New researches: Early Voting Counts, Canada Art, Maine Spiders, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, October 21, 2020

Early Voting Counts, Canada Art, Maine Spiders, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, October 21, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, from Fast Company: How many people have voted so far in 2020? This live map and state database will tell you . “In the interest of cutting to the chase, your suspicions are correct: A record number of people are voting before Election Day this year, and, yes, a lot of them are Democrats. That’s according to the latest data from the U.S. Elections Project, a website and portal that tracks early voting numbers.”

North Shore News: Group of Seven painter who lived in North Vancouver part of new digital collection. “The McMichael Canadian Art Collection, in partnership with Google Arts & Culture, has released an online collection of Canadian art, including pieces from Canada’s Group of Seven, it was announced earlier this week.”

Bangor Daily News: New list gives comprehensive look at Maine’s many spiders. “Maine has 677 different species of spiders, according to the newly-published Checklist of Maine Spiders. Co-written by Daniel T. Jennings and Charlene P. Donahue, the list is the ‘first reasonably comprehensive checklist of spider families, genera and species’ collected in Maine, according to the checklist’s introduction.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNN: Short-form video app Quibi is shutting down after just six months. “Much like its content, Quibi didn’t last very long. Quibi, the app that staked its future on short videos, is shutting down just six months after it launched, the company announced Wednesday.”

BetaNews: Microsoft releases first build of its Edge browser for Linux . “We’ve known for a while that Microsoft has been working on a Linux version of its new Chromium Edge browser, and today the software giant announces the first build for users to try. Today’s release supports Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE distributions and Microsoft says going forward it will be releasing new builds on a weekly basis.”

ABC News: Pakistan lifts brief ban on Chinese social media app TikTok. “Pakistan’s media regulatory agency said Monday it lifted a temporary ban on the Chinese social media app TikTok ‘with some conditions.’ However, it gave no further details.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

NiemanLab: Is Facebook too big to know? The Markup has a plan (and a browser) to wrap its arms around it. “The Citizen Browser Project will pay 1,200 Americans to let The Markup monitor the choices that tech company algorithms are making for them. ‘What are they choosing to amplify? And what are they choosing not to amplify?'”

New Yorker: Taking Back Our Privacy. “Since Signal was released, it has evolved from a niche tool, touted by the privacy-minded and the paranoid, into a mainstream product recommended by the Wall Street Journal. Activists use Signal to coördinate protests, lovers to conduct affairs, workers to unionize, finance professionals to exchange sensitive information, drug dealers to contact customers, journalists to communicate with sources.”

TechRadar: Gamers are fixing Microsoft Flight Simulator with Google Maps. “Over on the official Flight Simulator forums, the difference in photogrammetry quality (the art of extracting 3D information from photographs) between Bing and Google has been highlighted, and visual comparisons between the two are noticeably apparent.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Vox: Why the US government is suing Google. “The Department of Justice and 11 states filed the lawsuit against Google in a federal court, accusing Google of using money it makes from its dominant position in search to pay other companies to help maintain its lead and block out competitors. Google pays Apple billions each year to be the default browser on Safari, for example, and search comes preloaded on devices using Google’s Android operating system.

Reuters: Seven states may sue Google in coming ‘weeks’: NY AG . “Seven additional states may file a separate antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc’s Google in the coming weeks, New York Attorney General Letitia James said Tuesday.”

MIT Technology Review: Live facial recognition is tracking kids suspected of being criminals. “In a national database in Argentina, tens of thousands of entries detail the names, birthdays, and national IDs of people suspected of crimes. The database, known as the Consulta Nacional de Rebeldías y Capturas (National Register of Fugitives and Arrests), or CONARC, began in 2009 as a part of an effort to improve law enforcement for serious crimes. But there are several things off about CONARC. For one, it’s a plain-text spreadsheet file without password protection, which can be readily found via Google Search and downloaded by anyone.” Good evening, Internet…

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