Monday, August 17, 2020

Aviation History, Pop-Up Art, Chrome OS, More: Monday Evening ResearchBuzz, August 17, 2020

Aviation History, Pop-Up Art, Chrome OS, More: Monday Evening ResearchBuzz, August 17, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Yorkshire Post: Log book shows pilot Amy Johnson loved taking plane for joyride. “Covering the years from when she was learning to fly until just before the outbreak of the Second World War, the log book includes the Hull-born pilot’s record-breaking flights and her historic solo flight to Australia in 1930. The original document can be seen at Sewerby Hall, near Bridlington, but it is the first time a complete transcript has been made available on the East Riding Museums website.”

Illinois News Bureau: Illinois researcher’s work among the pop-ups that invade your online day. “A new online digital art exhibition features the work of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign researcher and artist Ben Grosser. But instead of displaying on the exhibition’s website, the work of Grosser and six other artists will come to you. It will appear on your computer screen unannounced at intervals throughout the day – pop-up art, rather than pop-up ads.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Silicon Angle: Google launches new resource for Chrome OS developers. “Google LLC today published a new resource for developers interested in building apps for the company’s Chrome OS, the operating system that powers its ecosystem of Chromebook computers. In a blog post, Iein Valdez, head of Chrome OS developer relations, said Chromebooks, along with traditional laptops, are seeing a renaissance of sorts thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic that has forced people to spend more time indoors. With so much time on their hands, people are increasingly putting down their mobile phones in favor of larger screens.”

USEFUL STUFF

Oooh, I’m feeling this one. From Vice: A Beginner’s Guide to Getting an Education Without Going to College. “Self-directed learning might put you at a disadvantage as far as access to course materials, instruction, peers and community, and other resources associated with institutions. But you’re also at a distinct advantage you wouldn’t otherwise have: You’re able to learn at your own pace outside of the often inflexible and unaccommodating structure of traditional classes, and to learn about the things you’re interested in that might fall outside of a set curriculum within a program or major.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Untapped New York: New Augmented Reality App Recreates Historic NYC Buildings. “Every street in New York City is imbued with history. Each building and lot houses countless stories about the Big Apple of yesteryear and the team at Metro ARchive is developing an immersive experience that will bring those stories to life. Using augmented reality technology, the app will enable users to view historic New York City streets as they were centuries ago.”

CNET: Black Girls Code wants to diversify the tech industry. Here’s why it’s important. “Women have long been underrepresented in the tech industry. But women of color even more so: One study, by the National Center for Women in IT, reported that Black women in particular held only 3.1% of computing jobs in 2019. Kimberly Bryant is the founder of Black Girls Code, an organization that helps young women of color from underrepresented communities learn skills to help prepare them for STEM careers (science, technology, engineering and math).”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: U.S. Justice Department going ‘full tilt’ on tech antitrust probe: official. “The U.S. Justice Department is moving ‘full-tilt’ on its antitrust investigation of Alphabet Inc’s Google and other Big Tech platforms, the department’s second-ranking official told Reuters.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: Why Protest Tactics Spread Like Memes. “A video frame captured in Hong Kong in August 2019 shows a group of pro-democracy protesters, smoke pluming toward them, racing to place an orange traffic cone over a tear-gas canister. A video taken nine months later and 7,000 miles away, at a Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis, shows another small group using the same maneuver. Two moments, two continents, two cone placers, their postures nearly identical.”

PR Newswire: Clarivate Launches the Arabic Citation Index in Egypt (PRESS RELEASE). “Clarivate Plc (NYSE:CCC), a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation, has now launched the Arabic Citation Index™ (ARCI), the world’s first local language citation index for the Arabic world in Egypt. The ARCI is funded by the Egyptian government, and is available across the entire research community in Egypt. It is also open to journal submissions by editors of Arabic-language journals and will be open to researchers and organisations in all 22 nations of the Arab League by the end of 2020.”

Science Blog: ‘Endless Doomscroller’ Asks What Compels Us To Keep Scrolling Through Bad News. “The bad news seems endless. And as part of Ben Grosser’s latest project, it truly is. ‘The Endless Doomscroller’ is a constant stream of headlines, endlessly scrolling, that tell us ‘Cases Surging,’ ‘Panic Rising,’ ‘Global Crisis Looms’ and ‘Experts Say It’s Never Getting Better.’ Grosser – a professor in the School of Art and Design and the co-founder of the Critical Technology Studies Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign – describes the project as ‘an endless stream of doom, without all the specifics.'” Good evening, Internet…

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August 18, 2020 at 06:15AM
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Hong Kong Protest Posters, Historical Cookbooks, Online Scams, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 17, 2020

Hong Kong Protest Posters, Historical Cookbooks, Online Scams, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 17, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Found at the Hong Kong Free Press: Hong Kong Protest Movement Data Archive: Poster Search Engine. From the “Methodology and sourcing” section: “The Poster Search Engine allows for text inside the movement posters to be searchable. In total, 23,366 posters have been collected from two major movement publicity Telegram channels: 777文宣傳播稿件大合集 and 反送中文宣谷 covering the movement up until January 23, 2020 and January 18, 2020 respectively. The text inside the posters was OCR-extracted by Google Docs, tokenised, and indexed. OCR errors were manually corrected by a team of Cantonese-speaking human editors who understand the context.”

Atlas Obscura: A Database of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks Is Now Online, and You Can Help Improve It. “In July 2020, [Barbara Ketcham] Wheaton and a team of scholars, including two of her children, Joe Wheaton and Catherine Wheaton Saines, launched The Sifter. Part Wikipedia-style crowd-sourced database and part meticulous bibliography, The Sifter is a catalogue of more than a thousand years of European and U.S. cookbooks, from the medieval Latin De Re Culinaria, published in 800, to The Romance of Candy, a 1938 treatise on British sweets.”

USEFUL STUFF

CNET: How to avoid a spear-phishing attack. 4 tips to keep you safe from timeless scams. “Targeted attacks, also called spear-phishing, aim to trick you into handing over login credentials or downloading malicious software. That’s what happened at Twitter in July, where the company says hackers targeted employees on their phones. Spear-phishing attacks also often take place over email. Hackers usually send targets an ‘urgent’ message and include credible-sounding information specific to you, like something that could have come from your own tax return, social media account or credit card bill. These scams aim to override any red flags you might notice about the email with details that make the sender sound legitimate.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Ocula: How to Support Artists and Galleries Impacted by the Beirut Explosion. “Relief funds have been established to help artists, galleries, and others impacted by the 4 August blast that killed over 200 people and left more than 300,000 homeless in Beirut, Lebanon. Letitia Gallery director Gaia Foudolian was reportedly killed in the blasts, while Marfa Gallery, Galerie Tanit, Opera Gallery, and Sfeir-Semler Gallery were severely damaged. The blast also hit major institutions including the Sursock Museum, Ashkal Alwan, the Arab Image Foundation, and the Beirut Art Centre.”

British Film Archive: Brazil’s film archive is facing wipeout. “Indifference and hostility from successive governments have left the Cinemateca Brasileira, one of Latin America’s great film institutions, close to collapse. Director Walter Salles and other Brazilian film industry figures explain how this came about and what’s at stake.”

Salem Reporter: First executive director will guide deeper research, online museum for Oregon Black Pioneers. “For more than 20 years, a small group of volunteers has worked to find historical records of Black Oregonians scattered across the state. They’ve documented hundreds of lawyers, distance runners, miners and foresters in nearly every county in the state. But those records are mostly confined to filing cabinets in the Oregon Black Pioneers’ Salem office. ‘Right now, the only way to know anything about them is to reach out to us,’ said Zachary Stocks, the group’s executive director. Stocks is working to change that.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TMZ: YouTube Stars Charged With Swatting … After Bank Robbery Pranks. “YouTube stars Alan and Alex Stokes are in very real trouble for allegedly faking a series of bank robberies … they’ve each just been hit with a felony charge. Authorities say the twin brothers, who have 4.81 million subscribers on their Stokes Twins YouTube page, staged a pair of fake bank robberies in Irvine, CA back in October, one of which resulted in an unsuspecting Uber driver being held at gunpoint by police.”

Bangkok Post: Google slams Australia law forcing tech giants to pay for news. “US technology giant Google went on the offensive Monday against an Australian plan forcing digital giants to pay for news content, telling users their personal data would be ‘at risk’. Australia announced last month that firms like Google and Facebook would have to pay news media for content, after 18 months of negotiations ended without agreement.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

MIT News: Shrinking deep learning’s carbon footprint. “Some of the excitement over AI’s recent progress has shifted to alarm. In a study last year, researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst estimated that training a large deep-learning model produces 626,000 pounds of planet-warming carbon dioxide, equal to the lifetime emissions of five cars. As models grow bigger, their demand for computing is outpacing improvements in hardware efficiency. Chips specialized for neural-network processing, like GPUs (graphics processing units) and TPUs (tensor processing units), have offset the demand for more computing, but not by enough.”

NoCamels: National Autism Research Center of Israel Launches National Database. “The National Autism Research Center of Israel (NARCI) at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) announced it will launch a national database that brings together Israeli scientists with clinicians to study nine key questions about autism. Over 45 scientists and clinicians, leaders in the field in Israel, came together following two national autism research conferences at BGU to publish a shared paper describing the National Database in the prestigious Journal of Molecular Neuroscience.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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August 18, 2020 at 12:45AM
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Florida Government Spending, Massachusetts Law Enforcement, Occupy Movement, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, August 17, 2020

Florida Government Spending, Massachusetts Law Enforcement, Occupy Movement, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, August 17, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Northwest Florida Daily News: Does your community pass muster? New website ranks counties, cities in Florida. “A $117,000 website that grades and lets people compares cities and counties based on spending, crime and education was rolled out by the state House this week. House Speaker Jose Oliva, R-Miami Lakes, said in a press release the new Taxpayer Accountability & Transparency Project… ‘gives residents a useful tool to help them make educated judgments and hold their elected officials accountable.'”

NBC Boston: Mass. Launches New Website Tracking Crime, Policing Data. “Massachusetts has launched a new website that gathers data from all the state’s police departments into one place. The Massachusetts Crime Statistics site breaks down hundreds of local and state police agencies’ arrest numbers and offers details on the number and types of of crimes reported each year, going back as far as 1994.”

Phys .org: A decade after the Occupy movement, a new digital archive chronicles its history—and continuing influence. “Funded by the Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship in the Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western Reserve—and led by a scholar of the Occupy Movement—the Occupy Archive preserves more than 1,200 pages of documentation and offers access to more than 400 digitized materials that help bring to life the movement’s massive scale, grassroots flavor and enduring impact.”

KGMI: Eat Local First Washington Directory launched. “Advocacy groups Sustainable Connections and Eat Local First have launched the ‘Eat Local First Washington Directory’. The online database allows you to find local farmers statewide through a variety of sources.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BetaNews: Windows 10 0x800f0988, 0x800f081f or 0x800f08a errors? You are not alone. “The August security updates for Windows 10 released by Microsoft last week are causing issues for people running the November 2019 Update (version 1909) and the May 2020 Update (version 2004). Released last Patch Tuesday, 11 August, the KB4565351 and KB4566782 updates are causing various issues, ranging from failed installations, through error messages and BSoDs to problems with audio.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Virginia Tech Daily: Mellon Foundation grant supports development of a plan for using artificial intelligence to plumb the National Archives. “The National Archives and Records Administration, the official recordkeeper of the United States, provides digital access to more than 110 million digital records, a number that continues to grow exponentially…. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Virginia Tech a planning grant to work with the National Archives and a number of universities nationwide to understand the opportunity for using artificial intelligence to search digital records.”

New York Times: After Atomic Bombings, These Photographers Worked Under Mushroom Clouds. “The idea of publishing in the United States images from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings was first proposed to the University of Texas at Austin in 2017 by the Anti-Nuclear Photographers’ Movement of Japan, one of the organizations that have worked for decades to collect and preserve such photographs. The group was seeking an American publisher because it worried about rising tensions enveloping North Korea, Japan and the United States at the time, and it wanted to broadcast its antinuclear message to a wider audience. Through an intermediary, it approached the Texas university’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, whose collection includes photographs of the Vietnam War by the American photojournalist Eddie Adams….The center’s director, Don Carleton, said that while he initially worried that the Japanese group might use the project to ‘assign war guilt,’ it turned out that the two sides had a simple goal in common: educating the public about the horrors of nuclear war. The association eventually agreed to make its photos available as a digital archive at the university, starting in 2021.” Warning: the pictures are horrifying.

NBC News: Big Tech met with govt to discuss how to handle election results. “Nine major U.S. tech companies met with federal government officials Wednesday to discuss how to handle misinformation during this month’s political conventions and election results this fall.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Techdirt: Las Vegas Police Are Running Lots Of Low Quality Images Through Their Facial Recognition System. “Even when facial recognition software works well, it still performs pretty poorly. When algorithms aren’t generating false positives, they’re acting on the biases programmed into them, making it far more likely for minorities to be misidentified by the software. The better the image quality, the better the search results. The use of a low-quality image pulled from a store security camera resulted in the arrest of the wrong person in Detroit, Michigan. The use of another image with the same software — one that didn’t show the distinctive arm tattoos of the non-perp hauled in by Detroit police — resulted in another bogus arrest by the same department.”

CTV: Canadian AI-powered legal response tool helps guide victims of harassment. “The Botler For Citizens web app is a free service that will confidentially ask users trauma-informed questions based on any incident they have experienced. Using artificial intelligence, the software then analyzes the details of the incident to identify if any misconduct had occurred. Based on the findings, the user is then provided with a breakdown of relevant information to help them understand their rights and the potential legal options at their disposal.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Colorado Boulder: Twitter users may have changed their behavior after contact with Russian trolls. “It’s the latest research to dig into the affairs of the Russian government-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA). For more than two years, according to an investigation by the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, this organization set out to undermine the U.S. electoral process—through a campaign of posting false information and racist memes to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. The new CU Boulder findings, however, are some of the first to examine the behavior of a broad swath of Twitter users who had contact with the IRA.”

CNET RoadShow: Russian company Yandex sets up self-driving car testing in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “Yandex is a regular attendee of CES in Las Vegas, and now, according an announcement… by the company, it’s getting even more of a foothold in the US. Specifically, it’s opening a facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Why Michigan? Unlike cities such as Moscow and Tel Aviv, where Yandex also tests, Michigan allows self-driving cars to operate without an engineer behind the wheel, and Yandex is already taking advantage of that.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!





August 17, 2020 at 05:01PM
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Sunday, August 16, 2020

Sunday CoronaBuzz, August 16, 2020: 21 pointers to new resources, useful stuff, research news, and more.

Sunday CoronaBuzz, August 16, 2020: 21 pointers to new resources, useful stuff, research news, and more.
By ResearchBuzz

“Leftovers” edition with old news. Next ones will be larger. Please wear a mask. Wash your hands. Stay at home if you can. Please be careful. I love you.

NEW RESOURCES – MEDICAL/HEALTH

The Tribune: Pair Of Businessmen Launch Website To Track Pandemic. “TWO local businessmen launched a new website this week to allow Bahamians to easily track the COVID-19 pandemic through customisable graphs.Seeing a need for comprehensive and easily-understood data on the virus, Ash Henderson and Ben Jamieson developed the website… to provide an interactive look at the virus throughout the country.”

RTE: IEA launches database of companies producing PPE. “The Irish Exporters Association has launched a database of companies producing personal protective equipment. The initiative is led by the Chair of the IEA’s Western Regional Network Group, Dr John Carr.”

NEW RESOURCES – STATE-SPECIFIC

Times Telegram: Database: NY bars that have cited for COVID-19 violations. “New York has stepped up its enforcement at bars and restaurants that have flouted the state’s executive orders related to COVID-19 safety precautions. The state on [July 28] suspended liquor licenses for 12 New York City bars, and last weekend a multi-agency task force, led by State Police and the Liquor Authority, did 1,300 compliance checks, finding violations at 132 establishments.”

FACT CHECKS / MISINFORMATION

Global Voices: Nigerians counteract COVID-19 denialism with social media campaigns. “Nigerians are reducing the effect of COVID-19 denial narratives with powerful online Twitter campaigns such as #MyCOVID19NaijaStory and #COVIDStopswithMe. These counter-narratives aim to prove that the deadly coronavirus is not a hoax and more importantly, to encourage people to adopt good public health behaviours to mitigate its spread. As of July 29, Nigeria had recorded 41,804 confirmed COVID-19 cases,18,764 recoveries and 868 deaths.”

SOCIETAL IMPACT

New York Times: The Strange Lives of Objects in the Coronavirus Era. “A set of new objects has emerged in the last few months to address the new reality of illness, lockdown, social distancing and social protest. Some of these objects are wacky and unrealized — speculative concepts that may never see the light of day. Others, like cocktails-in-a-bag, thermometers and all manner of partitions, are already circulating widely. And some aren’t new at all: familiar household items like bottles of Lysol and rolls of toilet paper, which have taken on new meaning and importance because of scarcity or sudden unusual needs.”

BUSINESS / CORPORATIONS

BBC: Coronavirus: Uber customer activity falls sharply. “The number of customers active on Uber’s apps has dropped nearly in half since last year as the pandemic devastates demand for the company’s taxi services. The ride-hailing giant said it had an average of 55 million customers each month in the April-June period, down from 99 million last year.”

GOVERNMENT

New Zealand Herald: Covid 19 coronavirus: Medics testing returnees struggled with poor information, new database to ‘streamline’ process. “Teams swabbing people in quarantine and managed isolation hotels have at times struggled with incorrect information including names, authorities admit – but a new database is expected to streamline the border defence.”

BBC: Coronavirus: Face covering use expanded in England and Scotland. “Face coverings have become mandatory in more indoor settings in England and Scotland following a recent spike in coronavirus cases. Places where coverings must now be worn in both countries include museums, places of worship and aquariums. Other new settings in England include cinemas and funeral homes, and in Scotland, banks and beauty salons.”

EDUCATION

AZFamily: There is a new way of teaching on the Navajo Nation amid COVID-19. “On the Navajo Nation teachers and students are preparing for an unusual school year, given COVID-19. Educators like sixth-grade teacher, Priscilla Black, are thinking outside-of-the-box when it comes to education this academic year.”

New York Times: A School Reopens, and the Coronavirus Creeps In. “One of the first school districts in the country to reopen its doors during the coronavirus pandemic did not even make it a day before being forced to grapple with the issue facing every system actively trying to get students into classrooms: What happens when someone comes to school infected?”

Chicago Sun-Times: ‘Devastated’ Chicago college students opt to stay home after last-minute shifts to all online classes, strict COVID-19 restrictions. “Eli Stone, of Lake View, was ready for the ‘normal college experience’ and set to start his freshman year this fall at Brandeis University outside Boston. But when Brandeis released its reopening plans, Stone, 18, said he couldn’t imagine finding new friends or developing new relationships when he was living in a single dorm and taking all his classes online. So earlier this summer, he deferred his enrollment for at least a semester.”

Slate: This Year Will Be a Nightmare for Marginalized Students. “The anxiety for teachers right now is palpable. As I trudge through this long Sunday night that is August, and I recall the intense challenges of last spring, I’ve found myself worried. I know that this fall, our educational system needs to do many things differently in order to truly serve our students. If we can’t ‘reimagine’ our system, many of our already marginalized students will only fall farther behind.”

HEALTH

Global News: The faster a country required masks, the fewer coronavirus deaths it had: study. “Some countries have been devastated by the novel coronavirus, and others have escaped lightly. Why the extreme differences? The main one is that countries that quickly resorted to widespread mask-wearing had far lower death rates and shorter outbreaks, a new study argues.”

OUTBREAKS

BBC: Coronavirus Vietnam: The mysterious resurgence of Covid-19. “The communist country acted fast and decisively where other nations faltered, closing its borders to almost all travellers except returning citizens as early as March. It quarantined and tested anyone who entered the country in government facilities, and conducted widespread contact-tracing and testing nationwide. So what went wrong?”

TECHNOLOGY

NBC News: Latinos rely more on social media as a coronavirus lifeline, Nielsen report finds. “Latinos are using social media, mobile apps and other digital platforms at higher rates than the general U.S. population amid social distancing guidelines during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report released Thursday by Nielsen.”

NBC Chicago: Chicago Will Check Social Media to Help Enforce Travel Order: CDPH Commissioner. “Chicago health officials could check your social media if they believe you may have violated the city’s travel order. The city’s top public health official said Tuesday that social media could be used as evidence to help enforce a quarantine requirement for anyone visiting or returning to the city from a list of states seeing a rise in coronavirus cases.”

RESEARCH

The Kingston Whig-Standard: Queen’s researcher to build COVID-19 patient tracking database. “To remedy the lapses in COVID-19 clinical data, a researcher at Queen’s University is building a provincial database to track patients in hospital emergency departments. Dr. Steven Brooks, a clinician-scientist at Kingston Health Sciences Centre and emergency physician in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Queen’s, has received $1.2 million in funding through the Ontario COVID-19 Rapid Research Fund for the project.”

FUNNY

BBC: Fawlty Towers John Cleese backs Torbay social distancing plea. “Fawlty Towers legend John Cleese has joined in a call for social distancing in the seaside town where the comedy series was set. Cleese tweeted: ‘Going forward if I see you too close to one another I shall lay down in-between. Social distance!’ The tweet by Cleese who played hapless hotelier Basil Fawlty in the TV comedy, added ‘2 metres = 1 Basil Fawlty’.”

CRIME / SECURITY / LEGAL

WPLG: Florida man spit at boy who refused to remove his mask, police say. “A Florida man has been arrested after police say he confronted a child wearing a mask at a restaurant and spit in his face when the boy refused to take it off. Treasure Island police say 47-year-old Jason Copenhaver approached the child’s table Sunday and asked the boy to remove his mask.”

POLITICS

Slate: No Relief in Sight. “It’s been a week since the CARES Act’s enhanced unemployment benefits expired, and two weeks since its eviction moratorium expired. The Paycheck Protection Program, designed to keep small businesses afloat and their employees on board, expires Saturday. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, remains in the double-digits. These deadlines did not sneak up on anyone. The House had passed its sequel to the CARES Act, the $3.4 trillion HEROES Act, in May. But Senate Republicans took a wait-and-see approach until the last minute and, when McConnell finally released his counteroffer, half of his own conference instantly rejected it. With McConnell throwing his hands in the air, the business of propping up the American economy for another few months was left to negotiations between Democratic leaders and Trump’s White House envoys. It’s been a train wreck. Meanwhile, the evictions are set to begin.”

Vanity Fair: How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air”. “Six months into the pandemic, the United States continues to suffer the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the developed world. Considerable blame belongs to a federal response that offloaded responsibility for the crucial task of testing to the states. The irony is that, after assembling the team that came up with an aggressive and ambitious national testing plan, Kushner then appears to have decided, for reasons that remain murky, to scrap its proposal. Today, as governors and mayors scramble to stamp out epidemics plaguing their populations, philanthropists at the Rockefeller Foundation are working to fill the void and organize enough testing to bring the nationwide epidemic under control.”

CoronaBuzz is brought to you by ResearchBuzz. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment, send resource suggestions, or tag @buzz_corona on Twitter. Thanks!







August 17, 2020 at 01:43AM
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Niagara Frontier Radio Reading Service, Michigan Invasive Plants, Chrome, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, August 16, 2020

Niagara Frontier Radio Reading Service, Michigan Invasive Plants, Chrome, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, August 16, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Niagara Gazette: Niagara Frontier Radio Reading Service goes online. “In 1987, Bob Sikorkski founded the Niagara Frontier Radio Reading Service. It’s designed to give people who are blind, have low vision or have other print disabilities, the ability to hear books as well as local publications. On July 31, they took, their service online for streaming and podcasting. Previously, listeners would have to get a special radio to be able to listen in.” I checked in on the stream. It is not location-restricted and is free to listen to.

Click on Detroit: New website helps identify woody invasive plants in Michigan. “A new website can help you identify potentially invasive plants in your backyard in Michigan. [The site], developed by the Woody Invasives of the Great Lakes Collaborative, contains a wealth of information about how to distinguish woody invasive species from similar beneficial plants, an interactive map showing how these species are regulated by Great Lakes jurisdictions, detailed management approaches and noninvasive woody plant ideas for gardeners and landscape designers.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Digital Trends: Google’s new Chrome add-on gives you a rundown of all the ads on a webpage. “Nearly every website today hides underneath dozens of entities and trackers that monitor your activities in the background. Google wants to bring more transparency to the experience and it’s doing so with a new Chrome add-on appropriately called Ads Transparency Spotlight.”

CNET: Facebook announces internet nostalgia app E.gg. “A weird new Facebook app is launching, and it’s based on bringing back the internet of the ’90s. E.gg is the latest creation from Facebook’s experimental app team New Product Experimentation and is aimed at ‘recapturing that atmosphere’ of the early web.” Because of all the things we left behind, we really need to recapture blinking UNDER CONSTRUCTION gifs and “Punch the Monkey” banner ads.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Slate: What Indians Lost When Their Government Banned TikTok. “Despite its myriad flaws, TikTok’s dominance of Indian social media was a nearly unalloyed good for many of the less well-off people who enjoyed it. In a highly stratified society, a video app with a notoriously addictive algorithm happened to cut across castes, faiths, and other gulfs, all so Indians could watch one another’s lip-syncs and skits. When the government pulled the plug—the app disappeared from the Apple and Google app stores, and users in the country can no longer access any videos—it deprived users of entertainment, a budding alternative media source, and in many cases income.”

Tech Transparency Project: Instagram’s Hashtag Blocking Favors Trump, Hurts Biden. “When a person searches Instagram for a hashtag and clicks on it, the platform has automatically generated “related hashtags” pointing users to other relevant content. TTP examined related hashtags for 20 popular terms associated with the Trump and Biden campaigns and found starkly different treatment of the two candidates. Instagram blocked the display of related hashtags on all 10 of the Trump hashtags reviewed, including #donaldtrump, #trump and #trump2020. That means users were not directed to other content, including anything negative or critical about the president. But for all 10 similar Biden hashtags, Instagram did display related hashtags, which at times steered users to insults and disinformation about the former vice president, with phrases like #creepyjoebiden, #joebidenpedophile and #joebidenisaracist.”

TNW: Mike Pompeo wants to build the US a ‘clean’ internet free of Chinese tech. “With the Clean Carrier policy, Pompeo wants to keep Chinese network companies out of the US networks. Clean Store and Clean Apps initiative signal towards booting out untrustworthy and potentially dangerous apps from phones of folks in the US. Clean Cloud is aimed towards keeping the cloud data out of reach from the Chinese companies. And finally, Clean Cable policy is to ensure that China is not spying on the country by sabotaging undersea cables.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BetaNews: Windows 10 has a dangerous print spooler bug, and there is no fix. “An unpatched vulnerability in the Windows Print Spooler exists that could be exploited by an attacker to run malicious software with elevated system privileges. The issue affects Windows 7, Windows 8.x, Windows 10 as well as versions of Windows Server. It is being tracked as CVE-2020-1048 and CVE-2020-1337 and has a severity rating of ‘Important’.”

Mashable: Google smart speakers secretly updated to listen for more than wake words. “The company admitted Monday, following a report by Protocol, that it had updated an unspecified number of Google Assistant-enabled devices to respond to auditory cues beyond the user-specified wake phrase. Google told Protocol this was a mistake that was quickly fixed, but did not appear to address the larger privacy concerns that such a mistake signifies. After all, how are users supposed to trust a live microphone in their home if someone can remotely update it to be even more invasive without their knowledge?”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TechRepublic: AI-powered tool aims to help reduce bias and racially charged language on websites. “Website accessibility tech provider UserWay has released an AI-powered tool designed to help organizations ensure their websites are free from discriminatory, biased, and racially charged language. The tool, Content Moderator, flags content for review, and nothing is deleted or removed without approval from site administrators, according to UserWay.”

Illinois News Bureau: Journalists’ Twitter use shows them talking within smaller bubbles . “Journalists in Washington, D.C., have long been accused of living in a ‘Beltway bubble,’ isolated from the broader public, talking too much to each other. Their interactions on Twitter, however, show them congregating in even smaller ‘microbubbles,’ says a recent study. The journalists within each communicate more among themselves than with journalists outside the group.”

The Verge: A college student used GPT-3 to write fake blog posts and ended up at the top of Hacker News. “College student Liam Porr used the language-generating AI tool GPT-3 to produce a fake blog post that recently landed in the No. 1 spot on Hacker News, MIT Technology Review reported. Porr was trying to demonstrate that the content produced by GPT-3 could fool people into believing it was written by a human. And, he told MIT Technology Review, ‘it was super easy, actually, which was the scary part.'” Good afternoon, Internet…

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August 17, 2020 at 01:41AM
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Wednesday, August 12, 2020

Having a real hard time right now

Having a real hard time right now
By ResearchBuzz

Try to be back next week. Much love.





August 13, 2020 at 03:57AM
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Saturday, August 8, 2020

Haiti Educational NGOs, Paper-Mâché Horses, VoteByMail, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, August 8, 2020

Haiti Educational NGOs, Paper-Mâché Horses, VoteByMail, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, August 8, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Thanks very much to Win Flint for letting me know about her new site, and I’m sorry it had to sit in the queue for almost a week. It’s called Educational NGOs in Haiti. From the front page: “This website is for non-governmental (NGO) schools in Haiti to share resources and make connections. Given the nature of the transportation and communications infrastructure in Haiti this can be difficult. It is also a place for sharing evidence-based research that can be useful in improving the educational operation of schools in Haiti.”

The Calvert Journal: Watch the birdie: how a papier-mâché horse in Tbilisi Zoo grew into a popular photo studio. “I was born in Tbilisi in the 1980s, back when the country was still a part of the Soviet Union. Visiting the zoo was a special event for me: it meant that I would get a Plombir ice cream, a cup of sparkling gazirovka (a non-alcoholic sparkling beverage), and a ride on an amusement ride adjacent to the premises. But the highlight of the day would always be getting the chance to sit on the papier-mâché horse that looked like it had galloped from a merry-go-round ride. I remember being helped onto the horse, filled with anticipation and excitement at having my photo taken, but also overcome with shyness in front of the photographer.” The author is working with the descendants of the photographer to crowdsource a collection of these images. This essay is so good. Grab a tissue and read it.

The Verge: VoteByMail makes it easier to request a mail-in ballot ahead of the election. “Registering to vote by mail can be a tricky process that varies depending on the state you reside in. You’ll often need to find the right website, the right form, fill in the correct info, and find the right election official to submit the paperwork. VoteByMail streamlines the process by finding your local election official, assembling some basic information needed to request a ballot, and sending the whole thing off for you. You should still check with your local board of elections if you do not receive a mail-in ballot, to ensure you can vote when election season arrives.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Revelstoke Review: Revelstoke’s forestry museum launches podcasts and new website. “Gary Xie started working for the [BC Interior Forestry Museum] in mid-May from his home in Surrey, Ont. He has never seen the museum and never been to Revelstoke. He was supposed to move to Revelstoke at the half-way point of his contract, however, he had trouble finding safe, single-space accommodation. However Xie continued to work remotely, updating the museums website and eventually, creating a podcast for the museum, featuring professionals in the local forestry industry.”

ProPublica: After a Year of Investigation, the Border Patrol Has Little to Say About Agents’ Misogynistic and Racist Facebook Group. “The Border Patrol vowed a full accounting after ProPublica revealed hateful posts in the private Facebook group. Now congressional investigators say the agency is blocking them and revealing little about its internal investigation.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CNN: Facebook bans ads from pro-Trump PAC. “Facebook announced Thursday it was banning ads from The Committee to Defend the President, a pro-Trump super PAC. Facebook did not say how long the ban would last.”

Hyde Park Herald: Museum of Science and Industry wins grant to digitize 7,000 artifacts. “The Museum of Science and Industry (MSI), 5700 S. Lake Shore Drive, has received a grant $225,782 to digitize a major part of its collection of more than 35,000 artifacts. The funds will pay for the MSI to create a website that will give free public access to 7,000 artifacts for the first time.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Deutsche Welle: Brazil top court sets precedent by banning global access to social media accounts. “Once again, Facebook and Twitter are finding themselves caught in the crossfire as Brazil’s top court goes after suspected purveyors of fake news. Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered both platforms to block accounts spreading illegal content. The fact that national Brazilian judges are having international social media accounts blocked is a novelty and could have global repercussions.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Texas at San Antonio: UTSA experts find bias in disease-tracking algorithms that analyze social media. “Social media has become the latest method to monitor the spread of diseases such as influenza or coronavirus. However, machine learning algorithms used to train and classify tweets have an inherent bias because they do not account for how minority groups potentially communicate health information.”

KTSP: New website tracks broadband access and internet speed across Minnesota. “The Minnesota Rural Broadband Coalition is asking people to take the speed test on their website. Participants give their address or a nearby location data. The website then measures the download and upload speeds of the internet connection. The results are then recorded and displayed on a map. Green dots indicate a fast connection; red dots equal a slow connection.”

ABC News (Australia): Australia needs a soil database to prepare for future fires, scientists say. “The academics recently wrote a paper saying last summer’s bushfires had ravaged soils, damaging agricultural and environmental recovery.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!





August 8, 2020 at 09:28PM
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