The Scout Report -- Volume 25, Number 25

Readers looking for some educational entertainment might find the YouTube series It's Okay to Be Smart to be just the thing. Launched by PBS Digital Studios in 2013, this web series is enthusiastically hosted by Joe Hanson, a molecular biologist by training with a doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin. Here, viewers will find dozens of fun and upbeat videos exploring all manner of curiosities and scientific topics, such as why cereal tends to either clump together or stick to the edges in your cereal bowl, whether it's true that everyone has a doppelganger, and how fire ants became so widespread in the southern United States. The channel's main page is helpfully organized into numerous categories. While biology-related topics are heavily represented, visitors will also find videos on physics, earth science, and astronomy. Episodes are typically between 5 and 12 minutes in length, making them suitable for classroom use, and the videos' descriptions frequently include a bibliography of sources or links to additional information. [JDC]

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Why are facts often not enough to dispel false beliefs? If you know that a drug is a placebo, could it still work anyway? What can a personality test tell us about who we are? These and many other questions are explored on the award-winning podcast and radio show Hidden Brain. Through "science and storytelling," this intriguing program hosted by social science journalist Shankar Vedantam "reveals the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, and the biases that shape our choices." Episodes typically range from 30 to 60 minutes in length, and links to additional resources are frequently provided in the show notes. Instructors will also want to check out the show's Education section, where they will find study guides for six episodes (as of this write-up) designed for use with middle school, high school, and college students, with different guides provided for each level. An NPR production, Hidden Brain can be downloaded and streamed at the link above, and it is also available on multiple podcast platforms. [JDC]

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Humans have left tangible evidence of their activities throughout history, but have those activities had a geologic impact? And if so, how would this affect the field of geology? These are the questions explored by Nicola Davison in this long-form article written for The Guardian and published on May 30, 2019. As the article explains, to help conceptualize planetary changes stretching back billions of years, stratigraphers (geologists who study rock layers) created an official timeline called the International Chronostratigraphic Chart that divides the Earth's history into different geologic units. According to this chart, human history falls within the Holocene epoch, but in 2000 atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen began asserting that humans had become the leading geologic force, thereby making the term Holocene obsolete. Although many geologists initially dismissed the idea of this new epoch, which Crutzen labeled the Anthropocene, by 2008 the notion had taken hold to the point that stratigrapher Jan Zalasiewicz formed a working group of geologists and other scientists to examine the geologic evidence for the Anthropocene and to determine how it should be defined. This in-depth article provides an excellent overview of the context and debate surrounding this emergent scientific concept. [JDC]

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Fans of astronomy and vintage advertisements are sure to enjoy Visions of the Future, a collection of 16 imaginative travel posters created for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). This poster series envisions other parts of our solar system (and beyond) as future travel destinations, advertised here in styles inspired by the iconic Works Project Administration national parks posters from the 1930s and '40s. While our planetary neighbors like Mars and Jupiter are featured, as is Earth itself, the series also encourages intrepid future travelers to vacation on moons such as Titan and Europa, as well as more distant places like the starless "rogue" planet PSO J318.5-22. The posters were painstakingly crafted by a team of nine artists, designers, and illustrators with input from JPL scientists and engineers, as well as from communication experts. Each poster can be downloaded for free as a PDF or a high-resolution TIFF file, both measuring 20 x 30 inches when printed, and clicking an individual poster reveals a short paragraph describing JPL's research on that location. [JDC]

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The University of Minnesota's Open Textbook Library provides educators, students, and lifelong learners an excellent resource for finding high-quality digital textbooks. Here, visitors will find a large collection of openly-licensed textbooks that can be downloaded for free as PDF or e-book files. The books come from multiple authors and publishing organizations, and cover a wide range of academic areas, including the humanities, natural and social sciences, and mathematics, as well as medicine and law. For visitors curious about the effectiveness of a particular volume, many of the books in the Open Textbook Library also include detailed reviews written by faculty and instructors. In addition to reviews, the landing page for each textbook typically shows its table of contents, a brief description of the book and of its intended audience, and information about its authors, so that readers can better decide whether they should download it. The Open Textbook Library is maintained and supported by the Open Textbook Network and the Center for Open Education, which are also based at the University of Minnesota. [JDC]

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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in New York City, an event that many view as the start of the LGBTQ civil rights movement. To commemorate the uprising, throughout June 2019 New York Public Radio (WNYC) is presenting The Sound of Pride, a special programing series "that captures the spirit, history, impact, and voices of the LGBTQ movement." Here, readers will find podcast episodes and radio segments produced by a variety of WNYC shows, as well as relevant blog posts from WQXR (New York City's classical music station) and upcoming live events. The series covers a wide range of topics, including a review on The New Yorker Radio Hour about "how the movement for LGBTQ rights has changed our culture and our laws," a discussion on The Takeaway about the relationship between police departments and LGBTQ communities, and an episode from the acclaimed podcast Nancy presenting "three stories about different kinds of coming out." Those interested can stream and download these episodes and more online or subscribe to the podcast via Stitcher, Spotify, RadioPublic, or other platforms. [JDC]

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Launched in 2015, Where Love Is Illegal is a global campaign that "documents and captures personal testimonies of survival from the LGBTQI+ community around the world." Here, visitors can find dozens of personal stories and statements conveying both struggle and resilience from people in countries such as Nepal, Ghana, Armenia, Peru, and the United States. Some of these testimonies are accompanied by evocative portrait photography, while others have candid snapshots. As this project points out, "72 countries around the world have criminal laws against sexual activity by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex people." On the World Map page, visitors can click on many (though not all) countries to see a summary of their laws and statistics regarding LGBTQI+ rights, as well as a link to stories from that particular country. For example, although the West African country of Gabon has never outlawed homosexual activity, same-sex couples "are not eligible for the same legal protections available to opposite-sex couples." Where Love Is Illegal is a project by Witness Change, a nonprofit founded by photojournalist Robin Hammond that aims "to end human rights violations for marginalized communities through visual storytelling." [JDC]

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New York City is an important location in the history of LGBTQ activism, so it's not surprising that New York Public Library has a wealth of materials documenting the movement. LGBTQ Materials in the New York Public Library is a super-collection, composed of hundreds of documents, photographs, post cards, and more. Many of these items were originally archived by the International Gay Information Center (IGIC) and donated to the New York Public Library in 1988. Subsequently, other archives and collections were also added. Readers may want to begin with the About section, which gives an historical overview of New York City's activist groups from 1950s through the '90s and offers related resources for those looking to learn more. To browse the collection, readers can use the Navigation section, which features drop-down menus specific to particular groups and individuals within which users may view by material type. Some of the activists and organizations represented include Act UP New York, photographer Diana Davies, and artist Emilio Sanchez. Those interested in a more selective search can also use the Filters section to navigate by material topic, collection name, genre of media, and more. [DS][EL]

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Readers interested in diverse representation in popular culture may be interested in the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, a research project that describes itself as a "curated collection of information about LGBTQ and queerly read game content." Visitors should begin with the About page (found under the Home menu), which explains the project's central goal, method, and scope, as well as its limitations. Under Games, readers can view the games identified as having queer content by game series, with listed series containing more than one game with LGBTQ references. The site also compiles relevant digital and non-digital games by decade of release, dating back to the 1970s. On both lists, game titles that the Archive's team has been able to research are linked to "posts synthesizing information about each type of LGBTQ content in the game/game series." Readers can also browse the site by LGBTQ content categories such as characters, Easter eggs, or homophobia/transphobia. The Resources section offers helpful information like category descriptions, links to glossaries, and a bibliography of relevant academic research. As of this write-up, the project has identified over 1,000 games with queer content and has completed research on roughly 300 of them. The LGBTQ Video Game Archive is led by Adrienne Shaw, an associate professor in the Department of Media Studies and Production at Temple University. [JDC]

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Educators, school counselors, parents, and young people may want to check out The Trevor Project, a national organization whose mission is "to end suicide among gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer & questioning young people." In addition to their valuable crisis helplines for suicide prevention, The Trevor Project provides other resources such as their Lifeguard Workshop, which is a free educational curriculum that aims to help adults create a supportive environment for LGBTQ youth and includes a video and downloadable lesson plans. Another valuable resource featured here is a Model School District Policy that was developed to "help educators and school administrators implement comprehensive suicide prevention policies," both of which can be found under Education. Readers should also visit the Resources section, which features helpful information about preventing suicide, such as how to recognize warning signs and risk factors, as well as the Trevor Support Center, a collection of knowledge for LGBTQ youth and their allies about identity, relationships, mental health, and more. Founded in 1998 by filmmakers Peggy Rajski and Randy Stone and writer James Lecesne, The Trevor Project was named after their Oscar-winning short film Trevor, which interested readers can watch in its entirety on the History & Film page (found under About). [JDC]

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spaCY is a python library for natural language processing. It comes with pre-trained statistical models that allow it to perform detailed semantic analysis for English, German, Greek, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, and Portuguese. In these languages, spaCy is able to break sentences into parts of speech, identify syntactic relationships (subject, object, etc), and generate sentence diagrams. In addition, it is able to identify root words (a process called Lemmatization by linguists) for the above languages, recognizing both suffixed roots (e.g., "color," "colors," "coloring") and different verb tenses (e.g., "is," "was," "be"). spaCy can also perform Named Entity Recognition (NER), to recognize "named 'real-world' objects like persons, companies, or locations." For around 40 other languages that lack a statistical model, spaCy is still able to accomplish simpler tasks like text tokenization and similarity testing. On spaCy's Usage page, readers can find installation instructions for windows, macOS, and Unix/Linux systems. The Usage page also provides a number of guides for getting started and a series of in-depth code examples. spaCy is free software distributed under the MIT license with source code available on GitHub. [CRH]

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Crossref is a publisher-run not for profit organization that maintains a database of information about publications that have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which includes most publications in peer-reviewed journals, many academic books, conference proceedings, and more. The Crossref API provides a number of ways to query this database. Works can be queried directly by DOI, or by title, publication, editor, and other attributes. Results for an individual publication typically include license information, publication dates, and a detailed bibliography of all cited works. Depending on the publisher, additional data such as funding information may also be present. As is typical for REST APIs, queries are performed by fetching a specially constructed URL and results are returned in JSON format. Alternately, users may access the API using one of the libraries listed on the Libraries section of the Crossref API website. [CRH]

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We originally featured LGBTQ-RAN in the 4-27-2018 Scout Report, and it continues to be an excellent resource for those interested in LGBTQ religious history.

Launched in 2001 by the Chicago Theological Seminary, the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network (LGBTQ-RAN) is dedicated to "preserving history and encouraging scholarly study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) religious movements around the world." To meet this goal, LGBTQ-RAN, which is currently part of the Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion in Berkeley, California, has two initiatives. First, the group assists LGBTQ individuals and groups in identifying how to preserve relevant archival information. Second, the group seeks to provide "an electronic information clearinghouse for these archival collections and other historical data" on LGBTQ "religious history for the use of historians, researchers and other interested persons." Visitors to this website can explore short biographies of LGBTQ religious leaders in the Profiles Gallery and listen to oral history interviews with 52 of these individuals in the Oral Histories collection. Another highlight of this collection is the Online Exhibitions section, which features digitized archival material that may be of interest to religious studies scholars as well as members of the general public.

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