arc news

What We’re Reading This Month

• How to Be a Better Web Searcher: Secrets from Google Scientists – As long as information needs are easy, simple searches work reasonably well. Most people actually do less than one search per day, and most of those searches are short and commonplace. The average query length on Google during 2016 was 2.3 words. Queries are often brief descriptions like: [ quiche recipe ] or [ calories in chocolate ] or [ parking Tulsa ].  What Good Searchers Do

• Rolling Out the Covid Vaccine Is a Huge IT Challenge – The data infrastructure in the United States can’t adequately support the effort to vaccinate the U.S. population against Covid-19. Four steps must be taken: standardize the way personal health data is exchanged; align states’ immunization registries and state and federal reporting analytics; design immunization “passports” that are portable, equitable, and protect privacy; and address privacy, portability, and cybersecurity tradeoffs.  Access the article here.

• Case Study – Office 365 Project – Records Management, Governance & Migration – Check out one of ARC’s case studies on a project that migrated existing electronic files (from file share exclusively) to Office 365 with SharePoint and Teams.

• Cooking videos were one small savior of 2020 – Early one morning, a week after the pandemic started, chef and food writer J. Kenji López-Alt strapped a GoPro to his head and filmed himself making breakfast. In the video, you can see López-Alt rummaging through his fridge, slicing and frying bacon, and peeling a bit of egg off a pan to give to his excited dog. There’s no recipe beneath the video, no voice-over instructions detailing what we’re seeing – it’s just a guy in a kitchen making breakfast.

• The High Privacy Cost of a “Free” Website – Zajac was floored when The Markup showed her how many trackers appeared on the site. She said she learned a hard lesson: “If it’s free, that doesn’t mean it’s free. It just means it doesn’t cost money.” Instead, it costs your website visitors’ privacy. Check out the article here.

Interested in what you’ve read? Want to learn more about what we do? Contact us today. In addition to keeping on top of tech trends, we provide IT and business solutions to clients across North America.