Rohde & Schwarz claims the first automated EMC test system for both 5G FR1 and FR2 frequency ranges.
Toshiba’s latest micro-stepping motor driver IC can drive motors with a wide operating voltage range of 2.5 V to 16 V.
Infineon launches the 600-V CoolMOS S7 superjunction MOSFET family for low-frequency applications.
Murata’s PTC thermistor is housed in a 0201 package size for mobile devices, including smartphones and wearables.
NEW RESOURCES
BBC: The database that means festivals have ‘no excuses’ on gender balance. “Festivals hoping to achieve gender balance on their line-ups have been given a major helping hand – in the form of a massive spreadsheet. The document lists every female artist signed to a record label or releasing music independently in the UK.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
ChinaTechCity: TikTok maker ByteDance has a search app in China. “Without Google, China’s dominant search engine is Baidu with nearly two-thirds of the market. Now ByteDance, the owner of the viral short video app TikTok, wants a piece of the pie. The company is quietly testing a new search app that’s available for download on some Chinese Android app stores.”
The Next Web: You can now post Facebook’s trippy 3D photos without Portrait mode. “Facebook‘s trippy 3D photos are about to become much more accessible. The company first introduced the feature back in 2018, using depth data from your phone’s portrait mode to provide a nifty parallax effect to your images. It helped make images pop while scrolling through your news feed, and though it’s something of a gimmick, it’s still pretty cool. Problem was, it only worked if you’d activated portrait mode for that particular image.”
USEFUL STUFF
PopSugar: The Remini Photo App Makes Photos Look So Beautiful and Clear. “People have been taking to TikTok recently to flaunt the capabilities of the photo app Remini because of how well it enhances your pictures (old photos especially, the ones that are soft and fuzzy). The app gives photos new life by filling in faces and making photos look new.”
Search Engine Journal: Zero-Click Searches: How to Get Back Your Lost Google Traffic. “More than 50% of Google searches end without an organic click – and that’s a huge threat to our websites. These zero-click searches are resulting in growing losses in both revenue and leads, making Google everyone’s competitor.”
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
ProPublica: Kentucky’s $1.5 Billion Information Highway to Nowhere. “The internet arrived in some parts of eastern Kentucky’s Jackson and Owsley counties on the back of a mule named Old Bub. Nine years ago, Old Bub trudged between the rugged counties’ most remote utility poles, hauling the high-capacity fiber-optic cable intended to help bring Appalachian residents into the information age. Today, Old Bub symbolizes something else — a poor state plodding along the information highway.”
Columbia Journalism Review: Preserving a ‘national memory’ of an outbreak. “The project has become a tribute to the Chinese documentarians who’ve tactfully recorded the complex and often murky realities of life during the coronavirus outbreak amid threats of censorship. In the first weeks of coronavirus news coverage, Chinese news outlets published deep dives and government investigations, reporting on conditions in Wuhan under lockdown that many international organizations could not access. Their published stories are a win for press freedom in a country where the information flow is often strictly supervised.”
Washington Post: Millions of tweets peddled conspiracy theories about coronavirus in other countries, an unpublished U.S. report says. “Roughly 2 million tweets peddled conspiracy theories about the coronavirus over the three-week period when the outbreak began to spread outside China, according to an unreleased report from an arm of the State Department, raising fresh fears about Silicon Valley’s preparedness to combat a surge of dangerous disinformation online.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Route Fifty: Report: Two-Thirds of Counties Average Internet Speeds Slower Than Broadband. “New data, crowdsourced from an app that tests internet connectivity speeds, found that 65% of counties across the United States are averaging connection speeds slower than the FCC’s definition of broadband.”
ScienceBlog: Tune In To Social Media And Tone Down Your Risk Of Skin Cancer. “Social media smarts could make you less susceptible to skin cancer as new research shows that media literacy skills can help change people’s attitudes about what is believed to be the ‘tanned ideal’.” Good afternoon, Internet…
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The Arm Cortex-M55 and Ethos-U55 accelerator are designed to work best together to power machine learning in endpoint devices, IoT devices and other low-power applications.
NEW RESOURCES
KNAU: New Website Tells Grand Canyon’s Indigenous Stories. ” A new website tells stories from five Native leaders about their cultural and spiritual ties to the Grand Canyon. The images, videos, and audio clips gathered on the site are part of a larger effort to improve education about the Grand Canyon’s indigenous history” An audio story with transcript available.
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
CNET: Facebook pulls out of SXSW conference over coronavirus concerns. “Facebook said Monday that it’s withdrawing from the SXSW conference because of coronavirus concerns, a move that comes shortly after Twitter announced it wasn’t attending the massive tech and culture event either.”
USEFUL STUFF
Lifehacker: These Airlines Will Let You Change Your Flight for Free Because of Coronavirus. “If you have a flight coming up in the next few weeks that you’re starting to get nervous about, here’s a rundown on what each airline’s policy on changes and cancellations currently is. Also, keep in mind that when an airline waives a change fee, it’s waiving the additional charge you would traditionally have had to pay to change that ticket, you’re still going to be responsible for the change in the cost of airfare between your old and new ticket, so it’s in your best interest to make a change earlier rather than later.”
MakeUseOf: 5 Apps to Fix YouTube Fails and Overcome Limitations . “Tired of how YouTube promotes mainstream media? Or how it removes videos without warning and doesn’t let you listen to podcasts in the background? With the right tools, you can fix all of these YouTube failures and limitations.”
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
Daily Mail is not a resource I link to often, but in this case…. Daily Mail: Church of England to launch a ‘Google Maps for graves’ within five years enabling family historians to search for burial records and locations in an online database. “Thousands of cemeteries across the UK will be imaged and mapped over the next five years to create a comprehensive database of British burial sites. The Church of England project hopes to immortalise the tombs of millions of people buried in Anglican graveyards as well as those interred on unconsecrated land.”
Quartz: Wall Street’s watchdog is obscuring data that could protect investors. “BrokerCheck is operated by an industry-run regulator. And the way it presents data has the power to distort markets and protect the profits of financial institutions. The only reason we know this is that, finally, its grip on the data is slipping. Starting a few years ago, a handful of pioneering academics were able extract the critical firm-related data from individual profiles. It’s thanks largely to these analyses, which offer vastly more complete data on firm behavior, that we’re starting to see how little investors are being told—and how much the ignorance costs them.”
Poynter: Disinformers are targeting Taiwan as a country where coronavirus is out of control. “While struggling to fight the new coronavirus, Taiwan is also witnessing a serious digital attack driven by malicious disinformers. In the last few days, dozens of profiles and bots on Facebook and Twitter have posted different pieces of content suggesting that the COVID-19 is completely out of control in Taiwan and that the government doesn’t know what to do to protect its people. Active fact-checkers can already see political motivation behind it.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Reuters: EU court backs Google in case over Hungary tax declaration fines. “Hungary’s system of fines imposed on Google related to the country’s tax on advertising is not compatible with EU law, the Court of Justice of the European Union said on Tuesday.”
Wired: A Simple New Tool Lets You Open Email Attachments Without Fear. “Micah Lee, the head of information security for First Look Media, plans to release an alpha version of a free tool called Dangerzone on GitHub [next Sunday], timed to a talk about it at the Nullcon conference in Goa, India. Dangerzone is a simple quarantine program that allows anyone to sanitize untrusted documents, neutering any tracking beacons, malicious scripts, or other nastiness that those files might carry.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
The Verge: How hard will the robots make us work?. “On conference stages and at campaign rallies, tech executives and politicians warn of a looming automation crisis — one where workers are gradually, then all at once, replaced by intelligent machines. But their warnings mask the fact that an automation crisis has already arrived. The robots are here, they’re working in management, and they’re grinding workers into the ground.” Good afternoon, Internet…
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