New researches

Saturday, August 29, 2020

Filipino Music Artifacts, Railroad Retirement Board, Google Assistant, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, August 29, 2020

Filipino Music Artifacts, Railroad Retirement Board, Google Assistant, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, August 29, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

NME: The OPM Archive Foundation unveils online archive of digitised Filipino music artifacts. “The OPM Archive Foundation has unveiled an online archive collecting digitised artifacts of Filipino music, now open for virtual viewing. Earlier this week (August 26), the OPM Archive Foundation announced the digital archive, now open for online viewing and for donations of memorabilia.”

GPO: GPO Makes Available 11,000 Railroad Retirement Board Publications . “The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) is partnering with the Railroad Retirement Board (RRB) to make more than 11,000 RRB Board Coverage Decisions and Legal Opinions available on GPO’s govinfo, the one-stop site to authentic, published Government information. The indexed and searchable collection covers final agency decisions and agency guidance documents from 1936–2019. The Board Coverage Decisions available are final agency decisions that determine employer and employee status under the Railroad Retirement Act and the Railroad Unemployment Insurance Act.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Neowin: Google Assistant now lets you donate directly to nonprofit organizations. “Google today added a new feature to Assistant that allows you to make donations to various causes. The Center for Policing Equity is the first nonprofit organization to benefit from the new feature. The group promotes police transparency, equity, and accountability through research. To donate to them, simply launch Google Assistant and say ‘Donate to racial justice’.” I hope this is well locked down, because it seems open to shenanigans.

LiveMint: Google, Facebook dump Hong Kong cable after US security alarm. “Google and Facebook Inc. dropped plans for an undersea cable between the U.S. and Hong Kong after the Trump administration said Beijing might use the link to collect information on Americans. But the companies quickly submitted a revised proposal that includes links to Taiwan and the Philippines, as envisioned in the application that was withdrawn on Thursday.”

Digital Library of Georgia: GHN Forthcoming Newspapers – Fall 2020. “Over the next year, the Digital Library of Georgia will be adding a variety of new newspaper titles to the Georgia Historic Newspapers (GHN) website (https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/). Below is a list of newspapers titles currently slated to be added to GHN in Fall 2020/Winter 2021.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BuzzFeed News: Facebook Employees Are Outraged At Mark Zuckerberg’s Explanations Of How It Handled The Kenosha Violence. “Frustrated Facebook employees slammed CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday during a companywide meeting, questioning his leadership and decision-making, following a week in which the platform promoted violent conspiracy theories and gave safe harbor to militia groups. The billionaire chief executive was speaking via webcast at the company’s weekly all-hands meeting, attempting to address questions about violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and the QAnon conspiracy that has proliferated across Facebook.”

NBC News: Viral pro-Trump tweets came from fake African American spam accounts, Twitter says. “Twitter has taken action to stop a spam operation that pushed messages from fake accounts about Black people abandoning the Democratic Party. The company removed two fake accounts and deleted the account of a San Diego man who spammed the platform, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed Wednesday.”

Balkan Insight: Journalism, Activism Combine to Preserve Riches of Ancient Romanian Port. “In early July, when a court in Romania declared null and void the 2003 sale of a century-old palace on the country’s Black Sea coast, it marked a milestone in a journalistic fight to preserve the rich cultural heritage of the port of Constanta. Built in the early 1920s at the behest of Queen Mary of Romania, the Royal Palace of Mamaia became a nightclub and eventually a depository for mouldy mattresses after the state sold it to a local businessman 17 years ago. But the battle to save it from ruin began only in 2014, with the investigative reporting and public campaigning of Info Sud-Est, an online publication on Constanta affairs with a rare focus on the preservation of the city’s cultural heritage.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BNN Bloomberg: U.S. Google Monopoly Case Could Hit Supreme Court AmEx Hurdle. “As the Justice Department prepares to file a landmark antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc.’s Google, a 2018 Supreme Court decision in favor of American Express Co. could complicate matters.”

Motherboard: CBP Now Has a Massive Searchable Database for Devices Seized at the Border. “Every year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents seize tens of thousands of cell phones, laptops, and other devices from travelers at or near the country’s borders, often without charging them with a specific crime. Those seizures give the agency access to massive amounts of highly personal information—data that CBP will now upload to a searchable, agency-wide surveillance database and maintain for up to 75 years, according to a privacy assessment recently published by the agency.”

NonDoc (Oklahoma): Ambiguous social media rule leaves legislators in an ethical limbo. “State law holds strict rules preventing elected officials from using public resources for campaigning. Traditionally, this has meant that officeholders cannot solicit or receive donations in state-owned buildings or use state-owned phones or email accounts to conduct campaign business. When it comes to social media, however, the rules are not as well established, and many incumbents often stray into ethically ambiguous territory by using social media both to communicate with their constituents and to promote issues and campaigns.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Manila Bulletin: Nat’l museum unveils rare 14th century Chinese bowl in virtual series. “The National Museum of the Philippines (NMP) recently shared to the public a 14th century bowl found in an underwater heritage site located at the southern tip of Palawan as part of its ‘Museum From Home’ series.” Good morning, Internet…

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August 29, 2020 at 05:14PM
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Friday, August 28, 2020

Curriculum Library for Employee Ownership, SPIE Optics + Photonics Digital Forum, Facebook, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 28, 2020

Curriculum Library for Employee Ownership, SPIE Optics + Photonics Digital Forum, Facebook, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 28, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Business Wire: Teaching Our Way to a More Equitable Economy (PRESS RELEASE). “Rutgers University today unveiled a major redesign of the world’s only online library dedicated to employee share ownership, a business model that can reduce wealth inequality in America and help save jobs during the COVID-19 recession. The newly relaunched Curriculum Library for Employee Ownership (CLEO) features more than 600 resources designed to help college professors teach about employee share ownership in their classes. It is also a valuable resource for company leaders, researchers, and the public.”

Optics .org: SPIE Optics + Photonics Digital Forum opens with free access to 2,000 talks. “The online conference, which runs through Friday, 28 August, after which presentations will continue to be accessible via the website, includes over 1,200 on-demand technical presentations, 300 posters, and 900 manuscripts across three tracks: Nanoscience and Engineering Applications, Organic Photonics and Electronics, and Optical Engineering and Applications.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Reuters: Exclusive: Facebook says Apple rejected its attempt to tell users about App Store fees. “Facebook Inc on Thursday told Reuters that Apple Inc rejected its attempt to tell users the iPhone maker would take a 30% cut of sales in a new online events feature, forcing Facebook to remove the message to get the tool to users.”

USEFUL STUFF

Oprah Magazine: 117 Black-Owned Bookstores in America That Amplify the Best in Literature. “From online book boutique Sistah Scifi—a shop that strictly sells Afrofuturism novels—to children’s bookstore The Listening Tree in Decatur, Georgia, there are plenty of diverse Black-owned bookstores you can safely shop at right now, and always, no matter how much (or little) the nation is focused on a longtime continuing struggle.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Verge: Facebook chose not to act on militia complaints before Kenosha shooting. “In the wake of an apparent double murder Tuesday night in Kenosha, Facebook has faced a wave of scrutiny over posts by a self-proclaimed militia group called Kenosha Guard, which issued a ‘call to arms’ to in advance of the protest. Facebook took down Kenosha Guard’s Facebook page Wednesday morning, identifying the posts as violating community standards. But while the accounts were ultimately removed, new evidence suggests the platform had ample warning about the account before the shooting brought the group to prominence.”

Deutsche Welle: TikTok Holocaust trend ‘harmful,’ says Auschwitz museum. “The Auschwitz-Birkenau museum and memorial spoke out against a new trend on social media platform TikTok where users role-play as holocaust victims, in a statement released on Wednesday. ‘The “victims” trend on TikTok can be hurtful and offensive,’ said the museum at the site of the former Nazi-German death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in a statement, adding that some of the videos trivialized history.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

U.S. Department of Justice: District Court Enters Permanent Injunction Shutting Down Telecom Carriers Who Facilitated Hundreds of Millions of Fraudulent Robocalls to Consumers in The United States. “As alleged in a civil complaint filed earlier this year in United States v. Nicholas Palumbo, et al., spouses Nicholas and Natasha Palumbo of Scottsdale, Arizona, and their companies, Ecommerce National LLC d/b/a TollFreeDeals.com and SIP Retail d/b/a sipretail.com, received millions of fraudulent internet-based calls every day from other entities, often located abroad. Those calls were then transmitted, initially to other carriers within the United States and ultimately, to the phones of individuals. The defendants are alleged to have knowingly allowed numerous foreign-based individuals and entities to transmit fraudulent government- and business-imposter robocalls through defendants’ network and on to victims in the United States.”

C4ISRNET: Marines want tool to identify fake social media accounts posing as senior personnel. “The U.S. Marine Corps wants a commercial off-the-shelf tool to identify social media accounts that pose a threat to personnel and the Marines Corps Enterprise Network. According to a request for quotation released Aug. 20, the goal of the effort is to identify ‘evil twin’ social media accounts, or accounts pretending to be key personnel, general officers and senior executive service employees. The RFQ claimed these fake accounts are sending malicious links to service members, as well as extorting information and money while posing as key members of the Corps.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New Atlas: World-first database catalogs 1,000s of viruses in our gut microbiome. “Researchers from Ohio State University have created the first catalog of viral populations known to inhabit the human gut. Called the Gut Virome Database, the study suggests each person’s gut viral population is as unique as their fingerprints.”

Stevens Institute of Technology: A.I. Tool Promises Faster, More Accurate Alzheimer’s Diagnosis. “By detecting subtle differences in the way that Alzheimer’s sufferers use language, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have developed an A.I. algorithm that promises to accurately diagnose Alzheimer’s without the need for expensive scans or in-person testing. The software not only can diagnose Alzheimer’s, at negligible cost, with more than 95 percent accuracy, but is also capable of explaining its conclusions, allowing physicians to double check the accuracy of its diagnosis.” Good afternoon, Internet…

August 29, 2020 at 12:45AM
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Skid Row, IKEA Catalogs, Arolsen Archives, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, August 28, 2020

Skid Row, IKEA Catalogs, Arolsen Archives, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, August 28, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Hyperallergic: A “People’s History” of Los Angeles’s Skid Row. “Plans for an online version of the physical archive at LAPD’s Skid Row History Museum & Archives (SRHMA) date back to the museum’s opening in 2014. LAPD founder and artistic director John Malpede explained by email that the original plan was to ‘include everything we have in our Skid Row archive,’ which contains documentation from LAPD’s performance history, including scripts, rehearsal notes, and videos dating back to its inception, as well as historical materials such as city planning documents related to the Skid Row neighborhood.”

Bloomberg CityLab: Get Lost in 70 Years of Old IKEA Catalogs. “As millions of people around the world become intimately familiar with their home decor, the Swedish furniture giant IKEA is offering an online resource to fuel your redecoration reveries: In honor of the the 70th anniversary of the company’s first catalog, IKEA just dropped digital versions of every catalog on its museum website. If your idea of a good time is wandering the labyrinth of your local IKEA showroom, trying out sectionals in a pretend living room, this digital trove of modular furniture makes an excellent and Covid-safe alternative distraction — and a fascinating time capsule of Scandinavian design trends.”

Business Wire: Ancestry® Completes the Arolsen Archives Collection with 19 Million Holocaust Records (PRESS RELEASE). “Ancestry®, the global leader in family history and consumer genomics, has completed a significant philanthropic initiative to digitize and make searchable millions of Holocaust and Nazi persecution-related records. Building on its commitment to preserve at risk history, there are now more than 19 million Holocaust records available globally, for free and in perpetuity as part of the Arolsen Archives Collection. Ancestry also announced today a new partnership with USC Shoah Foundation to publish an index to nearly 50,000 Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies that contain information on more than 600,000 additional relatives and other individuals found in survivor questionnaires.”

Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University: New Online Tool Tracks Oil and Gas Transformation. “To help explain how the oil and gas sector is transforming, the many challenges the industry is facing, and the intersecting factors that will shape its role in the energy transition, the Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) partnered with the World Economic Forum on the Oil and Gas Transformation Map, an interactive tool for users to explore and make sense of the complex and interlinked forces that will dictate the future of the industry.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNN: Walmart is joining Microsoft in the pursuit of TikTok. “Walmart is partnering with Microsoft in an attempt to buy TikTok, as the popular yet embattled short-form video app seeks a US buyer amid intense political scrutiny. The retail giant told CNN Business Thursday it is participating in the negotiations with Microsoft over a potential deal. CNBC was first to report the effort by the two companies.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: How TikTok’s Talks With Microsoft Turned Into a Soap Opera. “Pushed by President Trump, who has ordered TikTok’s U.S. operations to be sold or to cease operating, ByteDance is now discussing selling parts of TikTok’s global operations to several potential bidders. And with so many groups jumping into the talks to get a piece of any deal, all are trying to drive their own interests and agendas.”

Straits Times: Thai minister says clampdown on social media content won’t stop as Facebook plans to fight order. “Thailand’s digital minister vowed not to relent on Wednesday (Aug 26) in a crackdown on social media content deemed illegal. It was also unlikely that Facebook would follow through on plans to challenge an order to block access to a group critical of the Thai monarchy, the minister said. The ‘Royalist Marketplace’ group, which had more than one million members, was blocked within Thailand late on Monday after the Digital Ministry threatened legal action against Facebook under the country’s Computer Crime Act.”

BuzzFeed News: Blanked-Out Spots On China’s Maps Helped Us Uncover Xinjiang’s Camps. “China’s Baidu blanked out parts of its mapping platform. We used those locations to find a network of buildings bearing the hallmarks of prisons and internment camps in Xinjiang. Here’s how we did it.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Malay Mail: Facebook shares data on Myanmar with UN investigators. “Facebook says it has shared data with United Nations investigators probing international crimes in Myanmar, after the lead investigator said the company was withholding evidence. A Facebook representative told Reuters yesterday it had given the Independent Investigative Mechanism on Myanmar (IIMM) data from pages and accounts associated with the Myanmar military that it had removed in 2018 to stop hate speech against Rohingya but declined to describe the content.”

India Today: Gangs of Twitterpur: Inside a network of fake celebrity accounts. “Some Twitter users are caught imitating popular personalities during a given news cycle. While impersonating celebrities like Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and prominent lawyers, they used to garner thousands of like and retweets based on the news doing rounds at a particular time.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EurekAlert: How to make AI trustworthy. “One of the biggest impediments to adoption of new technologies is trust in AI. Now, a new tool developed by USC Viterbi Engineering researchers generates automatic indicators if data and predictions generated by AI algorithms are trustworthy. Their research paper, ‘There Is Hope After All: Quantifying Opinion and Trustworthiness in Neural Networks’ by Mingxi Cheng, Shahin Nazarian and Paul Bogdan of the USC Cyber Physical Systems Group, was featured in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence.”

Cornell Chronicle: Tool transforms world landmark photos into 4D experiences. “Using publicly available tourist photos of world landmarks such as the Trevi Fountain in Rome or Top of the Rock in New York City, Cornell researchers have developed a method to create maneuverable 3D images that show changes in appearance over time.” Good morning, Internet…

August 28, 2020 at 05:43PM
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Thursday, August 27, 2020

Australia Children’s Literature, Mental Health Apps, Live Music Video, More: Thursday Late-Evening ResearchBuzz, August 27, 2020

Australia Children’s Literature, Mental Health Apps, Live Music Video, More: Thursday Late-Evening ResearchBuzz, August 27, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Sector: NCACL makes free database for educators to help find First Nations children’s books. “The National Centre for Australian Children’s Literature (NCACL) has produced a free database for educators to help them discover children’s books by and about Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.”

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center: One size may not fit all: BILH psychiatrists develop mental health app assessment tool. “About one in five U.S. adults, an estimated 47 million people, lives with a mental illness. Fewer than half of them receive treatment, counseling or medication. In recent years, smartphone apps have emerged as potentially cost-effective means of expanding access to mental healthcare. But with some 10,000 mental health apps — which are not subject to FDA oversight — available in mobile app stores today, the task of determining which apps are safe and effective can seem overwhelming to patients and providers alike.”

JamBase: JamBase Launches Massive Live Video Archive. “Today, JamBase is excited to announce the JamBase Live Video Archive (JBLVA), an ever-growing database featuring thousands of live music videos. The JBLVA allows visitors to filter videos in any number of ways, including by band, song, duration, year and videographer/channel to help you find just the right clip.”

University of North Carolina at Greensboro: Professor Launches Undocu-friendly College Planning Site. “Students who are DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program) recipients, are undocumented, or live in mixed-status families often find that college planning is complex and challenging. Many counselors and school staff aren’t equipped with the information and resources they need to understand the impacts of immigration status on college admissions and degree attainment. In response to this growing community need, UNC Greensboro’s Dr. Laura Gonzalez has launched ‘So Much Potential,’ a new website aimed at educating high school counselors and staff so that they can better support all students on the path to college. The website also serves as a resource for students and families who may not be aware of their options.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

US News & World Report: US Rolls Out Free App for Alerts on Vehicle Recalls. “The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was scheduled to roll out the free app for both Android and Apple phones on Thursday. Owners key in or scan their 17-digit vehicle identification number, and the app will search the agency’s database for recalls. If there is one, the app will send an alert, the agency says. People also can add child seats, trailers and tires, and the app will check those for recalls.”

The Next Web: How to use Microsoft Word’s new ‘Transcribe’ tool. “Microsoft today announced a new feature for Word: a transcription tool that allows you to get spoken words into your document without you having to type all of them. We’ll show you how to use it.”

USEFUL STUFF

Fast Company: Stop opening so many browser tabs and use these 3 slick tools instead. “Once you’ve buried yourself under dozens of browser tabs, you’re constantly having to pick through them all to find your way back to Gmail or Google Docs. Or instead of trying to track down the sites you’ve already got open, you just open them again in a new tab, creating even more clutter. As they say in infomercials, there’s a better way. By making some changes to your web browser, you can more easily access the websites you use most and cut down on tab overload. Here are a few things to try.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

ZDNet: Twitter takes down ‘Dracula’ botnet pushing pro-Chinese propaganda. “Social media research group Graphika said today it identified a Twitter botnet of around 3,000 bots that pushed pro-Chinese political spam, echoing official messaging released through state propaganda accounts. Graphika said it was able to identify the botnet due to a quirk shared by the vast majority of bot accounts, most of which used quotes from Bram Stoker’s Dracula book for the profile description and the first two tweets.” Dracula?

RESEARCH & OPINION

South China Morning Post: Baidu creates ‘world’s largest’ Chinese natural language processing database. “Chinese search engine giant Baidu has launched what it says is the world’s largest Chinese natural language processing (NLP) database, among several other artificial intelligence (AI) products, as it seeks to diversify its revenue sources. NLP is a branch of AI involved in making computers understand the way humans naturally talk and type online, turning such information into structured data for further analysis.”

Phys .org: Big data delivers important new tool in conservation decision making. “The Harry Butler Institute has collaborated with researchers around the world to develop a new tool to inform conservation decisions across Europe. The research is poised to have a direct and immediate impact—on both science and practice.” Good late evening, Internet…

August 28, 2020 at 07:37AM
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Poland Women Artists, Michigan Superintendent Salaries, Veteran Graves, More: Thursday Evening ResearchBuzz, August 27, 2020

Poland Women Artists, Michigan Superintendent Salaries, Veteran Graves, More: Thursday Evening ResearchBuzz, August 27, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Hyperallergic: Writing the Untold Stories of Polish Women Artists. “Not Yet Written Stories is a collaboration between the Arton Foundation, the Croatian Office for Photography, SCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana and the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art. The project aims to expand the Forgotten Heritage database and organize a series of exhibitions and workshops. A conference about female European artists is tentatively scheduled for spring 2021 and will culminate in a publication.”

WXYZ: New database shows salaries of superintendents of districts across Michigan . “You can now see how much school districts across Michigan spend on superintendent compensation via an updated database from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The database reports how much districts spent on superintendent compensation, including salary, insurance, pension and other benefits.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

WMDT: Historic Salisbury cemetery receives state recognition, new database for veterans graves. “A Victorian-era cemetery in Salisbury has been recognized at the state level and it’s all thanks to some 21st century technology. ‘The thing with being a veteran is you’re forgotten when no one ever speaks your name again,’ says Carol Smith with the Parsons Advisory Committee. A recently finished project will help ensure the more than 12-hundred veterans buried in Salisbury’s Parsons Cemetery won’t be forgotten.”

Coywolf News: Apple showing signs it may soon launch a search engine to compete against Google Search . “Regulatory pressure, a contentious relationship with Google, and the maturation of Apple’s Siri and iCloud are presenting an opportunity for Apple to create and launch a search engine. There are several signs right now that indicate Apple may be doing just that.”

USEFUL STUFF

San Francisco Chronicle: Worried about Bay Area smoke? Here’s how to look up the air quality in your microclimate . “The air over much of the Bay Area is generally clean, thanks to ocean breezes. But when the skies fill with wildfire smoke, that changes. For your health and safety, it’s vital to know the latest air quality information in your community. But it can be hard to find, especially since the Bay Area has so many microclimates. Here is a guide to resources that can help you monitor and understand your local air quality.” This article was written for people in the Bay Area, but it has plenty of resources for California in general and a couple for the entire United States.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Brown University: Introducing theKEEPER: A Digital Archive of Womxn in Hip Hop. “Brown University Postdoctoral Fellow Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo (aka SAMMUS) has been working on theKEEPER: A Digital Archive of Womxn in Hip Hop this summer as part of a team of artists, scholars, and activists led by Akua Naru, a performing artist who was also an artist-in-residence through Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Enthinicty in America in Fall 2019.”

The Tab: ‘It’s like my baby’: This is what it’s like to run a celebrity fan account with 100k followers. “Becca is just one of the thousands of Timothée Chalamet fan accounts. A drop in the ocean. An even smaller drop in the abyss of total fan accounts: there are hundreds for each celeb. Name any celeb, there will be a stan account out there – even if it’s lingering about in the Instagram nether with a weird username, 60 followers, and hasn’t posted since 2013. You’ve probably stumbled upon fan accounts before, likely when you’re perusing the Insta search function to follow a certain celeb. You might even already follow some. But behind the scenes, these accounts are borne out of hard work and a deep appreciation for the celebrities they’re based on.”

Internet Archive, and this one is a real wow: An Archive of a Different Type . “Imagine being so well-known for your craft that letters addressed to ‘Mr. Typewriter, New York’ would get delivered by the Post Office to your door. Imagine you mount a letter wrong while crafting a typewriter, and it causes a country (Burma) to change that letter to accommodate your mistake. Or that, through decades, your expert testimony about the accuracy of a brand of typewriter and the characters it types means the difference between guilt, incarceration, freedom or the swapping of fortunes. Such was the life of Pearl and Martin Tytell, of Tytell Typewriter. From a shop on Fulton Street of NYC from 1938 to 2000, the couple oversaw not just endless consultations and repairs, but fabrications and projects that were revolutions in themselves.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Gizmodo: Even Google Employees Found Google’s Privacy Settings Confusing. “By 2018, Google mastered the art of obscuring privacy settings to the degree that even some Google employees didn’t know how location privacy settings worked, according to an Arizona consumer fraud lawsuit (now with fewer redactions) shows. As the Arizona Mirror first noticed, the complaint contains messages between Googlers venting that the company’s privacy settings are — even for the exact people most likely to understand them — a ‘mess.'”

BNN Bloomberg: U.S. Antitrust Case Against Google Zeroes In On ‘Tying’ Products. “Government officials building an antitrust case against Google are investigating whether the company engages in tying, the practice of bundling different products together in a way that can block out competitors and give the seller an unfair advantage.” Good evening, Internet…

August 28, 2020 at 04:08AM
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Poland Women Artists, Michigan Superintendent Salaries, Veteran Graves, More: Thursday Evening ResearchBuzz, August 27, 2020

Poland Women Artists, Michigan Superintendent Salaries, Veteran Graves, More: Thursday Evening ResearchBuzz, August 27, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

USEFUL STUFF

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

SECURITY & LEGAL

August 28, 2020 at 04:08AM
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1940s New York Architecture, Isle of Man Newspapers, Google Photos, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, August 27, 2020

1940s New York Architecture, Isle of Man Newspapers, Google Photos, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, August 27, 2020
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Brooklyn Paper: Park Sloper Maps Old Tax Photos On ‘1940s Street View’ Website. “A new website maps Depression-era tax photos of every building in the city, making it easier for researchers and history buffs to navigate several hundred thousand snapshots of buildings from 1940s New York City, according to the site’s Brooklyn creator.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BBC: Isle of Man online newspaper archive to remain free permanently . “Thousands of newspapers documenting more than 150 years on the Isle of Man will remain available online for free permanently. A subscription service to view the items, which date from 1792 to 1960, was temporarily suspended by Manx National Heritage (MNH) during the Covid-19 lockdown in April.”

TechCrunch: Many Canon cameras can now automatically back up pictures to Google Photos. “Canon and Google today announced a new software integration that enables automatic Google Photos backup of pictures taken with select Canon cameras — a full list is available here, but it’s most of their recent interchangeable lens cameras dating back basically to when they started getting Wi-Fi on board.”

The Peninsula: Google CEO Sundar Pichai rules out buying TikTok. “Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said the company has no plans to acquire TikTok. During an interview on the podcast show Pivot Schooled, Pichai was asked whether Google was going to buy the popular video app. ‘We are not,’ he replied.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

From The New Yorker, with a caveat that you might find yourself wanting to punch something: Confessions of a Trump Troll. “‘I like chaos. I thrive in it’: a Georgia lawyer with too much time on his hands and ties to the G.O.P. describes how he used twenty fake Twitter accounts to disseminate political disinformation.”

Politico: Report: ‘Superspreaders’ of bogus health news racked up billions of views on Facebook. “Groups and pages that spread misleading health news attracted an estimated 3.8 billion views on Facebook in the past year, an activist group said in a report Wednesday — adding that those networks pushing bogus claims drew far more traffic than authoritative sources on topics like Covid-19. The report, published by the nonprofit activist group Avaaz, drew immediate scrutiny from Democratic lawmakers about the tech giant’s efforts to combat phony coronavirus news.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Smithsonian Magazine: The Inside Story Of The $8 Million Heist From The Carnegie Library. “There are two types of people who frequent special collections that are open to the public: scholars who want to study something in particular, and others who just want to see something interesting. Both groups are often drawn to incunables. Books printed at the dawn of European movable type, between 1450 and 1500, incunables are old, rare and historically important. In short, an incunable is so valued and usually such a prominent holding that any thief who wanted to avoid detection would not steal one. The Oliver Room thief stole ten.”

CNET: License plate tracking for police set to go nationwide. “Police often rely on automatic license plate readers to track the movement of cars in their jurisdiction. A surveillance company’s new initiative looks to expand those capabilities nationwide. On Tuesday, Flock Safety, which makes a license plate reader, announced the ‘Total Analytics Law Officers Network,’ or TALON. The network looks to connect the 400 law enforcement agencies using its cameras, allowing agencies that opt in to view camera data from other regions.”

Sydney Morning Herald: Google moves to block movie piracy loophole. “Google Australia has agreed to banish hundreds more websites involved in the illegal downloading of movies and programs after pirates were able to bypass its initial attempts to remove them from search results. The tech giant agreed to voluntarily pull down websites engaging in piracy last year to help stop the spread of illegally downloaded material, a move which allowed copyright holders to avoid fighting the tech giant for an injunction in court.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Tufts Now: The Case of the Reappearing Art . “On the rolling plateau along the border between Turkey and Armenia stand the ruins of the Cathedral of Ani, a magnificent building constructed between 989 and 1001 AD, along with many other long-abandoned churches in Ani, which was once called the City of 1,001 churches. Now thousand-year-old paintings are coming to life again on the cathedral’s walls, thanks to Christina Maranci, Arthur H. Dadian and Ara Oztemel Professor of Armenian Art and Architecture at Tufts.”

JSTOR Daily: How to Meme What You Say . “In a socially distant world, online life for many people has become normal life. How we express ourselves on the internet has become more important as we lose the social signals of body language and facial expressions. Without handshakes, hugs, and in-person social rituals, such as public gatherings and assemblies, how do we socialize and bond with each other? How can we convey emotionally what our lives have become in this pandemic era without having to explain it all through painstakingly literal language?”

First Draft News: Why we need a Google Trends for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Reddit. “When it comes to data voids, a distinction is usually drawn between search engines and social media platforms. Whereas the primary interface of search engines is the search bar, the primary interface of social media platforms is the feed: algorithmic encounters with posts based on general interest, not a specific question you’re searching to answer. It’s therefore easy to miss the fact that data voids exist here, too: Even though search isn’t the primary interface, it’s still a major feature. And with billions of users, they may be creating major social vulnerabilities.” Good afternoon, Internet…

August 28, 2020 at 12:04AM
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