Indiana Jobs, Truth in Photography Project, Patch Tuesday, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 12, 2021

Indiana Jobs, Truth in Photography Project, Patch Tuesday, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 12, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Tribune: State unveils Hoosier Talent Network job search site. “Hoosiers who are out of work due to the COVID-19 pandemic or simply looking for a job change now have a new online employment platform to help guide their career choices. The Indiana Department of Workforce Development has unveiled the Hoosier Talent Network from Eightfold AI to connect employers with workers disrupted by the coronavirus outbreak.”

LA Weekly: The Truth In Photography Project Is Asking Big Questions. “An interactive project committed to presenting multiple points of view and encouraging a wider discourse, the Truth In Photography project features diverse and eclectic contributions of curators, photographers, critics, and historians, as well as vernacular photography, photojournalism, and fine art…. Truth in Photography will be updated quarterly, beginning with the new Winter 2021 which comes in three themed sections.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Neowin: Microsoft confirms Windows 10 printer crashes after Patch Tuesday updates. “As it typically does, Microsoft unleashed an array of updates for all supported versions of Windows this past Tuesday, being that it was the second one in March, making it Patch Tuesday. Multiple Windows 10 versions received cumulative updates, and it wasn’t long before issues started being reported by numerous users, claiming that they were encountering a blue screen of death (BSOD) error when trying to use printers.”

USEFUL STUFF

Elite Daily: Here’s How To Use The Dispo App To Replicate The Fun Of A Disposable Camera. “While it’s good news the invites are no longer, Android users are still out of luck as Dispo still isn’t supported for non-iPhone devices. Dispo has yet to give an exact date for when Android users will have access to the platform, but per a comment on a March 9 Instagram post announcing its launch to the public, they’re ‘working on it.’ If you have the app, though, here’s what you need to know.”

Washington Post: What is an NFT, and how did an artist called Beeple sell one for $69 million at Christie’s?. “Using the same principles behind cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, NFTs allow people to claim ownership over specific digital files, be they songs, videos or static images. Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, is the latest beneficiary of a rush into NFTs that’s a side effect of the fast-growing interest in digital currencies and the technology behind them.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

TechCrunch: Detail wants to turn your phone into a software-optimized camera app for live video. “Meet Detail, a new startup working on an app for iOS and macOS so that you can turn your iPhone into a software-optimized camera for live video. The startup wants to make it easy to use the phone that you have in your pocket with the livestreaming platform that you already use, such as Zoom, Google Meet, Twitch, Hopin or YouTube Live.”

Business Insider: Russia claims a fire at a data center in France broke access to Google and YouTube. Google says that’s not true.. “A data center belonging to French cloud provider OVH caught on fire on Wednesday. At the same time, Russia was experiencing widespread outages meaning people couldn’t get onto Google and YouTube, which Google owns. The state media watchdog, Roskomnadzorm, claimed Wednesday the problems were caused by the fire in France. Google says that’s not true.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: Facebook wants court to dismiss antitrust lawsuits. “Facebook is pushing back against antitrust lawsuits filed by the US Federal Trade Commission and 48 state attorneys general, alleging they failed to show that the social media giant illegally stifled competition and harmed consumers.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: Your Loved Ones, and Eerie Tom Cruise Videos, Reanimate Unease With Deepfakes. “To those fearful of a future in which videos of real people are indistinguishable from computer-generated forgeries, two recent developments that attracted an audience of millions might have seemed alarming.”

EurekAlert: Not-for-profit publisher makes big move toward open access science. “Canadian Science Publishing (CSP)–a not-for-profit publisher of peer-reviewed STEM journals–is excited to announce a new transformative open access publishing agreement with the University of California (UC) that will offer unlimited open access publication for UC researchers publishing with its journals.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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March 13, 2021 at 12:37AM
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Venezuela Aircraft, Apple App Privacy, École Polytechnique, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, March 12, 2021

Venezuela Aircraft, Apple App Privacy, École Polytechnique, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, March 12, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Thanks to Tish W. for the heads-up! BellingCat: Launching an Open Source Aircraft Database for Venezuela . “In January 2020, I started an open database of aircraft registered in Venezuela. Using open source flight tracking data and helpful tips from aircraft tracking enthusiasts, the database now includes details on approximately 240 aircraft. The vast majority of these aircraft are registered in Venezuela, but some are foreign-registered with some connection to the country (more on that later).”

CNET: Apple’s new privacy-label database lets you see what data its apps gather on you. “Apps are everywhere, and pretty much all of them gather data about us whenever we use them. In light of that, Apple in December began requiring app developers to list information about the data their apps gather, in an accessible privacy label. Now the company is taking things one step further, with an easily searchable database of privacy labels for Apple’s own apps.”

Institut Polytechnique de Paris: Unprecedented historical collections on Google Arts & Culture. “École Polytechnique and Google Arts & Culture are teaming up to make available to the general public for the first time a unique collection of nearly 2,000 pieces from scientific, historical, and artistic collections from l’X, retracing more than 226 years of existence.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Microsoft is ending support for the old non-Chromium Edge. “Support for Microsoft’s Edge browser is ending today — not the new Chromium-based one, but the original Edge that was built as a replacement for Internet Explorer 11. Microsoft now calls it Legacy Edge, and the company announced it would be discontinuing the product back in August. That day has finally come: Legacy Edge will no longer receive security updates, and anyone still using it should start the process of switching to something else.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Livemint: News channels body asks Google to compensate for content. “After the Indian Newspaper Society, the News Broadcasters Association (NBA) has written to Internet giant Google on revenue sharing with intermediary technology platforms while seeking a meeting to discuss the ‘urgent need to create an equitable relationship and level the playing field between global tech monopolies and traditional media/news organisations.'”

CNN: Pakistan bans TikTok again. “The popular short-form video app is no longer available on mobile devices in the country after regulators issued an order late Thursday to ‘immediately’ block access to it. Pakistan’s Telecommunications Authority said it banned TikTok after a provincial court in Peshawar called for the platform to be removed.”

New York Times: Russia Says It Is Slowing Access to Twitter . “The Russian government said on Wednesday that it was slowing access to Twitter, accusing the social network of failing to remove illegal content and signaling that the Kremlin is escalating its offensive against American internet companies that have long provided a haven for freedom of expression.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TechCrunch: Lawmakers want to empower publishers to collectively negotiate with Facebook. “On the heels of a heated standoff between platforms and publishers in Australia, U.S. lawmakers reintroduced a piece of legislation that would allow the news industry to collectively negotiate content deals with tech companies.”

SecurityWeek: Flaws in Apple Location Tracking System Could Lead to User Identification. “Vulnerabilities identified in offline finding (OF) — Apple’s proprietary crowd-sourced location tracking system — could be abused for user identification, researchers said in a report released this month. Introduced in 2019, the system relies on the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology for the detection of ‘lost’ devices, and on the Internet connection of so-called ‘finder’ devices to report on their location back to the owner.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Pennsylvania: Twitter Bots May Not Be as Influential as You Think. “A new study from Annenberg School Associate Professor Sandra González-Bailón found that verified media accounts are more central in the spread of information on Twitter than bots — even though they amount to a much smaller fraction of all accounts active.”

EurekAlert: Experts recreate a mechanical Cosmos for the world’s first computer. “Researchers at UCL have solved a major piece of the puzzle that makes up the ancient Greek astronomical calculator known as the Antikythera Mechanism, a hand-powered mechanical device that was used to predict astronomical events.”

University at Buffalo: How to spot deepfakes? Look at light reflection in the eyes. “University at Buffalo computer scientists have developed a tool that automatically identifies deepfake photos by analyzing light reflections in the eyes. The tool proved 94% effective with portrait-like photos in experiments described in a paper accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing to be held in June in Toronto, Canada.” Good morning, Internet…

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March 12, 2021 at 06:29PM
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Thursday CoronaBuzz, March 11, 2021: 19 pointers to updates, useful stuff, research news, and more.

Thursday CoronaBuzz, March 11, 2021: 19 pointers to updates, useful stuff, research news, and more.
By ResearchBuzz

Please wear a mask (or even two). Wash your hands. Stay at home if you can. Please be careful. I love you.

NEW RESOURCES – OTHER

Dazed: Enter the library of isolation curated by Arca, Fran Lebowitz, and more. “Last month, New York-based cultural club WHAAM! launched a physical and virtual library of books, hand-picked by artists, musicians, and public figures in response to the question: In isolation, what parts of yourself have you recovered Titled Reading Room, the exhibition was created by online library New Reader, and features selections by Arca, Elise By Olsen, The White Pube’s Zarina Muhammad, and more.”

USEFUL STUFF

CNET: COVID-19 depression and anxiety: How to take care of your mental health. “The coronavirus pandemic, high rates of unemployment, racial inequality and a divisive, at times hostile, political climate have driven stress way up among Americans. More than 40% of people reported having symptoms of depression and anxiety in January of 2021, compared to just 11% between January and June, 2019. It will take months, perhaps even years, to fully heal from the trauma of 2020, but in the meantime, there are things we can all do to cope.” Big roundup with tons of links.

MISINFORMATION / DISINFORMATION

New York Times: How to Reach the Unvaccinated. “My colleague Sheera Frenkel spoke to experts and followed a community group as it went door to door in an ethnically diverse neighborhood in Northern California to understand the reasons behind the low vaccination rates for Black and Hispanic Americans compared with non-Hispanic white people. What Sheera found, as she detailed in an article on Wednesday, was how online vaccine myths reinforce people’s fears and the ways that personal outreach and easier access to doses can make a big difference.”

HEALTH CARE / HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS

BBC: Oxford-AstraZeneca: EU regulator says ‘no indication’ vaccine linked to blood clots. “There is no indication that the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine is linked to an increased risk of blood clots, the EU’s medicines regulator says. It said the number of cases in vaccinated people was no higher than in the general population. The statement came after a number of countries, including Denmark and Norway, suspended the use of the jab.”

BUSINESS / CORPORATIONS

DCist: D.C. Lost At Least 375 Businesses Since Last March. Here’s How Those Closures Have Reshaped The City. “At least 235 brick-and-mortar businesses have closed permanently in D.C. since the first known coronavirus case was reported on March 7, 2020, with 100 more shuttered temporarily, a count by DCist/WAMU found. (The status of another 40 is unknown.) As of December, more than 36,000 residents were unemployed — a 77% increase over the prior year.”

WORLD / FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

BBC: Covid stimulus: Biden signs $1.9tn relief bill into law. “US President Joe Biden has signed a $1.9tn (£1.4tn) economic relief bill that aims to help Americans impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic into law. The bill includes $1,400 payments, an extension of jobless benefits, and a child tax credit that is expect to lift millions out of poverty.”

CNBC: Biden will direct states to make all adults eligible for vaccine by May 1. “President Joe Biden is set to announce Thursday evening that he will direct states to make all adults eligible for the Covid vaccines by May 1. Biden, in his first primetime address to the nation, is also expected to say that Americans should be able to gather in small groups to celebrate the Fourth of July, a senior administration official told reporters Thursday.”

STATE / LOCAL GOVERNMENT

Route Fifty: Alaska Becomes First State to End Restrictions on Vaccine Eligibility. “Alaska is the first state to end restrictions on who can get Covid-19 vaccine shots, offering them to all residents ages 16 or older. Gov. Mike Dunleavy announced the policy change on Tuesday and said it is effective immediately.”

10 Boston: ‘We’re Not Going to Play That Game’: Baker Defends Decision to Wait on Teacher Vaccinations. “Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker defended the state’s vaccination rollout Thursday and said he has no intention of taking doses away from vulnerable populations in order to make them available to teachers.”

HEALTH

Arizona State University: Double-masking the right way. “Double-masking, or wearing one mask over another, has been the subject of much recent media attention. Even as COVID-19 rates decline, state and federal agencies recommend continuing to wear masks. If one mask is good, wouldn’t two be better? Not necessarily, especially if the masks are worn incorrectly.”

CNET: We have COVID-19 vaccines, so how long will they protect you?. “We’re a year into the COVID-19 pandemic and several vaccines are available worldwide. That was supposed to be the beachhead of normalcy, yet a lot of people aren’t sure when they can get a vaccine, what it will mean if they do or if they even want one. Now what?”

Washington Post: Vaccinated lives: 5 health experts revel in simple pleasures. “The Washington Post asked five public health/infectious-diseases experts how they have navigated risk — and how their own lives have changed since getting inoculated. They all said they continue to take precautions, wearing masks and social distancing in public. All drew their lines in different places but exulted at newfound opportunities for human connection — hugging friends, having dinner parties, even getting haircuts.”

TECHNOLOGY

TechXplore: Pinpointing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic with AI. “Fraunhofer IAO, the University Hospital Dresden and seracom GmbH joined forces to investigate the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic using AI algorithms in a project called WIBCE. The results of the associated Germany-wide online survey indicate that younger people experience more psychological distress than older people, despite the fact that their objective health risk is relatively low.”

EurekAlert: Pandemic emphasizes need for digital literacy education. “Parents would never give their children the keys to the car without supervised training and driver’s education. An Iowa State University researcher says parents and educators need to take a similar approach before handing children a keyboard to access the digital world.”

Mashable: How a year of living online has changed us. “As work, school, and social interactions migrated online once COVID-19 became a global pandemic last March, the average monthly household data use in 2020 skyrocketed by 40 percent compared to the prior year, according to OpenVault, a global provider of broadband industry analytics. That figure includes tablet, computer, gaming console, and mobile phone data that uses a household’s broadband internet connection, but doesn’t reflect when someone accesses the internet through their cellular data. The average household now uses nearly a half a terabyte of data each month.”

OPINION

The Grio: Everything they ‘forgot’ to tell Black people about contracting COVID-19. “Our nation is suffering, but only a portion of the population (read: Black and brown people) is simultaneously bearing the weight of this pandemic with a healthcare system that values profit over people and a rightful distrust of government-funded vaccinations. This is a recipe for disaster at the macro-level, but when you zoom in to the very personal view, it is even scarier to experience.”

BetaNews: Half a dozen little 2021 predictions about life after COVID-19. ” While COVID-19 will undoubtedly kill more Americans than did the Spanish flu, the percentage of the population dying will be much lower than the 0.65 percent death rate in 1918. But the numbers are close enough that one might guess the long-term impact of this pandemic could be very similar to that one. I don’t think it will be. I think this pandemic will have greater long-term effects than that of 1918 and the reason comes down mainly to technology.”

Mashable: We dreamed of the Before Times for a year. But how will COVID’s scars haunt the After Times?. “The pandemic hasn’t just changed the world, it has become the world. Its tentacles touch everything. I don’t dream like I used to. Literally. Many nights I have nightmares where I accidentally enter public spaces unmasked, only to realize Oh God, oh no, it’s still a pandemic. I’ll have dreams of sick loved ones and unshakeable danger. My metaphorical dreams have changed, too. In some ways they’re bigger: I want to travel everywhere, do more, work less, visit my friends spread across the country. But my dreams have shrunk as well. Who needs to write a book, or get recognition? I’d love a dinner with family, a fine life with friends who love me, a cool beer at a dank bar.”

POLITICS

NBC News: States with Republican governors had highest Covid incidence and death rates, study finds. “States with Democratic governors had the highest incidence and death rates from Covid-19 in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, but states with Republican governors surpassed those rates as the crisis dragged on, a study released Tuesday found.”

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!

March 12, 2021 at 07:52AM
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January 6, University of Missouri System, MIT Press, More: Thursday Evening ResearchBuzz, March 11, 2021

January 6, University of Missouri System, MIT Press, More: Thursday Evening ResearchBuzz, March 11, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

HuffPost: Citizen Sleuths Launch A Slick New Website To Hunt Down Capitol Insurrectionists. “The website… was built by a small team of volunteer software developers, using the work of open-source investigators looking into the deadly Capitol attack. The site features a color-coded timeline that reflects the time of day, and allows users to click around on a map of the Capitol and pull up any video evidence from a particular location and time frame. Users can even track an individual suspect’s movements over the course of Jan. 6.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

KMIZ: UM System puts online courses in one place with Missouri Online. “The University of Missouri System launched a new website Tuesday that puts online courses from all four system schools in one place…. The combined online universities offer more than 260 online degree and certificate programs, with 22 additional programs coming online in 2021.”

MIT News: The MIT Press launches Direct to Open. “The MIT Press has announced the launch of Direct to Open (D2O). A first-of-its-kind sustainable framework for open-access monographs, D2O moves professional and scholarly books from a solely market-based, purchase model where individuals and libraries buy single e-books to a collaborative, library-supported open-access model…. Beginning in 2022, all new MIT Press scholarly monographs and edited collections will be openly available on the MIT Press Direct e-book platform. Instead of purchasing a title once for a single collection, libraries now have the opportunity to fund them one time for the world through participant fees.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Mashable: On TikTok, mental health creators are confused for therapists. That’s a serious problem.. “TikTok has a therapy problem. Creators who purport to reduce the stigma around mental health issues may be unintentionally spreading misinformation on the app, where people who post about mental health are easily confused with real professionals making similar content.”

Voice of America: Tunisia Cracks Down on Social Media 10 Years After Arab Spring. “Tunisian police are arresting social media activists for criticizing the government online and calling for protests, according to rights groups. Ten years after Tunisia’s Arab Spring uprising for democracy, the country has been hit by a wave of riots and protests over ongoing political unrest and a poor economy.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CyberScoop: FBI alert warns of Russian, Chinese use of deepfake content. “The FBI warned in an alert Wednesday that malicious actors ‘almost certainly’ will be using deepfakes to advance their influence or cyber-operations in the coming weeks. The alert notes that foreign actors are already using deepfakes or synthetic media — manipulated digital content like video, audio, images and text — in their influence campaigns.”

TechCrunch: America’s small businesses face the brunt of China’s Exchange server hacks. “Microsoft last week revealed a new hacking group it calls Hafnium, which operates in, and is backed by, China…. It’s not clear what Hafnium’s motives are. Some liken the activity to espionage — a nation-state gathering intelligence or industrial secrets from larger corporations and governments. But what makes this particular hacking campaign so damaging is not only the ease with which the flaws can be exploited, but also how many — and how widespread — the victims are.”

AP: Molson Coors says cyberattack impacting brewing operations. “Molson Coors Beverage Co. said Thursday it has been hit by a cyberattack that disrupted its brewing operations and shipments. In a regulatory filing, the Chicago-based company said it has hired forensic information technology experts and legal counsel to help it investigate the incident.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Purdue University: Creating a new type of computing that’s ‘naturally probabilistic’. “‘You see, nature is unpredictable. How do you expect to predict it with a computer?’ said American physicist Richard Feynman before computer scientists at a conference in 1981. Forty years later, Purdue University engineers are building the kind of system that Feynman imagined would overcome the limitations of today’s classical computers by more closely acting like nature: a ‘probabilistic computer.'”

EurekAlert: The University of Barcelona leads the construction of a pocket high-resolution microscope. “An international team led by researchers of the University of Barcelona builds the smallest and cheapest high-resolution microscope to date. To build it, researchers developed new nanoLEDs that act as a lightning source and determine the resolution of the microscope without lenses. The team created a new start-up and started a new European project to bring this technology to the market.” Good evening, 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!

March 12, 2021 at 06:50AM
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Electronic Music, Apple App Store, WordPress, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 11, 2021

Electronic Music, Apple App Store, WordPress, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 11, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Google Blog: Music, Makers & Machines. “Music, Makers & Machines, the new exhibit from Google Arts & Culture and YouTube, celebrates the history of electronic music: its inventors, artists, sounds and technology. More than 50 international institutions, record labels, festivals and industry experts have come together to capture the crucial role electronic music plays within wider culture, from the WDR Studio for Electronic Music to Blacktronika to the ‘Diva of the Diodes’ Suzanne Ciani. There are more than 250 online exhibitions, an extensive archive of photos, videos, 360° tours and 3D-scanned objects, including synthesizers and the door of Berlin’s legendary Tresor techno club.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Apple said to deny Parler app back into App Store. “Apple has reportedly told the social network Parler that it still can’t publish its app in the iPhone and iPad App Store. Apple banned the controversial social network, which is popular with extremists and conspiracy theorists, after insurrectionists attacked the US Capitol on Jan. 6.”

Search Engine Journal: WordPress 5.7 Launches With One-Click HTTP to HTTPS Conversion. “Named after musician Esperanza Spalding, the first WordPress release of 2021 offers features such as an easier to use editor and the ability to accomplish more without writing custom code. Here’s an overview of all the new features in WordPress 5.7.”

PR Newswire: Dictionary.com Announces New Words Relating to Covid, Social Justice, and More (PRESS RELEASE). “Dictionary.com today announced its latest addition of new words, which reflects the ongoing impact of COVID-19 on language and hits on a variety of additional themes relating to race, social justice, identity, and culture. The leading online dictionary has updated 7,600 entries, including 450 new entries and 94 new definitions in existing entries.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

WSMV: New search engine featuring black authors. “‘I started having a lot of conversations, especially during the lockdown, with some of my friends just trying to understand, “where were melinnial BIPOC youth and young adults getting their news from,”‘ said Dr. Paul McNeil of MB Usable Security LLC. McNeil found many were missing the black perspective. So he created ‘BLAAGLE,’ a search engine he designed where he’s indexing articles specifically written by black journalists and bloggers.” It appears that the site is currently in closed beta, but you can apply for access.

Yahoo Finance: Facebook and Twitter algorithms incentivize ‘people to get enraged’: Walter Isaacson . “The CEOs of Facebook (FB), Google (GOOG, GOOGL), and Twitter (TWTR) will appear later this month before a U.S. House subcommittee to face questions over the spread of misinformation tied to the 2020 election and COVID-19. In a new interview, author Walter Isaacson — best known for his biography of late Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs — said social media platforms should take more responsibility for the extremism and misleading information fostered by their sites. He offered a blistering criticism of the algorithms that determine what users see, calling them ‘dangerous.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Toronto Star: Uber, Lyft team up on database to expose abusive drivers. “Uber and Lyft have teamed up to create a database of drivers ousted from their ride-hailing services for complaints about sexual assault and other crimes that have raised passenger-safety concerns for years. The clearinghouse unveiled Thursday will initially list drivers expelled by the ride-hailing rivals in the U.S. But it will also be open to other companies that deploy workers to perform services such as delivering groceries or take-out orders from restaurants.”

The State: Hard to find now, SC senators want to show you how the Legislature spends your money. “The proposal would create a state website with a searchable database showing what the state is spending on and who is receiving money. The S.C. Comptroller General’s website currently has a searchable database for payments made to organizations but doesn’t differentiate from grants, state contracts or budgeted earmarks.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: It’s not just a social media problem – how search engines spread misinformation. “Ad-driven search engines, like social media platforms, are designed to reward clicking on enticing links because it helps the search companies boost their business metrics. As a researcher who studies the search and recommendation systems, I and my colleagues show that this dangerous combination of corporate profit motive and individual susceptibility makes the problem difficult to fix.”

University of Washington News: Large computer language models carry environmental, social risks. “Computer engineers at the world’s largest companies and universities are using machines to scan through tomes of written material. The goal? Teach these machines the gift of language. Do that, some even claim, and computers will be able to mimic the human brain. But this impressive compute capability comes with real costs, including perpetuating racism and causing significant environmental damage, according to a new paper, ‘On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? '” Good afternoon, 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!

March 12, 2021 at 01:55AM
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Property Tax Inequality, Lithuanian-Jewish Genealogy, Women in Radiation Sciences, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, March 11, 2021

Property Tax Inequality, Lithuanian-Jewish Genealogy, Women in Radiation Sciences, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, March 11, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

UChicago News: Property tax burdens fall on nation’s lowest-income homeowners, study finds. “The Center for Municipal Finance at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy has completed a nationwide analysis revealing that property taxes—which generate roughly $500 billion and represent the single largest revenue source for local governments each year—are inequitable, with the burden falling disproportionally on owners of the least valuable homes in most counties, cities, and other taxing jurisdictions across the United States…. Using data from millions of residential real estate transactions between 2007 and 2017, [Professor Christopher] Berry—who directs the Center for Municipal Finance and is the William J. and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor at Harris Public Policy—developed the nationwide analysis and a new tool, searchable by county and city, which looks at property tax records for communities around the U.S.”

BusinessWire: MyHeritage Adds Lithuanian-Jewish Historical Records in Coordination with LitvakSIG (PRESS RELEASE). “MyHeritage, the leading global service for discovering your past and empowering your future, and LitvakSIG, a U.S. non-profit organization providing the primary online resource for Lithuanian-Jewish genealogy research worldwide, jointly announced today the publication of an important compilation of Lithuanian-Jewish historical records by MyHeritage. The records in this collection were originally translated and indexed by LitvakSIG, and represent almost the entire corpus of LitvakSIG’s work over more than twenty years. These records have now been added to MyHeritage’s historical record database.”

Science Advisory Board: EPA launches Women in Radiation History website. “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is marking Women’s History Month with the launch of a new website to celebrate the history of women in radiation sciences.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Walmart to host a new livestream shopping event on TikTok, following successful pilot. “In December, Walmart partnered with TikTok on the first pilot test of a new livestreamed shopping experience in the U.S. on the video platform. That test seemingly performed well, as today Walmart announced it will return to TikTok to host another livestream shopping event, the ‘Spring Shop-Along: Beauty Edition,’ which will feature TikTok creators and influencers in an hour-long livestream.”

Google Blog: New features for Chromebook’s 10th birthday. “Today, Chrome OS devices do everything from helping people get things done to entertaining them while they unwind. But we want to do more to provide a powerfully simple computing experience to the millions of people who use Chromebooks. We’re celebrating 10 years of Chromebooks with plenty of new features to bring our vision to life. ”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Mashable: We all hate Facebook. So why aren’t we deleting our accounts?. “More than three billion people use Facebook every month — and nearly 2.6 billion are active users who log onto the platform every day, according to Facebook. That leaves about 400 million people who have Facebook accounts but don’t log on often. It’s not so much that they love the platform itself, but it’s that Facebook has become such a staple in our lives on the internet that deleting it completely doesn’t feel like an option if you want to remember birthdays, log onto other platforms, or keep up with far-flung acquaintances.”

The New York Times: Epoch Media Casts Wider Net to Spread Its Message Online. “Epoch Media, which is affiliated with the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, regularly publishes anti-Chinese Communist Party content as well as conspiracy theory-laden articles about QAnon and unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.”

Macleod Gazette: Project creates digital home for Blackfoot items. “Mootookakio’ssin, at its simplest description, is a project to create detailed images of historical Blackfoot objects housed in British museums. At its most complex, it is creating a virtual home for Indigenous objects, a place to reactivate the Blackfoot relations within them and transfer that knowledge all the way from Britain back to their peoples in southern Alberta. After two years of research, construction and creation, this collaborative project between University of Lethbridge and UK researchers, led by Blackfoot advisors and elders, is coming to fruition, culminating in presentations, exhibitions, workshops, and the launch of the digital object microsite in summer 2021, to be housed in the Blackfoot Digital Library.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Federal News Network: A new agency to officially take over the .gov domain. “Any agency wanting a brand new website will have to go through a new provider. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is taking over the management of the dot-gov domain. The General Services Administration controlled the dot gov domain since the 1990s. But in 2020 Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed the DOTGOV Act into law.”

The Verge: Democrats are gearing up to fight for net neutrality. “A new bill to bring back net neutrality is on its way, supported by one of the open internet’s most fervent advocates. At an advocacy event last month, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) announced that he would be introducing a measure in the next few ‘weeks’ that would engrave the no throttling, block, or paid fast lanes rules into law.”

Ars Technica: Critical 0-day that targeted security researchers gets a patch from Microsoft. “Microsoft has patched a critical zero-day vulnerability that North Korean hackers were using to target security researchers with malware. The in-the-wild attacks came to light in January in posts from Google and Microsoft. Hackers backed by the North Korean government, both posts said, spent weeks developing working relationships with security researchers. To win the researchers’ trust, the hackers created a research blog and Twitter personas who contacted researchers to ask if they wanted to collaborate on a project.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Next Web: AI generates trippy music video inspired by 50,000 album covers. “A Spanish artist has created a trippy music video by training a deep-learning algorithm on thousands of album covers. Bruno López produced the video by using a combination of Spotify data, Python scripts, and Generative Adversarial Networks.” Good morning, Internet…

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March 11, 2021 at 06:35PM
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Courtney Barnett, Windows Updates, TweetDeck, More: Wednesday Evening ResearchBuzz, March 10, 2021

Courtney Barnett, Windows Updates, TweetDeck, More: Wednesday Evening ResearchBuzz, March 10, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

NME: Courtney Barnett launches new live performance archive. “Courtney Barnett has launched a new website and archival project that documents the songwriter’s live performances over the last decade and a half. The new site allows fans to extensively explore Barnett’s prolific touring history, featuring live videos, full concert desk mixes, backstage photos, show posters and more.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Neowin: Here’s what’s new for Windows 8.1 and 7 this Patch Tuesday. “We’re already three months deep into 2021, and as we reach the second Tuesday of March, that means it’s time once again for Microsoft to update every supported version of Windows. Naturally, the most recent versions of Windows 10 are getting updates, but Windows 8.1 is also still supported. And, for businesses paying for extended security updates, so is Windows 7.”

The Verge: Twitter is working on a ‘big overhaul’ of TweetDeck. “Twitter is actively working on a ‘big overhaul’ of its TweetDeck platform, which lets you arrange lists and feeds into easy-to-read vertical rows, and it plans to share more about the project publicly later this year, product chief Kayvon Beykpour said in an interview with The Verge published Tuesday.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Spotted via Reddit (I think) and apparently launching next month: NFT Hub. From the front page: “NFT Hub hosts monthly exhibits that feature the most interesting digital assets. We aim to show a curated collection of NFTs, along with their histories, their owners, and their prices.” Of course, I think the countdown date resolves to April 1st, so this could be crap. If it is I apologize for putting crap on your radar.

Canadian Running: Social media is changing track and field for the better. “Platforms like Instagram and YouTube are providing greater access to the sport for fans, and allowing athletes to promote themselves in a way they never could before.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CBS News: Immigrant rights groups sue facial-recognition company Clearview AI. “Two immigrant-rights groups in California are suing Clearview AI, claiming the face-recognition company violates privacy laws by building the largest database of human faces in the nation and providing law enforcement with the database even in cities that have banned facial recognition.”

ZDNet: Malicious apps on Google Play dropped banking Trojans on user devices. “On Tuesday, Check Point Research (CPR) said in a blog post that the Android applications appear to have been submitted by the same threat actor who created new developer accounts for each app. The dropper was loaded into otherwise innocent-looking software and each of the 10 apps were utilities, including Cake VPN, Pacific VPN, BeatPlayer, QR/Barcode Scanner MAX, and QRecorder.”

Courthouse News Service: EU High Court Finds Embedded Images Can Violate Copyright Rules. “If copyright holders take steps to prevent their works from being embedded on third-party websites, doing so violates European Union law, the bloc’s top court ruled Tuesday.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EurekAlert: Geological engineers create landslide atlas of Kerala, India. “Dedicated to the thousands of lives lost in landslides, the new atlas assesses landslide risk in 13 districts in the Indian state of Kerala. The Western Ghats trailing the western edge of India are a global hotspot for biodiversity. The southern reach of the range extends into Kerala, where the steep slopes, soft soils and heavy monsoon rains greatly increase the risk of landslides.”

Newswise: Someone to watch over AI and keep it honest – and it’s not the public!. “The public doesn’t need to know how Artificial Intelligence works to trust it. They just need to know that someone with the necessary skillset is examining AI and has the authority to mete out sanctions if it causes or is likely to cause harm.” Good evening, Internet…

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March 11, 2021 at 07:00AM
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