Met Museum Makes 375,000 Images Freely Available Online

filed under: art, museums
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Rembrandt via The Met Museum // CC0 1.0

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has made around 375,000 images of public-domain artworks from its collections freely available online, The New York Times reports. Members of the public can download, edit, and distribute high-resolution photos from the Met’s website, with no copyright restrictions whatsoever.

The initiative—a part of the Met’s new open access policyincludes partnerships with Creative Commons, Wikimedia, Artstor, Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), Art Resource, and Pinterest in order to improve access to the museum’s images. For example, web users can now find images, save, tag, or “pin” images of artworks on Creative Commons, as Hyperallergic reports. The Met has also named a new “Wikipedian in Residence,” Richard Knipel, who’s responsible for uploading pictures into Wikimedia Commons, documenting their metadata, and creating new articles on various artworks or topics.

The images feature 200,000 artworks, including famous paintings like Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware and El Greco’s The Vision of Saint John. They comprise a large portion of the Met’s collections, although many other of the institution’s public domain works—think engravings, posters, and prints—have yet to be digitized. (Another 65,000 Met artworks have been digitized, but they don’t fall under public domain.)

“Our comprehensive and diverse museum collection spans 5000 years of world culture,” Met director Thomas P. Campbell said in a statement quoted by Artnet. “Our core mission is to be open and accessible for all who wish to study and enjoy the works of art in our care. Increasing access to the museum’s collection and scholarship serves the interests and needs of our 21st-century audiences by offering new resources for creativity, knowledge, and ideas.”

As Hyperallergic points out, the Met’s website has contained hundreds of thousands of publicly accessible images since 2014, but visitors were only able to download them for free if they were intended for non-commercial or scholarly use. Now, all of those images have CC0 1.0 or Creative Commons Zero licenses. You can browse the newly available works by going to the Met’s Collection page and selecting the “Public Domain Artworks” filter on the left.

Digitized images of the Met’s collections will be rolled out gradually, AFP Relax News reports.

[h/t The New York Times]


February 8, 2017 – 5:30pm

Inflexible Schedules Can Keep Women From Working—This Job Site Aims to Change That

filed under: Work
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It’s clear that gender inequality is an issue in the workforce, but figuring out how to best eliminate it isn’t always so straightforward. According to one study released last year, the gender pay gap starts to grow significantly wider once women hit age 32. The reason? Shouldering the majority of the child-rearing responsibilities makes it a lot harder for women to hold nine-to-five jobs. A new job search website aims to combat this by only highlighting positions that offer flexible schedules.

Werk is the brainchild of former consultant Anna Auerbach and veteran law attorney Annie Dean. Dean became aware of a need for this type of service after becoming a parent herself: “I was sitting at my desk at my law firm, feeling completely exhausted and utterly defeated,” she tells mental_floss. “I was in the middle of an intense deal and there just weren’t enough hours in the day for what I was responsible for.”

Auerbach, a former refugee and a mother of one, noticed the same issue. “Everywhere I looked, women were being told to work harder, to speak louder, to negotiate more. But nothing was attempting to answer the question of, ‘How do we keep talented women in the workforce?’ It was then I knew something fundamental had to change,” she says.

Like competing job search sites Monster, LinkedIn, and Indeed, Werk provides a way for job-seekers to search for openings online. What sets Werk apart is the quality of the listings—every position that’s posted offers pre-negotiated flexibility. Users can sort jobs based on the ability to work remotely, work part-time, work unconventional hours, or tweak their schedules with little notice to keep up with the unpredictable demands of caring for dependents.

It’s easy to see how this might appeal to a certain type of worker: Thirty percent of women with bachelor’s degrees drop out of the workforce when they have a child, while 19 percent of women with a master’s degree or higher and 26 percent of women with less than a bachelor’s degree do the same. But Werk emphasizes that their mission can benefit employers as well. According to Auerbach and Dean, employees with flexibility tend to be happier at work and more likely to stay. They also cite a study by McKinsey & Company that found gender-diverse companies are more likely to outperform their peers.

Werk has already attracted some big-name companies, featuring listings at companies like Facebook, Uber, and Samsung. A membership to use the job search tool costs $48 a year, which may be well worth it to caregiving professionals of any gender looking to take control of their schedules. As Dean says, “Our generation has the ability to say what works and what doesn’t, and we have a responsibility to act on it.”


February 8, 2017 – 5:00pm

Chan Zuckerberg BioHub Awards $50 Million to ‘Risky’ Science

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The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub—the nonprofit medical research institute launched by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg—has announced its first class of scientific grantees, each of whom will receive up to $1.5 million in funding. The biohub was created to provide a safe but exciting space for scientific experimentation, all with an eye to eliminating disease around the world.

Biohub co-leader Stephen Quake is a bioengineer at Stanford University, one of the organization’s major partners. “We told researchers, ‘Give us your riskiest ideas,’” Quake told Nature. “There is a creative anarchy in the atmosphere here in the Silicon Valley that we want to harvest.”

The 47 grantees represent a broad range of scientific specialties from immunology to (perhaps unsurprisingly) human social networks. Here are 10 of them.

1. JILL F. BANFIELD, UC BERKELEY

Banfield studies geomicrobiology and environmental microbiology—that is, the tiny organisms living in the rock, soil, and sand.

2. MARTIN KAMPMANN, UC SAN FRANCISCO

Kampmann’s research focuses on the molecular mechanisms behind neurodegenerative conditions like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.

3. MARKITA LANDRY, UC BERKELEY

Landry uses her background in chemical and biomolecular engineering to develop infrared and nanosensor scanners that will produce super-high-resolution images of the inside of the brain.

4. JURIJ LESKOVEC, STANFORD

Leskovec analyzes information and social networks from the large-scale (humans) to the microscopic (neurons) and even the invisible (data).

5. MICHEL MAHARBIZ, LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LAB

Maharbiz develops very, very, very, very small implantable biosensors, including one he calls “neural dust.”

6. RIKKY MULLER, UC BERKELEY

Muller is creating wireless microsystems that could be directly attached to the human brain for long-term, non-invasive monitoring, and treatment of psychiatric and neurological disorders.

7. KATIE POLLARD, UC SAN FRANCISCO

An epidemiologist and biostatistician, Pollard researches the ways our microbiome influences our health and response to disease and treatment.

8. MANU PRAKASH, STANFORD

Prakash and his colleagues have invented a number of low-cost, hand-powered tools for researchers and medical practitioners working in remote areas. Their latest invention was a paper centrifuge that can be made for about $0.20.

9. ELIZABETH SATTELY, STANFORD

Sattely’s focus is plants—specifically food plants like grains, and how they might be engineered to become more nutritious.

10. KE XU, UC BERKELEY

Xu has invented new microscope techniques so advanced that we can now see biological structures we’d never seen before.

Check out the Biohub website for the complete list of grantees.


February 8, 2017 – 4:30pm

8 Foods Rich in Vitamin D

It’s a fact. Bad things happen to your health and well-being when you don’t have sufficient levels of vitamin D in your system. Even though our bodies manufacture vitamin D when we are exposed to sunlight, many of us don’t get enough exposure to maintain healthy levels of this important vitamin. As many as half of everyone living in the United States may be deficient when it comes to vitamin D. The list of benefits associated with healthy levels of vitamin D may be too long to list but it’s well-established that it helps keep bones healthy, ward of depression,

The post 8 Foods Rich in Vitamin D appeared first on Factual Facts.

Dangers of Taking Antidepressants

At times it seems like we are living in an age where there is literally a pill for everything. The significance of many modern drugs that have been developed in recent decades should not be diminished, but sometimes their overuse can become a serious problem. A classic example of this is with antibiotics. They have been so overused for so long that their continued use has come into question because so many of them are ineffective against bacteria that has developed resistance. Perhaps resistance to antidepressants will never become a problem for the people taking them, but do doctors today

The post Dangers of Taking Antidepressants appeared first on Factual Facts.

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