By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Duke University Preservation Underground: Announcing the Conservation Documentation Archive. “Today we are excited to publicly announce the launch of The Conservation Documentation Archive (CDA). This is the culmination of several years of work to digitize and make available all of the conservation documentation that has been produced as part of caring for Duke’s collections for the last 26 years.”
New-to-me and discovered via a conversation on Mastodon: AudioGames. From the front page: “Using sound, games can have dimensions of atmosphere, and possibilities for gameplay that don’t exist with visuals alone, as well as providing games far more accessible to people with all levels of sight. This site exists as a community portal for all things to do with audiogames. Here you will find news, articles, an active community forum and our database of over 500 titles on platforms from Microsoft Windows to iOS.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Tubefilter: Some YouTube Premium users have held onto lower rates. They can expect price hikes in 2024.. “More price hikes are coming to YouTube Premium. Or, to put it more accurately: Users who were previously exempt from price hikes will be required to pay up just like anyone else.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
Mashable: Elon Musk’s AI assistant Grok roasts its creator. “Grok, the AI assistant on X (formerly Twitter), launched on Friday for Premium+ subscribers (those who pay $16/month) and has already spun a flurry of conversation. Nearly immediately, users noticed that Grok is ‘woke’; it doesn’t share its creator Elon Musk’s right-wing political or cultural views. For instance, as Mashable’s Cecily Mauran pointed out, Grok isn’t aligned with Elon Musk’s anti-trans beliefs, responding to a question of whether trans women are women with ‘yes.’ Not only that but, apparently, Grok isn’t afraid to roast its creator.”
Route Fifty: Data literacy: the drive to educate the public sector workforce. “There are certain positions in state and local government that everyone recognizes as essential to the successful use of data. They’re the obvious ones: data analysts, data scientists and experts in privacy and ethics. Those roles are hard to fill, but even when they are, there’s still a missing link. Michelle Littlefield, the chief data officer for the city and county of San Francisco, refers to this link as ‘upskilling the workforce.'”
WIRED: Fake Taylor Swift Quotes Are Being Used to Spread Anti-Ukraine Propaganda. “The disinformation campaign, which was launched in November, reached at least 7.6 million people on Facebook alone, according to a database of the ads reviewed by WIRED and collected by Reset, a nonprofit that provides grants to those tackling disinformation. It’s still in progress, and two separate groups of disinformation researchers believe the campaign is run by a notorious Russian influence operation dubbed Doppelganger that has in the past been linked to the Kremlin.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Associated Press: Google Antitrust Trial Focused on Android App Store Payments to Be Handed off to Jury to Decide. “A federal court jury is poised begin its deliberations in an antitrust trial focused on whether Google’s efforts to profit from its app store for Android smartphones have been illegally gouging consumers and stifling innovation.”
Washington Post: 2024 could be the ‘deepfake’ election. Few states are acting.. “As the 2024 election campaign heats up, there’s virtually no doubt that political actors of all stripes — including some deliberately trying to mislead voters — will turn to AI and deepfakes as the latest weapon in the political communications arsenal. They will do so in an environment in which just a handful of states have passed laws designed to limit the forgeries’ influence, while Congress has introduced a few pieces of legislation that have gone nowhere, at least to date.”
Europol: Europol warning on the criminal use of Bluetooth trackers for geolocalisation. “Based on the technological capabilities of Bluetooth trackers, and the information shared with Europol, it is confirmed that drug traffickers use them to track the transit of illicit cargo. Through the trackers, cargo can be traced after arrival in ports, and onward by road towards storage locations in European markets. They are likely also used to locate illicit shipments upon arrival in ports. To warn about the misuse of this technology, Europol has issued a restricted early warning notification to all EU Member States, as well as a public version.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Brookings Institution: What should be done about the growing influence of industry in AI research?. “Enabling academic researchers to play a larger, publicly-minded role in AI will require a variety of initiatives. To ensure academia has sufficient talent, academic researchers will need direct support to keep them from leaving for industry, and more open immigration policies will be needed to attract and retain promising researchers from other countries. To let academic researchers work on cutting-edge projects, investments will need to be made in public computing platforms and data.”
The Guardian: Scrawled bits of paper and an A-Z: How I went cold turkey on Google Maps. “Google Maps is an important and often necessary part of modern life. However, it has its problems. It has no time for meandering. The blue dot does not allow for distraction and discovery. It is there to get you from A to B. Removing it from my life has turned journeys around the city into richer, more enriching experiences. It has allowed me to feel part of things, and has made me feel more engaged with the place in which I live. That, I think, makes the occasional wrong turn well worth it.” I was glad to read this article because it’s an excellent metaphor for how I feel about AI-generated search results, even when they are correct.
OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL
BBC: The pro gamer who has to rely upon sound alone. “In the competitive world of professional gaming, one gifted player goes by the username Rattlehead. At the tournaments he attends in the US, his opponents quickly spot that he, real name Carlos Vasquez, is, by his own description, ‘completely blind’. They then let their guard down, wrongly thinking that they are set for an easy game of popular fighting series Mortal Kombat. And he often beats them.” Good morning, Internet…
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December 12, 2023 at 06:31PM
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