CalAgroClimate, Massachusetts BioMap, FTX, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, November 21, 2022

CalAgroClimate, Massachusetts BioMap, FTX, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, November 21, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

University of California Fruit & Vegetable Preservation Resources: New interactive web tools help growers cope with climate change. “Growers and crop consultants can use CalAgroClimate’s crop and location-specific tools and resources to help make on-farm decisions, such as preparing for frost or untimely rain and taking advantage of expected favorable conditions. CalAgroClimate currently includes heat advisory, frost advisory, cropphenology and pest advisory tools.” That’s “crop phenology” the science and not CropPhenology the R package.

State of Massachusetts: MassWildlife and The Nature Conservancy Announce Launch of BioMap. “The web portal delivers the latest scientific data and resources to help state and local governments, land trusts, non-government organizations, and other conservation partners strategically plan projects to conserve wildlife and their habitats.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

NPR: Sensing an imminent breakdown, communities mourn a bygone Twitter. “Users on the site have been steadily eulogizing the social network in the chaotic days since Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform. But the death knell sounded louder by Thursday, which saw yet another exodus from what’s left of Twitter’s workforce. That night, the top five Twitter trends in the U.S. all related to what people see as the imminent end of the site as they know it. Among the flood of tributes, a consensus has emerged about what makes the platform worth mourning: Twitter has been a uniquely accessible space where otherwise marginalized groups have felt heard and built community.”

Mozilla Accessibility Blog: Significant Improvements for Screen Readers Now in Nightly Firefox. “A couple of months ago, we shared an update on our Cache the World project, covering the ongoing re-write of the Firefox accessibility engine. The project aims to improve Firefox’s overall performance for users of assistive technologies (ATs) like screen readers and to reduce crashes and hangs. It will also make the accessibility engine easier to maintain and simplify adding new features going forward.”

TechCrunch: Google rolls out new features across Maps, Search and Shopping. “Google announced today that it’s introducing a slew of new Maps, Search and Shopping features. The company revealed a majority of the new features during its Search On event in September and is now starting to roll them out to users.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Verge: The Arc browser is the Chrome replacement I’ve been waiting for . “Arc wants to be the web’s operating system. So it built a bunch of tools that make it easier to control apps and content, turned tabs and bookmarks into something more like an app launcher, and built a few platform-wide apps of its own. The app is much more opinionated and much more complicated than your average browser with its row of same-y tabs at the top of the screen.”

Engadget: Elon Musk is reportedly considering cutting more of Twitter’s workforce. “According to Bloomberg, Elon Musk is considering new layoffs that would target the company’s sales and partnerships teams. The scale of the potential cuts is unclear but come after a large number of employees rejected Musk’s Twitter 2.0 ultimatum. On Friday, Musk reportedly asked Robin Wheeler, Twitter’s head of ad sales, and Maggie Suniewick, the firm’s partnerships chief, to fire more employees. Both were terminated after pushing back.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ZDNet: Not patched Log4j yet? Assume attackers are in your network, say CISA and FBI. “Almost a year on from Log4j’s disclosure, a joint alert by CISA and the FBI warns organizations that if they haven’t protected their systems against it yet, they really need to now.”

CNN: Singapore writes down $275 million in FTX, calls belief in Sam Bankman-Fried ‘misplaced’. “In a statement on Thursday, state-owned investment company Temasek said it had decided to write down the value of its full investment in the exchange to zero, ‘irrespective of the outcome of FTX’s bankruptcy protection filing.’ Temasek said it had invested $275 million in the crypto exchange, which was once considered one of the biggest and most reputable players in the market for digital assets.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Google Blog: Using AI to study 12 years of representation in TV. “See It, Be It: What Families are Seeing on TV is a new study that analyzes trends in the screen and speaking time of the visually presenting attributes of the characters — gender, skin tone and age — in scripted television over the last 12 years.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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November 22, 2022 at 01:57AM
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Lithium-Ion Battery Manufacturing, Manchester Accents, Opera Browser, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, November 21, 2022

Lithium-Ion Battery Manufacturing, Manchester Accents, Opera Browser, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, November 21, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Collaborative Database Maps Lithium-Ion Supply Chain Landscape. “The Lithium-Ion Battery Supply Chain Database [is] an ongoing collaboration between NAATBatt International and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to identify every company in North America involved in building lithium-ion batteries from mining to manufacturing to recycling. First released in September 2021 and funded by NAATBatt International, this database is the first comprehensive directory of its kind. A recent update in 2022 significantly expands on the database.”

Manchester World (England): Manchester Voices: New Central Library installation celebrates diversity in Greater Manchester accents. “Researchers gained extensive insight into how different accents are perceived throughout Manchester. Participants were asked to mark on maps where they thought had the friendliest accent, the poshest and the most ‘authentic’ Mancunian, to name just a few categories. And the results are highlighted in a series of interactive maps available on the Manchester Voices website.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

How-To Geek: Opera Wants You to Come Back, so It Made a TikTok Sidebar. “Opera used to be one of the most popular web browsers around, but over time it has fallen behind Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox. Now the browser is rolling out a new feature that could change all that: a TikTok sidebar. No, really.”

NBC News: MrBeast surpasses PewDiePie as the most-followed individual YouTuber. “Jimmy Donaldson, better known online as MrBeast, has surpassed Felix Kjellberg, also known as PewDiePie, to become the most-followed individual YouTuber in the world. Donaldson, who is known for doing expensive stunts and viral charity projects, officially reached 112 million subscribers as of Wednesday, according to his YouTube page.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: The Best YouTube Extensions Everyone Should Use. “Like every other popular website, YouTube has its share of missing features and annoyances. We have to wade through clickbait thumbnails and endless ad reads that get in the way—fortunately, there are plenty of browser extensions that fix these issues, so you can focus less on problem-solving and more on video-bingeing. Before you download these extensions, keep in mind that installing too many extensions is bad for your browser. They can slow things down, and sometimes affect your privacy. Make sure you’re comfortable with the permissions each extension asks for and only install those you really need.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Cape Talk: Robben Island calls on former political prisoners to maintain historic database . “The Robben Island Museum (RIM) is asking for EPPS or their relatives to update their contact details and other key information on the latest records held by the Department. Initially compiled in 1997, the RIM ex-Political Prisoner Database (EPPD) is a living document that requires public contribution and input to ensure it remains true to South Africa’s struggle heroes, both known and unknown.”

New York Times: Help! I Was Banned From Lyft and No One Will Tell Me Why.. “An app user was barred after just two uneventful trips, and the company wouldn’t explain or reinstate him. Our columnist gets him riding again, but transparency remains elusive.”

University of New Hampshire: UNH to Map Current and Planned Broadband to Improve Coverage in Granite State. “NH GRANIT, a mapping agency for the state based at the University of New Hampshire, is receiving close to a million dollars from the N.H. Department of Business and Economic Affairs (BEA) to inventory and map statewide broadband coverage that is currently available as well as what is proposed for the state’s businesses, educators and citizens.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Collapsed FTX owes nearly $3.1 billion to top 50 creditors. “Cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which has filed for U.S. bankruptcy court protection, said it owes its 50 biggest creditors nearly $3.1 billion. The exchange owes about $1.45 billion to its top ten creditors, it said in a court filing on Saturday, without naming them.”

Deutsche Welle: El Salvador takes risks for Chinese investments. “This week, FTX, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchange platforms in the world, announced it had filed for bankruptcy. The news caused a sharp drop in the price of bitcoin over the past days — and caused all eyes to turn to El Salvador. The president of the Central American nation, Nayib Bukele, made bitcoin legal tender in 2021 and also invested a large part of the country’s fiscal reserves in it.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Using CFPB complaint data to help cities and counties protect the public. “We wanted to increase the impact of our complaint data by sharing it with cities and counties so they can increase their efforts to protect consumers at the local level. Engaging with local governments is a win-win for consumers and the CFPB. It helps protect as many consumers as possible from predatory lending, barriers to credit, and other consumer harms.”

The Guardian: Twitter fails to delete 99% of racist tweets aimed at footballers in run-up to World Cup. “New research shows the platform failed to act on 99 out of 100 racist tweets reported to it in the week before the World Cup…. Of those, 11 used the N-word to describe footballers, 25 used monkey or banana emojis directed at players, 13 called for players to be deported, and 25 attacked players by telling them to ‘go back to’ other countries. Thirteen tweets targeted footballers over their English skills.” Good morning, Internet…

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November 21, 2022 at 06:29PM
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AI Time Machine, Atlas of Surveillance, Twitter, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, November 20, 2022

AI Time Machine, Atlas of Surveillance, Twitter, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, November 20, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

PetaPixel: AI Time Machine Allows You to Picture Yourself in any Historical Period. “AI Time Machine is a new tool that allows users to create images of a person in different time periods throughout history using AI-image generator technology.”

Electronic Frontier Foundation: EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance Database Now Documents 10,000+ Police Tech Programs. “With this project, we are creating a searchable and mappable repository of which law enforcement agencies in the U.S. use surveillance technologies such as body-worn cameras, drones, automated license plate readers, and face recognition…. The Atlas of Surveillance has now hit 10,000 data points. It contains at least partial data on approximately 5,500 law enforcement agencies in all 50 states, as well as most territories and districts.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Associated Press: Public safety accounts urge caution on Twitter after changes. “Government agencies, especially those tasked with sending messages during emergencies, have embraced Twitter for its efficiency and scope. Getting accurate information from authorities during disasters is often a matter of life or death.”

Fortune: Scammers are targeting desperate FTX customers by pretending to be the DOJ, promising access to funds. “FTX customers around the world no doubt regret their decision to sign on with the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange. Adding insult to injury, they’re now the targets of scammers pretending to be the U.S. Department of Justice.”

CNBC: Elon Musk says he will reinstate Twitter account of former President Donald Trump after online poll. “New Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk announced that he will reinstate the Twitter account of former President Donald Trump on Saturday.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Engadget: Governments vote to retire the leap second by 2035. “Introduced in 1972 as a way to adjust Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to reconcile discrepancies that can come up between atomic time and observed solar time, the leap second has been the bane of tech companies for decades. In 2012, for instance, Reddit was down for about 40 minutes when the addition of a leap second that year confused the company’s servers. More recently, Cloudflare saw part of its DNS services affected due to a time change in 2016.”

The Guardian: Twitter has ‘50% chance’ of major crash during World Cup, says insider. “Twitter stands a 50% chance of a major outage that could take the site offline during the World Cup, according to a recently departed employee with knowledge of how the company responds to large-scale events.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TechCrunch: Google clamps down on illegal loan apps in Kenya, Nigeria. “Google is requiring loan apps in Kenya to submit proof of license to operate in the country, failure to which they risk removal from Play Store, its digital distribution service. Those that have applied for licensing by Central Bank of Kenya, and can produce evidence of the same, may also be spared.”

Reuters: Italy court rejects Google’s appeal against watchdog fine, accepts Apple’s one. “An Italian administrative court rejected an appeal by Alphabet’s Google against a decision by Italy’s antitrust authority to fine the group, but accepted Apple’s appeal against the watchdog’s ruling.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: Twitter Was Influential in the Pandemic. Are We Better for It?. “When I wanted immediate feedback on an epidemiological model at 2 a.m., colleagues in Australia were awake and online to help. Twitter helped me to reach hundreds of thousands of concerned people, online and via news media, and help them understand what was happening. My Twitter following exploded from just over 10,000 to over 100,000 followers in six months. Many of my colleagues could tell a ‌‌similar story. And they could tell another as well.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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November 21, 2022 at 01:31AM
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Twitter, CBS News, US Broadband Access, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, November 20, 2022

Twitter, CBS News, US Broadband Access, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, November 20, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Boing Boing: Keep up with the latest Twitter meltdown news at this site dedicated to monitoring Musk’s daily f*ckups. “You can filter the news by tag (Bye-Bye, Call the Lawyers, Elon the Engineer, General Mayhem, Line Go Down, No-One Minding the Store, Rise of the Robots, Sickening Sycophants, Sleeping Under the Desk, and Twitter Blue) or elect to read the full firehose.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Variety: CBS News Suspends Twitter Posting ‘In Light of the Uncertainty’ About Musk-Owned Social Platform. “CBS News is halting its activity on Twitter over Elon Musk’s turbulent and potentially devastating moves following his takeover of the company.”

Ars Technica: FCC unveils big update to broadband map—and wants you to help correct errors . “Today, the FCC released the long-awaited National Broadband Map update based on the most detailed data the commission has ever collected from ISPs. There’s still plenty of work to do, as this first version will undergo a challenge process to correct errors, and there are indications it will have many inaccuracies.”

Radio New Zealand: Difficulty accessing archive documents angers historians “Mounting difficulties getting hold of critical historical documents at the national Archive are sparking government infighting and threats of legal action. A high court Justice has noted cases are being severely impeded. To make matters worse, the $9 million IT system used to search the country’s history files has had to be shut down over a security breach of restricted documents.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeTechEasier: How to Create a Web Archive With Archivebox. “Archivebox is an easy-to-use archival program that allows you to create an accurate snapshot of any website. This can be helpful for archivists and users that want to preserve information online. Not only that, Archivebox is also incredibly simple and easy to use.”

IP Watchdog: How to Use the USPTO Patent Public Search Tool. “Do you want a simple way to search for specific patents and to get PDF copies of those patents? And do you want those PDF files to come straight from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), so you can be confident that they contain any Certificates of Correction? Our first article in a series about the USPTO’s Public Patent Search (PPS) web page shows you how.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Fierce Pharma: Pharma must stay the course on Twitter as docs are not abandoning the platform yet: Report. “Like it or loathe it, and whatever its new direction, Twitter is still a powerful platform for doctors, and pharma should not abandon the troubled social media site yet, according to a new report from healthcare consultants at ZoomRx.”

BBC News: Alan MacMasters: How the great online toaster hoax was exposed. “For more than a decade, a prankster spun a web of deception about the inventor of the electric toaster. His lies fooled newspapers, teachers and officials. Then a teenager flagged up something that everyone else had missed.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

News@Northeastern: Adversaries Are Ready To Strike Us Infrastructure, Warn Cybersecurity Experts At Northeastern Event. “Enemies are situating themselves within the cyber operations of U.S. infrastructure sites with the potential of striking at any time, warned Brandon Wales, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).”

RESEARCH & OPINION

RMIT University: Nine in 10 adults have been cyberbullies, study finds. “Educated and married people, irrespective of their gender, are most likely to commit cyberbullying more frequently, according to the research, but demographics are not the only factors at play. The study found other characteristics such as being outgoing or deceptive ultimately contributed to a person’s likelihood of becoming a cyberbully.”

Stanford Graduate School of Education: A new approach to teaching science can help inoculate against misinformation, Stanford researchers say. “In a new essay published in the journal Science, [Jonathan] Osborne and [Daniel] Pimentel argue that new approaches to science education could help inoculate society against scientific misinformation in all of its forms, from the misguided to the malicious.”

Garowe Online: EDITORIAL: Why Africa should worry about new Twitter policies. “In Somalia, where information sharing has been traditionally oral, Twitter offered government officials the to narrate events, receive flak or praise from citizens, and debate on issues around security, culture, and economy…. Nothing could hurt Africa more than a dilution of a platform people have come to see as credible, available, and free and which has challenged authorities in most autocracies to conform or at least pretend to.” Good morning, Internet…

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November 20, 2022 at 06:31PM
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Canadian Down Syndrome Society, Student Journalism, FTX, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, November 19, 2022

Canadian Down Syndrome Society, Student Journalism, FTX, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, November 19, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

CTV News: ‘I want to work’: New hub connects people with Down syndrome to jobs. “Canada has roughly one million jobs unfulfilled, and a new tool is looking to connect employers with candidates they may not have expected to hire—which is part of the problem, according to disability advocates. Inployable is the first-ever employment network created in Canada on LinkedIn, an initiative of the Canadian Down Syndrome Society (CDSS).”

EVENTS

Chicago Tribune: Free virtual event: How student journalists can investigate police ticketing at high schools. “In ‘The Price Kids Pay,’ reporters from the Tribune and ProPublica found that local police wrote more than 12,000 tickets to students in dozens of school districts across the state in recent years…. Now, at a free event hosted by ProPublica in partnership with the Tribune and the Journalism Education Association, student journalists can learn how to report on ticketing on their own school campuses. The virtual event takes place at 3:30 p.m. Dec. 1.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Reuters: FTX launches strategic review, seeks court relief to pay critical vendors. “FTX, along with about 101 affiliated firms, also sought court relief to allow the operation of a new global cash management system and payment to its critical vendors.The exchange and its affiliates filed for bankruptcy in Delaware on Nov. 11 in one of the highest-profile crypto blowups, leaving an estimated 1 million customers and other investors facing total losses in the billions of dollars.”

CBS News: NFT prices slump as FTX’s collapse shadows digital collectibles. “The crypto world suffered a major blow last week when FTX Trading declared bankruptcy amid a $8 billion shortfall. The fallout is now affecting the digital collectibles realm, said NFT expert Connor Borrego. The price of ‘The Currency,’ a collection of NFTs by celebrated artist Damien Hirst, fell 12.6% to $4,666.60 on Friday while Moonbird NFTs fell 4.7% to $8,397.50 and Bored Ape Kennel Club fell 8.3% to $4,672.60, according to NFT Price Floor.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

FactCheck: Bogus Theory Misinterprets FTX Support for Ukraine. “The bankruptcy of FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, has sparked an unfounded claim that its former CEO had conspired with Ukraine and Democratic politicians to launder U.S. aid money. FTX helped make crypto donations available to Ukraine; it wasn’t taking any assets from Ukraine.”

Reuters: Special Report-FTX’s Bankman-Fried begged for a rescue even as he revealed huge holes in firm’s books. “Sequoia was among investors that lined up only months before to pump money into [Sam] Bankman-Fried’s empire. But not now. Sequoia was shocked at the amount of money Bankman-Fried needed to save FTX, according to the sources, while Apollo first asked for more information, only to later decline. Both firms and TPG declined to comment for this article.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

South China Morning Post: China to step up internet censorship with stricter rules for social media and streaming sites. “Chinese social media and web video platforms must approve all news-related comments before they go online and step up training for censors to keep out ‘harmful’ content, according to new regulations taking effect on December 15.”

Gizmodo: House Committees Slam ID.me for ‘Baseless’ Unemployment Fraud Claims. “ID.me, the controversial biometric identification verification company whose facial match technology provoked a major privacy backlash at the IRS earlier this year, may have misled the public and lawmakers when its CEO claimed the U.S. lost $400 billion to fraudulent pandemic unemployment claims.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Stanford University HAI: Language Models are Changing AI. We Need to Understand Them. “We need to know what this technology can and can’t do, what risks it poses, so that we can both have a deeper scientific understanding and a more comprehensive account of its societal impact. Transparency is the vital first step towards these two goals. But the AI community lacks the needed transparency: Many language models exist, but they are not compared on a unified standard, and even when language models are evaluated, the full range of societal considerations (e.g., fairness, robustness, uncertainty estimation, commonsense knowledge, disinformation) have not be addressed in a unified way”

The Hill: The true tragedy behind Musk’s Twitter buyout is the power of billionaires. “The fact that one single person, Elon Musk, could access enough money to buy out an entire social media platform is incredible. It would take the median American worker, working full time at $55,640 a year, no fewer than 790,797 years to make the $44 billion needed to buy Twitter. This is longer than human beings have been on the planet.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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November 20, 2022 at 01:59AM
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North America Mycology, Artemis I, Billy Bremner, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, November 18, 2022

North America Mycology, Artemis I, Billy Bremner, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, November 18, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Discover Magazine: Largest-Ever Fungi Bioblitz Catalogs the Diversity of North American Mushrooms and More. “This fall, between September 15 and October 15, more than 30,000 volunteers combed through forests, fields and even their own backyards in search of the humble mushroom…. Altogether, the citizen scientists who took part collected nearly 150,000 fungi sightings, and identified almost 4,400 different species. Their findings were posted on a digital map, as well as to an online database, and the data they gathered will be used by mycologists who are studying the diversity of fungi across the continent.”

WHNT: NASA launches website to keep track of Artemis I. “NASA’S new website allows people to view a real-time visualization of the telemetry of the Orion spacecraft, letting them view the spacecraft from multiple angles and from the locations of cameras actually on the spacecraft. AROW also allows for a view of the entire Artemis mission from Earth, the moon or Orion’s current position. This view lets users see different milestones Orion will hit along its trip to the moon and back.”

University of Stirling: New exhibition kicks Stirling sporting hero back into spotlight . “New memories about the life and career of Stirling-born football star Billy Bremner have been uncovered as part of a new online exhibition. Working with pupils from the sporting hero’s former school, St Modan’s High, and the local Raploch community, researchers from the University of Stirling uncovered a swathe of material connected to Bremner – who was born in the Raploch in 1942 before becoming one of the greatest midfielders of all time.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

IrishCentral: Find your family history online – Ireland’s 1926 Census is being digitized. “The National Archives of Ireland project has announced that as part of a €5 million project the Republic of Ireland’s 1926 Census results will be available online, free of charge, from April 2026.”

TechCrunch: Twitter is working on a feature to divide long text into a thread automatically. “Composing a thread on Twitter can be challenging as you need to separate the whole text into 280-character chunks. However, the company now seems to be working on a solution to turn long-form text into a thread automatically.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

BuzzFeed News: Verified Twitter Users Are Stuck With Joke Names Like “Spicy Chicken Sandwich” And “Giant Penis”. Um, warning for language, obviously. In an attempt to head off the growing issue of account impersonation by people who’d paid the $8 per month for Twitter Blue, Musk decided around Nov. 7 to stop anyone with a blue checkmark from changing their display name…. Musk’s decision left large numbers of verified accounts locked into sometimes ill-thought-out joke names, like problematic YouTuber @CountDankulaTV, who’s now ‘GIANT PENIS (Parody).'”

Slate: The Race to Save Fanfiction History Before It’s Lost Forever. “Archive of Our Own is probably best known as the place to read fans’ carefully crafted Harry Potter prequels or Lord of the Rings stories millions of words long. But the fanfiction website also has a lesser known, though no less important mission: to save older fanfic that’s at risk of disappearing. A new initiative, the Fanzine Scan Hosting Project, aims to make fan stories and art from physical fanzines accessible through the archive, preserving pieces of history previously confined to university libraries, scattered eBay sales, and forgotten corners of attics.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NBC News: This TikToker is ‘consensually doxxing’ people to teach them about social media privacy. “Many users go to great lengths to secure their social media accounts — but one TikTok creator is showing people that their profiles aren’t as private as they seem. Kristen Sotakoun, 32, is behind a viral TikTok series devoted to ‘consensual doxxing,’ in which she reveals the birthdates of people in her comments section.”

The Register: Google wins lawsuit against alleged Russian botnet herders . “A New York judge has issued a default judgment against two Russian nationals who are alleged to have helped create the ‘Glupteba’ botnet, sold fraudulent credit card information, and generated cryptocurrency using the network.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Scientific Reports: Social media enables people-centric climate action in the hard-to-decarbonise building sector. “The building and construction sector accounts for around 39% of global carbon dioxide emissions and remains a hard-to-abate sector. We use a data-driven analysis of global high-level climate action on emissions reduction in the building sector using 256,717 English-language tweets across a 13-year time frame (2009–2021). Using natural language processing and network analysis, we show that public sentiments and emotions on social media are reactive to these climate policy actions.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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November 19, 2022 at 01:32AM
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Digital Currency Prices, Mississippi Republicans, School Name Changes, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, November 19, 2022

Digital Currency Prices, Mississippi Republicans, School Name Changes, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, November 19, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Bank for International Settlements: Crypto trading and Bitcoin prices: evidence from a new database of retail adoption. “We study the drivers of crypto trading app adoption using a novel database on the daily use of crypto exchange apps for 95 countries over 2015–22. We make this database available as a resource for researchers, policymakers and practitioners. We answer the following questions: do more people join crypto markets when the price of Bitcoin rises? If so, who are these new users? And what country characteristics matter more for crypto adoption?”

Mississippi State University: MSU Libraries takes Mississippi Republican Party papers online for first time. “Historical papers of the Mississippi Republican Party, held by Mississippi State Libraries since 1980, are available online for the first time. A new finding aid—or descriptive guide—now helps researchers in electronically examining and understanding the content of the collection which dates back to 1928.”

USA Today: Over 80 schools changed their names in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. See our database. “Using public school directory files from the National Center for Education Statistics, USA TODAY built a comprehensive database and interactive map of school name changes nationwide since 2020. Reporters analyzed thousands of rows of data and reviewed local news publications to put together a picture of what happened in each case. The database includes schools that changed names through the end of 2021. But the list of schools shedding old names keeps growing.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

American Legion: Get ready for a new experience on American Legion Digital Archive. “The American Legion Library and Museum will launch a new interface for the American Legion Digital Archive in early December, featuring the new Legion branding with a more simplified layout to enhance access.”

Sky News: Cambridge Dictionary reveals word of the year – and Wordle frustration has played a key role. “The Cambridge Dictionary has revealed its word of the year for 2022, with editors crediting disgruntled Wordle players whose winning streak was ended by an unfamiliar American English term.”

USEFUL STUFF

ZDNet: The best Twitter alternatives . “As Twitter continues to circle the drain, many people are already heading for the doors looking for a new online home. The good news is there are many other social networks. The bad news is none of them are complete Twitter replacements.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

News Australia: Billionaire calls on Google to ‘aggressively’ cut staff and pay. “The billionaire owner of a hedge fund that is a major investor in Google and YouTube’s parent company Alphabet has made an extraordinary demand for the company to make ‘aggressive’ cuts to staff numbers and reduce the pay of remaining employees. Christopher Hohn, who owns London-based hedge fund TCI which holds a $6 billion stake in the company, wrote to Alphabet’s boss Sundar Pichai urging him to follow in the footsteps of its other tech rivals such as Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft and lay-off staff.”

Motherboard: Libraries Are Launching Their Own Local Music Streaming Platforms. “Over a dozen public libraries in the U.S. and Canada have begun offering their own music streaming services to patrons, with the goal of boosting artists and local music scenes. The services are region-specific, and offer local artists non-exclusive licenses to make their albums available to the community.”

Columbia Journalism Review: Journalists want to re-create Twitter on Mastodon. Mastodon is not into it.. “No one controls Mastodon—or rather, everyone controls their own version of it. There are thousands of servers running the software, and each one chooses which servers it ‘federates,’ or exchanges information with. Don’t like the users who belong to a specific server? Just block them. Unfortunately for some of the journalists who have joined the service, this mass-blocking (or ‘defederation’) approach is now being applied to them.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Google struck $360-million Activision deal to block rival app store, lawsuit says. “Alphabet Inc’s Google has struck at least 24 deals with big app developers to stop them from competing with its Play Store, including an agreement to pay Activision Blizzard Inc about $360 million over three years, according to a court filing on Thursday.”

Politico: Egypt’s COP27 summit app is a cyber weapon, experts warn. “Western security advisers are warning delegates at the COP27 climate summit not to download the host Egyptian government’s official smartphone app, amid fears it could be used to hack their private emails, texts and even voice conversations. Policymakers from Germany, France and Canada were among those who had downloaded the app by November 8, according to two separate Western security officials briefed on discussions within these delegations at the U.N. climate summit.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Washington Post: Google searches are not a great indicator of electoral success. “This is the era of having more data at our disposal than we know what to do with. And so it is that I came to wonder: Do Google searches correlate well to election results?” Good morning, Internet…

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November 18, 2022 at 06:29PM
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