS is free software, using the MIT license with source code available via GitHub. [CRH]

Comment on or rate this resource

IRCCloud provides a web-based and mobile IRC client with features similar to newer services like Slack, Tribe, Gitter, or Zulip. For example, it provides file uploads and embedded images, videos, tweets, code snippets, and more. But unlike those services that invent a new and often proprietary messaging protocol, IRCCloud leverages the open and established Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol. As a result, IRCCloud users can connect to any of the established IRC networks (Freenode, IRCNet, EFNet, etc) and join any of the channels there. Like Slack et al, IRCCloud's desktop and mobile clients keep your message history synchronized across all your devices. IRCCloud acts as an IRC "bouncer," keeping users connected to the IRC network even if all their devices are off. Users of IRCCloud's free tier may connect to two IRC networks and will remain connected for up to 2 hours of inactivity. Paid plans are also available that provide permanent connections to an unlimited number of networks. IRCCloud's web client has been tested in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Internet Explorer. They provide mobile apps for both Android and iOS devices. [CRH]

Comment on or rate this resource

Math, Science, and Music is one of our favorite educational resources for two reasons. First - the project is truly interdisciplinary, offering resources that may appeal to educators from a wide variety of disciplines. Second - although this resource is designed for the classroom, it contains much that may appeal more broadly to anyone generally curious about music, sound, science, or math.

Developed by the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, in collaboration with a number of educational experts from top universities around the U.S., Math, Science, and Music is a remarkable collection of educational resources designed to engage learners of all ages with math, science, music, and the areas where these three disciplines intersect. As of this writing, this collection contains ten teacher toolkits. In one toolkit, Music Cognition, visitors will find a series of video lectures about the links between music, psychology, and neuroscience. These lectures are led by jazz composer and Harvard Professor Vijay Iyer and neuroscientist Ed Large and could be incorporated into a number of high school and college classrooms. Another toolkit, Making Music Count, includes interactive lesson plans and classroom activities designed to help elementary and middle school students explore beats, ratios, and patterns in music. Additionally, Scratch Jazz is an interactive program that enables users to compose their own jazz tunes while learning coding skills. While these resources are aimed at educators, they will also appeal to any curious member of the general public. The highly interactive nature of these resources makes them ideal for youth centers, museums, libraries, and other out-of-school learning environments.

Comment on or rate this resource