New researches

Thursday, March 5, 2020

Eskenazi Museum of Art, Conference Transcripts, Confederate Slave Payrolls, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, March 5, 2020

Eskenazi Museum of Art, Conference Transcripts, Confederate Slave Payrolls, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, March 5, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Indiana University: Newly launched Collections Online increases access to Eskenazi Museum of Art’s works. “The museum recently launched the first phase of its Collections Online, a database that will eventually contain pictures and descriptions of the more than 45,000 items in its collections. Each phase of the project will include adding 500 pieces of art from each curatorial area of the museum to the website.”

New-to-me and I think new in general, brought to my attention by Esther S.: Thisten. From the about page: “Thisten is an audio-to-text platform that transcribes speaker sessions at conferences, in real-time. The content from each event is aggregated to our app and website for users around the world to discover, search, and reference.” The tweet Esther used to let me know about Thisten also mentions future plans to provide transcripts for political rallies, sporting events, and movies.

NARA: Confederate Slave Payrolls Shed Light on Lives of 19th Century African American Families. “They are single lines, often with no last name, on paper yellowed but legible after 155 years, among thousands scrawled in loping letters that make up nearly 6,000 Confederate Slave Payroll records, a trove of Civil War documents digitized for the first time by National Archives staff in a multiyear project that concluded in January. For years, the Confederate Army required owners to loan their slaves to the military. From Virginia to Florida, the enslaved conscripts were forced to dig trenches and work at ordnance factories and arsenals, mine potassium nitrate to create gunpowder, or shore up forts.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechHive: Google is ‘aware’ of buggy Bluetooth for Home and Nest speakers and working on a fix. “For months, users of Google’s Home and Nest speakers have been complaining that their devices can’t hold a steady Bluetooth connection to a phone or an external speaker, and now Google says it’s looking for a fix.”

Tom’s Guide: Google zaps all coronavirus apps from Play Store. “First reported by the blog 9to5Google, if you enter either ‘coronavirus’ or ‘covid-19’ in the Google Play Store, nothing will appear on the results. This is a new situation that has apparently developed in recent days.”

BBC: #RIPTwitter trends as firm tests vanishing tweets. “Twitter is testing a feature that will allow some tweets to disappear after 24 hours, it announced on Wednesday. The new feature called ‘fleets’ is similar to vanishing posts on Snapchat and Instagram Stories.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: The 5 Best Open-Source VPNs for Linux and Windows. “Open source VPNs are quite rare, but they do exist. Their transparency makes them a sworn ally for many users, who are quick to recommend them to anyone seeking a free open-source VPN. Here are some of the best open-source VPNs out there, plus one honorable mention!”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Cointelegraph: Painting a Different Picture: How Digital Artists Use Blockchain. “Following its inception, blockchain technology quickly found an application in the art sector, making art objects more accessible while changing methods and approaches to their creation and perception. This gave new opportunities for collectors, art galleries, museums, art brokers and artists.”

CurveMag: Curvemag. com To Become Largest Global LGBTQI Media Offering For Women In 2020. “Todays Merger with Australia’s largest lesbian magazine will make 30-year-old Curve Magazine the world’s largest outlet of its kind… Due to the merger, the print production of both titles will be suspended to focus on digital offerings and to re-examine readers’ demands for a physical magazine. LOTL and CURVE will be made available in a 30-year digital magazine archive, free of charge, hosted on curvemag.com.” The archive is supposed to launch this month.

RESEARCH & OPINION

ZDNet: Data science vs social media disinformation: the case of climate change and the Australian bushfires . “Today, [World Weather Attribution] just released an analysis on the recent Australian bushfires, and ZDNet connected with WWA to learn more about it. At the same time, another analysis by the Brown university verifies what previous studies suggested: climate disinformation on social media abounds. The battle between bots and (data) science is raging.”

Vogue: Inside The “Vault”: Emily Adams Bode Partners With Microsoft on an AI-Powered Digital Quilt Archive. “The custom AI-powered, design-to-production platform acts as a computerized library of quilts and patterns through which Bode and her team can attach historical dates and facts and catalogue how much of a certain material they have left…. This is the first technology of its kind to be applied to fashion in this way, and the hope is that more and more brands, namely those which use upcycled or historical materials, will be able to utilize the platform in order to help streamline and grow their businesses.”

TechCrunch: Honeywell says it will soon launch the world’s most powerful quantum computer. “‘The best-kept secret in quantum computing.’ That’s what Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) CEO Ilyas Khan called Honeywell‘s efforts in building the world’s most powerful quantum computer. In a race where most of the major players are vying for attention, Honeywell has quietly worked on its efforts for the last few years (and under strict NDA’s, it seems). But today, the company announced a major breakthrough that it claims will allow it to launch the world’s most powerful quantum computer within the next three months.” Good morning, Internet…

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March 5, 2020 at 06:06PM
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Wednesday, March 4, 2020

Australian Associated Press, Pinterest, Face Datasets, More: Wednesday Evening ResearchBuzz, March 4, 2020

Australian Associated Press, Pinterest, Face Datasets, More: Wednesday Evening ResearchBuzz, March 4, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

AFP: Australia’s newswire axed amid pressure from digital giants. “Australia’s only national newswire will be shuttered after 85 years of operation, with around 180 staff told Tuesday their jobs will end in June. Staff gathered on the newsroom floor at Australian Associated Press’ headquarters in Sydney were told a drop-off in subscribers in the face of free online content meant the company was ‘no longer viable.'”

The Verge: Pinterest now showing custom search results for coronavirus to combat misinformation. “Pinterest is introducing a ‘custom search experience’ when you seek out information about the coronavirus on its platform, as a way to ‘connect Pinners with facts and myth-bust what’s not true with authoritative information from the [World Health Organization],’ the company tells The Verge.”

USEFUL STUFF

Analytics India Magazine: 10 Face Datasets To Start Facial Recognition Projects. “One of the major research areas, facial recognition has been adopted by governments and organisations for a few years now. Leading phone makers like Apple, Samsung, among others, have been integrating this technology into their smartphones for providing maximum security to the users. As per research, facial recognition technology is expected to grow and reach $9.6 billion by 2020. In this article, we list down 10 face datasets which can be used to start facial recognition projects.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

ZDNet: What’s the most popular web browser in 2020?. “For ages, it was almost impossible to get hard data on which were the most popular web browsers. Sure, many companies claimed to have good information, such as NetMarketShare and StatCounter, but their numbers were massaged. The US federal government’s Digital Analytics Program (DAP), however, gives us a running count of the last 90 days of US government website visits. While it doesn’t tell us about global web browser use, it’s the best information we have about American web browser users.”

CNET: Facebook pulls down hundreds of fake accounts tied to marketing firms in India and Egypt. “Facebook in February removed hundreds of accounts and pages tied to deceptive campaigns that appear to be from Egyptian and Indian marketing firms, the company said Monday. The takedowns are part of the social media giant’s efforts to crack down on what it calls ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior,’ which involves creating dozens or hundreds of fake accounts and using them to promote ideologies and drive users to deceptive content on other websites.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CBR: Casinos in Las Vegas Hit by Suspected Ransomware Attack. “Slot machines in two Las Vegas casinos were out of action for almost a week in an incident that bears all the hallmarks of a ransomware attack. Investigations are currently underway by the Nevada State Game Control Board, which told us it is ‘actively monitoring the situation’.”

Engadget: It took Google months to patch a serious Android security flaw. “Google has patched a critical security flaw that affects millions of Android devices with chipsets from MediaTek, XDA Developers revealed today. The vulnerability is a rootkit lodged in the CPU’s firmware. It allows a simple script to root Android devices that use nearly any of MediaTek’s 64-bit chips, so it has compromised hundreds of budget and mid-range smartphone, tablet and set-top box models, XDA says.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Nature: Find a home for every imaging data set. “Services such as [the Electron Microscopy Public Image Archive] give researchers a central location in which to store, share and access a rapidly expanding corpus of biological images. “The data aren’t just one picture any more,” says Joshua Vogelstein, a neurostatistician at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Movies, 3D images and microscope-based screening data can take up gigabytes or terabytes of storage, and can’t be e-mailed back and forth in the same way as individual TIFF or JPEG files. Moreover, grant agencies and journals increasingly require scientists to make their data available to all, but don’t necessarily offer to host them. EMPIAR and its kin fill that gap, and often provide a digital object identifier or other citation so researchers can get credit for their data.”

Phys .org: Brazilian communities fight floods together – with memories and an app. “Brazilian communities that are vulnerable to devastating floods are being united and empowered to defend themselves, using ‘citizen science’ and a specially developed mobile app, thanks to two research projects led by the University of Warwick.”

The Next Web: Google algorithm teaches robot how to walk in mere hours. “Researchers from Google developed algorithms that helped the four-legged bot to learn how to walk across a range of surfaces within just hours of practice, annihilating the record times set by its human overlords.” Good evening, Internet…

March 5, 2020 at 07:04AM
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WWII, Facebook Libra, National Archives of Estonia, More: Wednesday Mid-Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 4, 2020

WWII, Facebook Libra, National Archives of Estonia, More: Wednesday Mid-Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 4, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

State Archives of North Carolina: World War II Digital Collection Additions. “The Digital Services Section of the State Archives of North Carolina is pleased to announce new additions to the World War II digital collection online. Since Fall 2018, DSS has been digitizing a large addition of items related to World War II from a variety of collections. These items were selected to commemorate the 75th anniversary of World War II and to increase their usage through online access. The items relate to home front activities in North Carolina, North Carolina military installations, and North Carolina soldiers serving in the war.

BBC: Facebook ‘rethinks’ plans for Libra cryptocurrency. “Facebook is reportedly rethinking its plans for its own digital currency after resistance from regulators. It is now considering a system with digital versions of established currencies, including the dollar and the Euro, according to Bloomberg and tech site The Information.”

ERR: Tuesday marks century of national archives in Estonia. “The National Archives of Estonia began operating on January 1, 1999, however the establishment of a national archive system took place in the formative years of the Republic of Estonia already. It was on the initiative of an archival committee that convened on March 3, 1920, that a central state archive was established in Tartu as the storage place for historically significant institutions’ documents and a state archive established in Tallinn as the manager of active institutions’ documents.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

TechCrunch: Facebook fact-check feud erupts over Trump virus “hoax”. “Who fact-checks the fact-checkers? Did Trump call coronavirus the Democrat’s ‘new hoax’? Those the big questions emerging from a controversial ‘false’ label applied to Politico and NBC News stories by right-wing publisher The Daily Caller. Its Check Your Fact division is a Facebook act-checking partner, giving it the power to flag links on the social network as false, demoting their ranking in the News Feed as well as the visibility of the entire outlet that posted it.”

Human Resources: Emoji etiquette in the workplace: The good, the bad and the downright inappropriate. “Emojis are everywhere nowadays. When words fail us or we want to lighten the mood, very often we turn to emojis. In fact even in a professional work setting, 71% of respondents in Perkbox’s latest survey feel emojis should be encouraged.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ProPublica: Some Election-Related Websites Still Run on Vulnerable Software Older Than Many High Schoolers. “A ProPublica investigation found that at least 50 election-related websites in counties and towns voting on Super Tuesday — accounting for nearly 2 million voters — were particularly vulnerable to cyberattack. The sites, where people can find out how to register to vote, where to cast ballots and who won the election, had security issues such as outdated software, poor encryption and systems encumbered with unneeded computer programs. None of the localities contacted by ProPublica said that their sites had been disrupted by cyberattacks.”

Techdirt: Spanish Government Moves Ahead With First ‘Fake News’ Prosecution. “It’s unclear what the punishment is for spreading fake news. The law provides for a jail sentence of up to two years for violators, but that’s tied to the publication of information that ‘compromises the dignity’ of a protected group. It doesn’t say anything specifically about fake news. All that seems to be clear at this point is that the “effective protocols” involve government prosecutors.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The University of Washington Daily: The complexities of the Anthropocene through multimedia, vampires, and pig farms. “Anna Tsing, professor of anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, presented a lecture Feb. 25 as part of the Katz Distinguished Lectures in the Humanities series. The talk featured insights from her new book ‘Feral Atlas and the More-Than-Human Anthropocene.’ Feral Atlas will also be appearing online as an interactive digital medium that explores ecosystems that have been changed and expanded by human facilitation.”

The Verge: Alphabet’s Tidal moonshot tracks individual fish to help sustainably feed humanity. “Today Alphabet is announcing Tidal, an X division moonshot project with the goal of preserving the ocean’s ability to support life and help feed humanity sustainably. Tidal’s initial goal is to develop technologies that will give us a better understanding of what’s happening under water, with a focus on helping fish farmers to run and grow their operations in environmentally friendly ways.”

Phys .org: Not a ‘math person’? You may be better at learning to code than you think . “New research from the University of Washington finds that a natural aptitude for learning languages is a stronger predictor of learning to program than basic math knowledge, or numeracy. That’s because writing code also involves learning a second language, an ability to learn that language’s vocabulary and grammar, and how they work together to communicate ideas and intentions. Other cognitive functions tied to both areas, such as problem solving and the use of working memory, also play key roles.” Good mid-afternoon, Internet…

March 5, 2020 at 01:51AM
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Coronavirus News, Chrome OS, Free Videoconferencing, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 4, 2020

Coronavirus News, Chrome OS, Free Videoconferencing, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 4, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

NiemanLab: Not to alarm you, but coronavirus-focused news products are spreading very quickly. “If you’re itching for more information about coronavirus and its specific impacts, there’s a product for you and it’s probably free. There are so many coronavirus newsletters popping up that even the same Twitter jokes are going viral.” I don’t want to add anything if it’s not useful, but I’ve been pulling so much coronavirus stuff lately I’ve been thinking of doing a weekly roundup. At this point I could probably do a DAILY roundup.

Neowin: Google details new Chrome OS features including Ambient EQ and Netfilx PIP support. “Google typically releases new versions of Chrome OS every 6 weeks, coinciding with the browser release schedule. However, while Chrome 80 for desktop has been available for a while, the wider rollout for Chrome OS has not begun yet. Today, the search giant is detailing a few features that are making its way to Chrome OS with the latest release.”

USEFUL STUFF

ZDNet: Free video conferencing: Coronavirus spurs special deals from WebEx, Google, others. “Twitter just told all its 5,000 workers to work from home because of the COVID-19 coronavirus. It wasn’t the first, and it won’t be the last. Your company may be next. Fortunately, many video-conferencing services are now offering free access to their services for a limited time to help make life easier during the pandemic.”

Larry Ferlazzo: Even More Useful Online Tools If Our Schools Close & We Have To Teach Online (#COVID19). “Yesterday, I posted Here Are Online Tools Some Teachers In Asia Are Using For Remote Learning – Useful To Know In The Face Of #COVID19. Today, I realized that I hadn’t included three lengthy ‘Best’ lists that might also be helpful – they share many sites where teachers can create ‘virtual classrooms’ (the vast majority can be used at no-cost) for English Language Learners and English-proficient students and monitor student progress”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

ProPublica: We Want to Talk to People Working or Living on the Front Lines of Coronavirus. Help Us Report.. “ProPublica has put together a reporting team to investigate the government’s response to the new coronavirus, which is officially known as COVID-19. Are you a public health worker or front line medical provider? Do you work for or with a government agency that’s involved in the effort to protect the public? Have you or your family personally been affected? Show us what we should be covering, or serve as an expert to make sure we’re on track.”

Wired UK: Online Altruists Are Making Reddit More Accessible. “These volunteers are from a little subreddit called r/TranscribersOfReddit, who voluntarily type out extremely detailed descriptions of various content so that visually impaired people can access it. The band of noble souls have the goal of making Reddit, and the internet as a whole, a more accessible place. If you travel to one of r/TranscribersOfReddit’s 72 partner subreddits, like r/thatHappened or r/me_irl, there’s a chance you could stumble upon one of the group’s elaborate transcriptions.”

Vox: China has censored the Archive of Our Own, one of the internet’s largest fanfiction websites. “The Archive of Our Own (AO3), the Hugo-winning fanfiction website, is the latest casualty of Chinese censorship, amid a continued crackdown in the country on queer content, sexually explicit content, and websites based abroad.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Wall Street Journal: Lawmakers Push Again for Info on Google Collecting Patient Data. “A bipartisan trio of U.S. senators pushed again for answers on Google’s controversial ‘Project Nightingale,’ saying the search giant evaded requests for details on its far-reaching data tie-up with health giant Ascension.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CNN: How health officials and social media are teaming up to fight the coronavirus ‘infodemic’. “As health officials in a growing number of countries fight to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, they’re also working to stem a secondary issue that the World Health Organization is calling an ‘infodemic.'”

Search Engine Land: Fake and inaccurate reviews driving billions in ‘wasted’ consumer spending [Report]. “American consumers said they wasted $125, on average, in 2019 due to inaccurate reviews, a new report finds. If we extrapolate that across the adult population, as much as $25 billion in U.S. consumer spending has been wasted due to inaccurate (or fake) online reviews.” Good afternoon, Internet…

March 4, 2020 at 11:28PM
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Florida Man Headlines, 3D Cultural Heritage Models, Vaccination Web Archives, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, March 4, 2020

Florida Man Headlines, 3D Cultural Heritage Models, Vaccination Web Archives, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, March 4, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Towards Data Science: Explore a database of the most popular “Florida Man” headlines. “For almost a decade, ‘Florida Man’ has been a mainstay antihero of internet culture. Headlines like ‘Florida man too fat for jail’ and ‘Florida man steals dinosaur bones’ are easy fodder for meme-ification. In early 2013, ‘Florida Man’ was canonized on Twitter with @_FloridaMan and on Reddit with the r/FloridaMan subreddit. And after seven years of retweeting and upvoting, we can gather the most popular headlines to see what makes a ‘Florida Man’ headline successful.”

Smithsonian: You Can Now Download 1,700 Free 3-D Cultural Heritage Models. “During the first manned lunar landing mission in July 1969, Apollo 11’s crew lived in a command module dubbed the Columbia. Currently a priceless artifact in the National Air and Space Museum’s collections, the module was the only portion of the spacecraft to return to Earth. Now, thanks to a new open access initiative spearheaded by Sketchfab, the web’s largest platform for immersive 3-D content, anyone with an internet connection can ‘re-use, re-imagine and remix’ the vessel—as well as nearly 1,700 other historic artifacts—without limitation.”

Columbia University Libraries: Just Launched: Vaccination in Modern America: Misinformation vs. Public Health Advocacy Web Archive. “Developed by librarians within the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation, the archive preserves webpages representing the current state of public discourse and contrasting approaches to authority on vaccination in the United States, with a focus on sites that are both pro- and anti-vaccination. The purpose of this collection is to capture potentially ephemeral information about vaccination that could be used by health service researchers, information scientists, sociologists, and others to understand the motivations, practices, and outcomes of health information and information on the web.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bleeping Computer: SETI@home Search for Alien Life Project Shuts Down After 21 Years. “SETI@home has announced that they will no longer be distributing new work to clients starting on March 31st as they have enough data and want to focus on completing their back-end analysis of the data. SETI@home is a distributed computing project where volunteers contribute their CPU resources to analyze radio data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).”

British Library: 10 years of the Medieval Manuscripts Blog. “This month is an exciting anniversary for us: it has been ten years since the British Library’s award-winning Medieval Manuscripts Blog began back in February 2010. It’s a decade that has seen large-scale digitisation, blockbuster exhibitions, exciting acquisitions and fascinating discoveries, and the Blog has been our main way of letting you know about them all. We aim to be inspiring, informative and amusing and above all to share with you the manuscripts love. To celebrate our big anniversary, join us in looking back at some of the Blog’s highlights over the years.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: How to Add Branching in Microsoft Forms. “Microsoft Forms is a great tool for creating free, easy-to-use surveys, polls, quizzes, and questionnaires. It includes branching, which allows you to send users to different questions depending on their previous answers. Here’s how to add branching to your form.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CNET: US officials in contact with TikTok over political disinformation. “To take on the next generation of disinformation, the US government has started reaching out to TikTok, senior government officials said on Tuesday. The Chinese-owned platform has grown increasingly popular in the US among teens, and has frequently been used for sharing political memes.”

Core77: Social Adhesion: New Museum Dedicated to the History of Stickers. “To several generations’ worth of youth, stickers were the fastest way to prettify something, vandalize something or establish some attempt at identity by slapping favorite brands or subversive messages onto notebooks and laptops….To celebrate their stock-and-trade, StickerYou is launching the History of Stickers Museum at their home base in Toronto (which is the largest sticker store in the world), kicking it off with a permanent art exhibition called Stickers: RePEELed.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ABC News (Australia): Fears private details of Defence Force members compromised in database hack . “A highly sensitive military database containing the personal details of tens of thousands of Australian Defence Force (ADF) members was shut down for 10 days due to fears it had been hacked.”

BBC: Millions of websites face ‘insecure’ warnings. “Some well-known websites could stop functioning properly on Wednesday, 4 March, after a bug was found in the digital certificates used to secure them. The organisation that issues the certificates revealed that three million need to be immediately revoked.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

ZDNet: Coronavirus misinformation spreading fast: Fake news on COVID-19 shared far more than CDC, WHO reports. “The vast majority of coronavirus information shared across social media comes from fake news sites, according to Newsguard, a service that rates the credibility and transparency of web news content. Meanwhile, official sources like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) receive only a tiny fraction of the social engagement concerning COVID-19.”

Los Angeles Times: Column: COVID-19 could kill the for-profit science publishing model. That would be a good thing. “Of all the ways the current coronavirus crisis has upended commonplace routines — such as disrupting global supply chains and forcing workers to stay at home — one of the most positive is how it demonstrates the value of open access to scientific research. Ferreting out a silver lining in an event that has produced the infection of more than 90,000 individuals and taken the lives of more than 3,000 — and is certain to wreak further destruction before it is quelled — is a delicate matter.” Good morning, Internet…

March 4, 2020 at 06:23PM
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Tuesday, March 3, 2020

City Directories, WhatsApp, Google Cloud Next, More: Tuesday Evening ResearchBuzz, March 3, 2020

City Directories, WhatsApp, Google Cloud Next, More: Tuesday Evening ResearchBuzz, March 3, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

BusinessWire: MyHeritage Releases Massive Collection of Historical U.S. City Directories (PRESS RELEASE). “MyHeritage, the leading global service for discovering your past and empowering your future, announced today the publication of a huge collection of historical U.S. city directories that has been two years in the making. The collection was produced by MyHeritage from 25,000 public U.S. city directories published between 1860 and 1960. It comprises 545 million aggregated records that have been automatically consolidated from 1.3 billion records. This addition grows the total size of MyHeritage’s historical record database to 11.9 billion records.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Neowin: WhatsApp working on letting you password-protect Google Drive backups. “WhatsApp currently allows Android users to backup their chat data to Google Drive. However, while WhatsApp chats stored on your device are encrypted, the backups in Google Drive are not. WhatsApp is possibly looking to change that as hints of the company working on password-protecting Drive backups have surfaced. This will be a major win from a security standpoint as it will ensure that your WhatsApp backups stored in Google Drive are also encrypted.”

TechCrunch: Google cancels Cloud Next because of coronavirus, goes online-only. “Google today announced that it is canceling the physical part of Cloud Next, its cloud-focused event and its largest annual conference by far with around 30,000 attendees, over concerns around the current spread of COVID-19.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: Take Notes That Can Be Understood Two Weeks From Now. “A lot of us already know the value of carrying around some kind of note-taking device, whether it’s old-fashioned pen-and-paper or one of the bajillion smartphone apps designed to help us capture and organize our thoughts. But capturing those thoughts, in most cases, isn’t enough. A good note isn’t just a quick jot-down of an idea or an action item. Note-taking, when done well, provides both a record and a path forward.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Conversation: The census goes digital – 3 things to know. “The U.S. Census Bureau is hoping that most people who live in the U.S. will use the internet to answer census questions, rather than filling out a paper form or providing those answers to a census taker in person, at their home. That would be cheaper – a plus for a budget-strapped Census Bureau – and could help ensure maximum turnout and accuracy of the count. For instance, databases could keep track of which homes have not yet responded to the survey, allowing census officials to target mailings and in-person visits to those locations, without needing to spend time chasing households that have already responded.”

Medium: A journey into openness: an interview with Connecticut Digital Archive’s Mike Kemezis. “Michael Kemezis is the Repository Manager at the Homer Babbidge Library at the University of Connecticut. He is in charge of the Connecticut Digital Archive (CTDA) and he has been a key figure in CTDA’s adoption of Creative Commons and Rights Statements tools. In this interview, we explore the process that the CTDA followed to implement Rights Statements and Creative Commons tools, and gain insight on what still needs to be done to empower the sector.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Techdirt: Senator Thom Tillis Pushed Awful Patent Reform Idea Last Year; Now Looks To Top It With Awful Copyright Reform This Year. “Last year, Senator Tom Tillis was pushing a completely ridiculous patent reform bill that would have enabled massive patent trolling, by expanding what would count as patent-eligible subject matter. After his bill was released — and basically everyone who wasn’t a patent troll explained what a disaster it would be for American innovation, Tillis quietly let the matter drop. Given that experience, you might think that Tillis would think twice before stepping into the even more fraught arena of copyright reform. And yet, Tillis has been champing at the bit to change the DMCA to make Hollywood happier with it.”

The Verge: All The Ways Congress Is Taking On The Tech Industry. “In 2020, lawmakers have lots of ideas about how to regulate tech companies. After the 2016 presidential contest and years of investigations from intelligence experts, Congress woke up to the power Big Tech holds over democracy — whether it’s through collecting data or serving up political ads. For legislators, it feels like time to rein in that power. New bills are introduced every day, creating a sea of regulatory threats that’s difficult to keep straight as time goes on.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Boing Boing: Apple deleted files that I owned without telling me. It was inevitable, but I’m still pissed.. “This is, of course, the inevitable risk of buying any kind of digital media — you don’t actually own it. You’re technically just buying a license to access that media, which can be revoked at any time. Presumably, that’s what happened here (although Apple wouldn’t just say so directly). I’m certainly surprised that Epitaph — a famously independent punk rock record label — would revoke the license for one Menzingers album while leaving the rest of them intact on the iTunes Store. But music licensing is messy.” Good evening, Internet…

March 4, 2020 at 07:08AM
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Microstepping motor driver handles wide voltage range

Toshiba’s latest microstepping motor driver IC can drive motors with a wide operating voltage range of 2.5 V to 16 V.

source http://www.electronicproducts.com/Electromechanical_Components/Motors_and_Controllers/Microstepping_motor_driver_handles_wide_voltage_range.aspx