New researches

Monday, April 26, 2021

Portuguese Fish Tins, Nicolae Ceausescu, Japanese Cuisine, More: Monday Evening ResearchBuzz, April 26, 2021

Portuguese Fish Tins, Nicolae Ceausescu, Japanese Cuisine, More: Monday Evening ResearchBuzz, April 26, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Hyperallergic: The Enchanting Visuals of Portuguese Fish Tins. “The idiosyncratic visual culture of Portugal’s tinned foods industry is the subject of Conservas de Portugal, an online museum featuring more than 40,000 entries including fish tin designs, labels, photographs, and more. Its collection is curated by CAN THE CAN, a restaurant in Lisbon associated with the National Association of Manufacturers of Canned Fish (ANICP).”

Radio Free Europe: Absolute Power: The Astonishing Personal Photos Of Nicolae Ceausescu. “A family photo archive reveals life behind the public facade of Romania’s notorious communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. These images are some of nearly 6,000 photos released online in a photo archive created by Romania’s National Archives and the country’s Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism.” Some of the images even in the article are disturbing, featuring hazing-type violence and dead animals festooned with props like a hat and sunglasses.

Google Blog: Discover the people behind Japanese gastronomy. “In partnership with the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Google Arts & Culture is launching a new project about the incredible people behind the uniqueness of Japanese cuisine. You can check out their stories through 48 new exhibitions and more than a thousand unique images and videos.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Gizmodo: We’re Archiving Yahoo Answers So You’ll Always Know How Babby Is Formed. “With the help of the Internet Archive—and a little bit of code—we set up a script to auto-archive as many of the roughly 84 million submitted questions that we were able to find using the ‘sitemap’ file for the Yahoo Answers site. These sorts of files are typically included as a way to help search engines index different pages so that people looking for answers will have a particular Yahoo Answers page crop up.”

Wired: The New iOS Update Lets You Stop Ads From Tracking You—So Do It. “IF YOU’RE SICK of opaque ad tracking and don’t feel like you have a handle on it, a new iOS feature promises to give you back some control. With the release of Apple’s iOS 14.5 on Monday, all of your apps will have to ask in a pop-up: Do you want to allow this app to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites? For once, your answer can be no.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BuzzFeed News: Facebook Stopped Employees From Reading An Internal Report About Its Role In The Insurrection. You Can Read It Here.. “Titled ‘Stop the Steal and Patriot Party: The Growth and Mitigation of an Adversarial Harmful Movement,’ the report is one of the most important analyses of how the insurrectionist effort to overturn a free and fair US presidential election spread across the world’s largest social network — and how Facebook missed critical warning signs. The report examines how the company was caught flat-footed as the Stop the Steal Facebook group supercharged a movement to undermine democracy, and concludes the company was unprepared to stop people from spreading hate and incitement to violence on its platform.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BBC: US teen’s Snapchat rant reaches Supreme Court in free speech case. “A teenager’s rant that led to her getting kicked off her cheerleading team has reached the US Supreme Court. Brandi Levy sent a profanity-laden post to her friends on Snapchat in 2017, venting her frustrations with cheerleading and her school. But when coaches at the Pennsylvania school discovered the post, she was barred from the squad for a year.”

AP: Database will track officer complaints, disciplinary action. “Alabama will create a database to track disciplinary actions and excessive force complaints against law enforcement officers, a measure aimed at weeding out ‘bad apples’ in the profession.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Getty: Inside the Yearlong Deep-Clean of the Getty Museum. “When the Getty Center reopens, visitors will wander through galleries that have been painstakingly cleaned, rid of any insects, and treated to head off future pest activity. The process took months of deinstalling artworks and methodically cleaning them and the surrounding galleries. The pandemic offered a rare opportunity to work uninterrupted in the galleries for months at a time—an undertaking that would have been difficult if the museum was open to the public.”

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg: The winning entry of the Open Research Challenge (ORC) offers a solution for cleaning paleontological data . “Joe Flannery Sutherland has developed code that will automatically clean taxonomical errors in the Paleobiology Database (PBDB). The database, which is compiled by researchers from all around the world, is used extensively for quantitative analyses of diversification and extinction. It contains more than 1.2 million entries, many of which are erroneous or outdated. The code, developed in the statistics program R, will clean, and ideally replace, incorrect taxonomic and stratigraphic inconsistencies as well as temporal assignments of occurrence data.” Good evening, Internet…

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April 27, 2021 at 01:29AM
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Diplomacy in Cyberspace, Facebook, Oscar Winners, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, April 26, 2021

Diplomacy in Cyberspace, Facebook, Oscar Winners, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, April 26, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

National Security Archive: A Diplomatic Domain? The Evolution of Diplomacy in Cyberspace. “The recent passage of the ‘Cyber Diplomacy Act of 2021’ by the House of Representatives suggests U.S. lawmakers are eager to expand the U.S.’s toolbox for addressing cyber threats to explicitly include diplomacy, according to a compilation of policy records posted today by the nongovernmental National Security Archive. Introduced on the heels of the SolarWinds breach, the bill would establish a new ‘Bureau of International Cyberspace Policy.'”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

NiemanLab: Facebook is going to ask you more often what you want in your News Feed. “Facebook announced a batch of changes in how it organizes your News Feed today, and their organizing principle seems to be: Maybe we should ask people what they want to see?”

CNN: See the complete list of Oscar winners. Also includes the nominees and images for each winner.

USEFUL STUFF

ProPublica: What Forms Do I Need to File My Taxes and Where Can I Get Them?. “For 2021, the tax deadline for individuals was extended to May 17. This list highlights the most common tax forms and which ones you might need, depending on your circumstances.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BBC: Facebook v Apple: The ad tracking row heats up. “A new feature is being introduced to iPhones and iPads this week which is causing a huge rift between Apple and Facebook. It will allow device users to say no to having their data collected by any app. Facebook has been put in a spin by this because user data – and the advertising it can generate – is what makes the company so profitable.”

ABC News (Australia): National Archives of Australia warns historial recordings, films and images could soon be lost . “While the National Archives has long warned that its collection was at risk, it’s the first time it has detailed specific items that could disappear, including recordings from the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, ASIO surveillance footage and original films of early Australian Antarctic research expeditions.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Transparency International: Albania: Alarm Over Indications Of Personal Data Breach, Election Campaign Violations. “On 11 April, an Albanian media portal published a database containing personal data and private information of 910,000 individuals, allegedly maintained by the country’s ruling Socialist Party. It was revealed – and since then confirmed – that ‘patrons’ were assigned to voters who tracked their political preferences. Additional comments, recorded by the patrons, reportedly detail their interactions with citizens, with some instances amounting to possible voter intimidation.”

Sydney Morning Herald: ACCC, Senator Bragg to help small outlets strike Google, Facebook deals. “Google and Facebook are facing the prospect of another crackdown by the competition regulator after smaller independent news outlets raised concerns they were unable to successfully negotiate payment for their articles. Liberal senator Andrew Bragg has separately written to Facebook and Google about the absence of commercial deals with several smaller outlets and will seek to represent their interests to ensure the technology platforms pay for use of content.”

IP Watchdog: Non-Fungible Tokens Force a Copyright Reckoning. “The cycle of copyright law trying, and generally failing, to adapt and keep pace with emerging technology has meant copyright stakeholders have been always at a disadvantage because legal enforcement lagged so far behind innovative infringement. But during a year in which vast swaths of life moved online, the internet has forged and driven to prominence a powerful new tool for protecting copyright owners’ unique assets: the non-fungible token (NFT).”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Wired: NFTs and AI Are Unsettling the Very Concept of History. “The archival world is a world of inadequate budgets and financial constraint, filled with underpaid workers and massive, poorly resourced projects like digital preservation, and the challenging task of digitizing analog materials. Will archives be tempted by the potential upside of NFTs and tokenize digital representations of their crown jewels (or the rights to these assets)? This would worsen an already bad situation, where institutions like our Library of Congress hold physical copies of millions of films, TV programs, and recordings that can’t be touched because someone else holds the copyright.” Good afternoon, Internet…

April 26, 2021 at 11:43PM
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Fireburn, Sports Stats, Athol Shmith Photography, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, April 26, 2021

Fireburn, Sports Stats, Athol Shmith Photography, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, April 26, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Virgin Islands Daily News: Historic prison records reveal more Fireburn queens — and kings. “Virgin Islanders celebrate three heroines of the 1878 labor rebellion on St. Croix known as Fireburn for the torching of plantations across the island in retaliation for Danish oppression. But prison records show there may have been as many as five queens and some men — kings — according to researchers of the Fireburn Files, a historic digital collection dedicated to the riot and its ripple effects.”

Milwaukee Magazine: Aaron Rodgers Just Launched the IMDb for Sports. “The platform went live with a complete roster of NFL, MLB and NBA athlete profiles. It also has an editorial arm, which will regularly publish content that’s exclusive to the site. In advance of its launch, [Online Sports Database] raised $2.5 million in funding that will help the platform expand its offerings in the coming months to include NHL, soccer, UFC, WNBA, PGA, LPGA, cricket and E-Sports, while adding features such as college, high school and retired athlete profiles, historical data and sports betting insights, as well as subscription services.”

National Library of Australia: Zimmermann + Athol Shmith: Fashion Photography. “Elegant and bold, Melbourne photographer Athol Shmith (1914–1990) worked in fashion, theatre and advertising on private commission for decades. He was undoubtedly versatile, and well known as a portraitist and wedding photographer. Yet fashion photography – for magazines, department stores and boutiques – was a speciality…. In 1979, Shmith gave the National Library of Australia a large collection of his prints and negatives, mostly fashion photographs. Some have a relationship to prints in other Australian collections. Others appear to be unique.” What I know about fashion would fit in a thimble but I found Shmith’s work to be mostly really good.

WTTW: Harold Washington’s Speeches Can’t Be Heard, But Now They Can At Least Be Read. “Despite Harold Washington’s reputation as a gifted orator, precious few audio recordings exist of speeches made by the groundbreaking reformer, who served as mayor of Chicago from 1983 until his sudden death in 1987. The Chicago Public Library has now filled a gap in Washington’s legacy by digitizing scores of the mayor’s written speeches, available to the public in a searchable online collection, library officials announced this week.”

EVENTS

NASA: NASA to Air Live Coverage of SpaceX Crew-1 Astronauts’ Return to Earth. “The Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Resilience, is scheduled to undock from the space station to begin the journey home at 7:05 a.m. EDT Wednesday, April 28. NASA and SpaceX are targeting 12:40 p.m. for the splashdown and conclusion of the Crew-1 mission. The return to Earth – and activities leading up to the return – will air live on NASA Television, the NASA App, and the agency’s website.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Mashable: A centuries-old secret society is hanging out in Facebook groups. “Centuries ago, Rosicrucians were only able to maintain their society through their ability to be invisible. But over the past several hundred years, the world has changed — and, along with it, so has the need for Rosicrucians to stay shielded from the public. Now, like much of the rest of society, they’re finding new ways to connect, by pivoting to Facebook, Zoom, and YouTube.”

Jacobin Magazine: Fredrick Brennan Is the Founder of 8chan. Now He Wants to Take It Offline.. “Fredrick Brennan founded the 8chan image board that became home to QAnon conspiracists. Now he’s horrified by the site — and wants it offline. Brennan talks to Bhaskar Sunkara about free speech in the digital age, how 8chan became such a reactionary cesspool, and what we need to do to build a better internet.”

KCTV: Facebook removes page for French town named Bitche. “Sometimes, life can just be a Bitche. The residents of the French town carrying that name thought just that after social media giant Facebook removed Ville de Bitche’s official page from its site last month.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: As Outbreak Rages, India Orders Critical Social Media Posts to Be Taken Down. “The new steps to muzzle online speech deepen a conflict between American social media platforms and Mr. Modi’s government. The two sides have tussled in recent months over a push by India’s government to more strictly police what is said online, a policy that critics say is being used to silence government detractors.”

Bleeping Computer: Google Alerts continues to be a hotbed of scams and malware. “While Google Alerts has been abused for a long time, BleepingComputer has noticed a significant increase in activity over the past couple of weeks. For example, I use Google Alerts to monitor for various terms related to cyberattacks, security incidents, malware, etc. In one particular Google Alert, almost every new article shared with me today by the service led to a scam or malicious website, with two of them shown below.” I’m not seeing that in my Google Alerts – but I am seeing a lot of Web spam.

RESEARCH & OPINION

FedScoop: USPTO chief information officer most excited about new search algorithms . “New search algorithms for relevant prior art most excite the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s CIO right now. USPTO created the machine-learning algorithms to increase the speed at which patents are examined by importing relevant prior art — all information on its claim of originality — into pending applications sent to art units, said Jamie Holcombe.”

The Atlantic: What Facebook Did for Chauvin’s Trial Should Happen All the Time. “Discussion about content moderation tends to focus on binary decisions concerning whether individual pieces of content are left up or taken down. But content moderation is much more about knobs and dials that regulate the overall flow of posts. An individual piece of content is a mere drop in the ocean of Facebook content; the underlying systems that move this content around are the tides. The public discussion about content moderation typically fixates on the drops—what should Facebook have done with Donald Trump’s posts?—but when you’re weathering a storm, what matters is the tides.” Good morning, Internet…

April 26, 2021 at 05:18PM
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Sunday, April 25, 2021

Theater Directors of Color, National Park Service, Greek Pottery, More: Hilariously Lopsided Sunday Evening ResearchBuzz, April 25, 2021

Theater Directors of Color, National Park Service, Greek Pottery, More: Hilariously Lopsided Sunday Evening ResearchBuzz, April 25, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

American Theatre: Seeking a Director of Color? Now There’s a Database for That. “Among the challenges faced by U.S. theatre directors, both practitioners of color and their white counterparts, is the feeding frenzy that can happen when an in-demand director becomes a hot commodity. Directors who toil in obscurity for years can suddenly get a high-profile regional, Off-Broadway, or Broadway gig, and then everyone wants to hire them, whether it’s Sam Gold or Lileana Blain-Cruz. [Kareem] Fahmy said the BIPOC Directors Database could also be used by fellow directors who want to be able to refer directors to qualified colleagues when they can’t take the gig.”

National Park Service: Find your next adventure with the new National Park Service app. “Created by park rangers with visitors in mind, the NPS App gives the public up-to-date information about all 423 national parks in one easy-to-use app. Visitors can download the NPS App in the iOS App Store and Google Play Store to plan a trip, find interactive maps, download maps and tours ahead of time and find things to do and places to visit during National Park Week and beyond.”

University of Missouri Museum of Art and Archaeology: NEW Online Exhibition: Rarely Exhibited Greek Pottery. “This online exhibit, in two installments, illustrates examples from the Museum’s extensive collection of Greek pottery, most of which has not been exhibited in recent history. The first installment encompasses the Bronze Age to the Orientalizing period, ca. 2700–530 BCE.” The quote is from the PDF announcement.

Spotted via Reddit: PixAll. From the announcement: “PixAll was actually born of frustration. I noticed how often I got invited to diversity and inclusion panels but so rarely to game design ones…. So I decided to create a database that all of us can share with non-marginalized people, hopefully answering the questions they’d ask us and letting us focus on the fun part – making and playing games!” There are links here as well as articles, people to follow on social media, useful groups, etc. Plenty of useful information though I think I would have organized and presented it differently.

SHINE: China releases online database of lunar samples. “Researchers and the public can access the Lunar and Deep Space Exploration Scientific Data and Sample Release System via the website … The Chang’e-5 probe, which returned to Earth on December 17, 2020, retrieved a total of 1,731 grams of lunar samples, mainly rocks and soil from the lunar surface.”

National Library of Wales: The National Library of Wales launches on Google Arts & Culture. “Currently there are 190 items from the National Library’s collections available to explore in an online gallery on the Google Arts & Culture website and app, while more items will be added over the coming months…. The Library has also curated 10 digital stories so that audiences can enjoy the nation’s treasures in their historical context, from early manuscripts to contemporary artworks.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

GovExec: Trump, Defying Custom, Hasn’t Given the National Archives Records of His Speeches at Political Rallies. “In the case of modern presidents, for the official record, we rely upon transcriptions of all their speeches collected by the national government. But in the case of Donald Trump, that historical record is likely to have a big gap. Almost 10% of the president’s total public speeches are excluded from the official record. And that means a false picture of the Trump presidency is being created in the official record for posterity.”

Culpeper Star-Exponent: UVa looks to provide digitized context to historic features on Grounds. “People soon may hear all about Homer’s statue on The Lawn at the University of Virginia with a simple scan of a QR code on their smartphone. In fact, they may hear conflicting interpretations of the statue, The Lawn and UVa as the university seeks to provide context to its memorials, statues, plaques and buildings.”

InsideHook: From Courtney Barnett to Neil Young: The Wild, Wonderful World of Internet Music Archives. “For just about as long as the internet’s been around, there have been websites devoted to archiving a particular band’s touring history. In the early days, most of them were run by fans of jam bands like The Grateful Dead or Phish; for a genre where no two performances of any given song are exactly alike, it made sense that fans would need a place to help them track down a particular live performance, swap bootlegs or peruse decades of setlists. But in recent years, many musicians — including plenty who exist entirely outside of the jam scene — have taken matters into their own hands and launched their own online archives.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Regulatory Review: The Regulation of Stolen Cultural Artifacts. “After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, looters stole thousands of Iraqi artifacts, which may now be purchased online for relatively low prices. Although the United States has returned many of these artifacts, thousands have slipped through the cracks…. A patchwork of laws and international agreements currently governs the transport and sale of illegally obtained cultural artifacts in the United States. The National Stolen Property Act (NSPA) makes it illegal to transport stolen artifacts across state lines but only covers items worth more than $5,000.” Good evening, Internet….

April 26, 2021 at 02:34AM
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Iowa Women’s History, ASL Bibles, FeedBurner, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, April 25, 2021

Iowa Women’s History, ASL Bibles, FeedBurner, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, April 25, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Gazette: New website will honor Iowa women elected to state, federal offices. “The website highlights women who have been elected to Iowa state and federal offices and who were part of the suffrage movement in Iowa. It is the culmination of months of work with help from hundreds of people including those featured on the website and those behind the scenes.”

ABC 15 Arizona: Inside the massive effort to translate the Bible into American Sign Language. “It is a book that has been translated into thousands of languages. Yet one of the biggest challenges churches all over the country have faced is translating the book into a language the deaf community can understand. Within the last year, the Bible was finally available in American Sign Language. It took Deaf Missions Ministry and their partners 39 years to complete the translation, and it took the Jehovah’s Witnesses 15 years to put together the New World Translation of the Bible.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Google’s FeedBurner moves to a new infrastructure but loses its email subscription service . “Google today announced that it is moving FeedBurner to a new infrastructure but also deprecating its email subscription service. If you’re an internet user of a certain age, chances are you used Google’s FeedBurner to manage the RSS feeds of your personal blogs and early podcasts at some point. During the Web 2.0 era, it was the de facto standard for feed management and analytics, after all. Founded in 2004, with Dick Costolo as one of its co-founders (before he became Twitter’s CEO in 2010), it was acquired by Google in 2007.” There are still about 2000 of y’all who read ResearchBuzz via FeedBurner. I will be exporting the subscriber list and contacting you directly.

Input Magazine: DoNotPay’s new tool makes your photos undetectable to facial recognition software. “With the new Photo Ninja feature, users upload a photo of themselves to DoNotPay and its algorithms insert hidden changes that confuse facial recognition tools. This type of masked picture can be referred to as an ‘adversarial example,’ exploiting the way artificial intelligence algorithms work to disrupt their behavior.”

CNN: App makers blast Apple and Google in Senate hearing on app store policies. “Apple and Google faced a battery of accusations on Wednesday from prominent app developers, including Spotify and Tile, who alleged that the large tech platforms have abused their dominance and harmed competition. In a lengthy Senate hearing, the app makers said Apple and Google’s rules surrounding in-app payments and app updates allow the tech giants to choke off rival services, and that they engage in retaliation when app developers refuse to comply.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: The Slander Industry. “To get slander removed, many people hire a ‘reputation management’ company. In my case, it was going to cost roughly $20,000. We soon discovered a secret, hidden behind a smokescreen of fake companies and false identities. The people facilitating slander and the self-proclaimed good guys who help remove it are often one and the same.”

Yahoo News: Report: China, Russia fueling QAnon conspiracy theories. “Foreign-based actors, principally in China and Russia, are spreading online disinformation rooted in QAnon conspiracy theories, fueling a movement that has become a mounting domestic terrorism threat, according to new analysis of online propaganda by a security firm. The analysis by the Soufan Center, a New York-based research firm focused on national security threats, found that nearly one-fifth of 166,820 QAnon-related Facebook posts between January 2020 and the end of February 2021 originated from overseas administrators.”

TorrentFreak: RIP: The Uncanny Business of Dead Celebrity Endorsements on Social Media. “The dead are more alive than ever. Thanks to social media and inherited ‘intellectual property rights,’ stars of the past enjoy digital immortality. Icons including Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and John Lennon remain active on blue-checkmarked social media accounts that are often controlled by for-profit corporations, which don’t require a family tie to the deceased.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Stars and Stripes: Facebook says it halts hackers tied to Palestinian security. “Facebook said Wednesday it has broken up a hacker network used by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ intelligence service in an attempt to keep tabs on journalists, human rights activists and government critics.”

Associated Press: Wisconsin newspapers sue Google, Facebook. “A group of small Wisconsin newspapers have filed a federal lawsuit claiming Google and Facebook’s control of digital advertising threatens the publications’ existence and violates antitrust law.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

NextGov: National Archives Wants to Use AI to Improve ‘Unsophisticated Search’ and Create ‘Self-Describing Records’. “The National Archives and Records Administration—the keepers of all government records—manages millions of digital records. But users have trouble finding the records they’re looking for, and the current manual metadata tagging processes aren’t sufficient. The agency recently held a virtual informational day outlining its goals for integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning into two ongoing projects: personalizing the catalog search function and automating metadata tagging.” Good afternoon, Internet…

April 25, 2021 at 10:52PM
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Saturday, April 24, 2021

Lost Pet Facial Recognition, Underrepresented Composers, Iowa Writers’ Workshop Datasets, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, April 24, 2021

Lost Pet Facial Recognition, Underrepresented Composers, Iowa Writers’ Workshop Datasets, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, April 24, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

PR Newswire: Petco Love Launches Game-Changing Centralized Solution To Help Reunite Lost Pets With Their Families (PRESS RELEASE). “Animal welfare organizations across the country are joining forces with Petco Love, formerly known as the Petco Foundation, a national non-profit working to lead and inspire change for animals, to change the outcome for missing dogs and cats. Starting today, approximately 1,000 shelters and rescues in both cities and rural areas across the U.S., will adopt the searchable database that uses facial recognition technology to help reunite lost pets with their families should they ever go missing.” The public can also search the database or upload images of animals they found.

The Violin Channel: American Viola Society Creates a Database for Underrepresented Composers. “The goal is to amplify the voices and music that have been overruled by white, Western Euro-centric, male narratives and compositions. Standard repertoire can be re-evaluated and examined through a more culturally inclusive and broad lens. The database information page offers plenty of information to consider when going into programming and performing a piece, or pieces, by a BIPOC composer.” Unfortunately this article doesn’t really get into what the database offers. Allow me to point you toward a September 2020 article in the Daily Wildcat with a more extensive background.

University of Iowa: The Program Era Project: Limning the depths of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s literary influence. “The Program Era Project, or PEP, uses data visualization and other computer-assisted methods to track the aesthetic and cultural influence of the Workshop since its founding in 1936. In particular, writers affiliated with the Workshop, both as alumni and/or professors, have gone on to found or teach at many other creative writing programs around the nation…. The PEP, supported by the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio at UI Libraries, has compiled extensive datasets that track those networks of Workshop-affiliated writers.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: How to Set Up Instagram’s New Anti-Harassment Tools. “Instagram is adding two new anti-harassment tools aimed at cutting down abusive messages you might receive on the platform. Here’s a quick look at how to set them up once they arrive.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

IOL: Significant archives may have been lost in Cape Town’s fire. Why they matter so much. “A wildfire on the slopes of Table Mountain has wreaked havoc at the University of Cape Town (UCT) campus. Among the sites of historical significance that have been damaged is the Jagger Library. The library houses rare and specialist collections, such as the important African Studies collections. The Conversation Africa’s Nontobeko Mtshali asked UCT academic Shannon Morreira to share her insights on what the loss means for the historical records held by the university.”

The Diplomat: Social Media Is Blurring the Lines of National Sovereignty. “During the Cold War, Soviet citizens were banned from traveling outside their homeland. Nowadays, for economic reasons, authoritarian states have greater motivations for tolerating, and sometimes even encouraging, their populations’ mobility. Online communication has become a platform from which anyone can speak. But equally, integrated communication may provide new opportunities for governments to suppress voices abroad. Unless regulated, surveillance technologies and disinformation techniques will only become more effective in manipulating or silencing public opinion.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: AirDrop could be hacked to reveal personal information, researchers say. “Apple’s popular AirDrop feature for sharing files may be vulnerable to hacking attempts, according to security researchers at a German university. In a post published Friday, researchers at Technische Universitat Darmstadt said that a nearby stranger could discover the phone number and email of an AirDrop user because of a privacy gap in the feature.”

KOMO News: Mental health apps may expose more than you want them to. “The apps are becoming more popular and offer a range of options, from guided meditations to appointments with a licensed therapist. But the mental health apps aren’t always covered by the same medical privacy laws that shield information shared with medical care providers in person. When federal HIPPA rules do apply, they may not cover all the data collected by digital apps.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TNW: 60% of the world is online — 10 big takeaways on the state of the internet in 2021. “The new Digital 2021 April Global Statshot Report – published in partnership between Hootsuite and We Are Social – reveals that more than 6 in 10 people on Earth now use the internet. Internet users have grown by more than 330 million over the past year, reaching a total of more than 4.7 billion at the start of April 2021.” Good afternoon, Internet…

April 25, 2021 at 01:25AM
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Removing Ocean Plastic, Netherlands Slavery History, Ireland History, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, April 24, 2021

Removing Ocean Plastic, Netherlands Slavery History, Ireland History, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, April 24, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

This is from November, but I just found it and it’s so cool I’m excepting it in. Duke University: New Webpage Highlights 52 Technologies to Fight Plastic Pollution in Our Oceans. “Duke University researchers have created a new online resource designed to help local governments, conservation groups, businesses and other stakeholders identify the best technologies to clean up plastic pollution in our oceans or prevent it from getting there in the first place. The Plastic Pollution Prevention and Collection Technology Inventory includes 52 different technologies, from solar-powered catamarans that use conveyor belts to scoop up floating debris, to underwater bubble tubes that force submerged bits of plastic to the surface where they can more easily be collected.”

NL Times: Massive archive of Dutch slavery past published in digital archive. “The national archive of the Netherlands launched a virtual archive containing around 1.9 million documents about the Dutch history of slavery. The archives consist of restored material from the West India Company, the commercial slave trader Middelburgse Commercie Compagnie, the Suriname Society and documents about the Dutch occupation of the coast of Guinea. Caretaker education minister Ingrid van Engelshoven launched the archive on Friday. It is mainly comprise slave purchase records, ship logs, plantation lists, cargo overviews and invoices. Personal letters are also included, though they have not been fully investigated.”

IrishCentral: “Ambitious” digitization of Tipperary’s Famine-era records underway. “Tipperary County Council Library Service holds a vast collection of Poor Law Union Minute Books, Rate Books, and Workhouse Registers, encompassing virtually the entire county. In January, staff at Tipperary County Council Library Service undertook an ambitious project to commence digitizing its Famine-related Minute Books from the Poor Law Unions in Borrisokane, Cashel, Clogheen, Clonmel, Nenagh, Roscrea, Thurles, and Tipperary.” It looks like the site will launch in mid-May.

Yale News: Songs of survival from Yale’s Fortunoff Archive of Holocaust testimonies. “‘Shtubuneltsto’ is revived on ‘Cry My Heart, Cry! Songs from Testimonies, Volume 2,’ the latest album of music drawn from the Fortunoff Archive’s collection of more than 4,400 video testimonies. In sharing their stories, the survivors occasionally recalled songs or poetry that touched them before or during the Holocaust. The new album and its 2019 predecessor, ‘Where is Our Homeland?,’ transform these memories into stylistically diverse collections of songs that showcase the rich cultures of the people who created, sang, and enjoyed them.” The music is free to listen to and there will be a virtual concert on April 28.

Harvard Crimson: Harvard Dance Project: A Virtual Premiere to Life-Changing Performances. “Creating art collaboratively is more difficult now than ever before. Despite the obstacles, the Harvard Dance Project launched its digital archive on April 15 consisting of month-long access to debuting performances, this time in a virtual format instead of a live premiere.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Religion News Service: Likes and prayers: Facebook tests new ‘prayer post’ feature. “A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to Religion News Service that the social media platform is currently testing the prayer post feature. The idea for prayer posts grew out of the myriad ways users have connected over Facebook while distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the spokesperson.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Roll Call: Veterans hit by huge pandemic-related records backlog. “Since the beginning of the pandemic, the [National Personnel Records Center] has sat empty, with employees working remotely. And records requests, most of which require someone to physically search for documents within the building, have been piling up. Now, the backlog has grown to more than 499,000 requests, according to a spokesperson for the National Archives, which oversees the NPRC. The National Archives estimates that it will take 18 to 24 months to clear the backlog once the center is staffed at full capacity.”

NBC News: Census settlement: House seat numbers can’t be released before next week. “The numbers used for deciding how many congressional seats each state gets can’t be released before next Monday, according to an agreement that settles litigation between the U.S. Census Bureau and a coalition of local governments and civil rights groups. The agreement filed in court on Thursday also requires the statistical agency to provide regular updates to the civil rights groups and local governments on the quality of the data used for drawing congressional and legislative districts.”

Motherboard: Bugs Allowed Hackers to Dox John Deere Tractor Owners. “A pair of bugs in John Deere’s apps and website could have allowed hackers to find and download the personal data of all owners of the company’s farming vehicles and equipment, according to a security researcher who found the vulnerabilities.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Penn State News: Penn State center to advance AI tools to accelerate scientific progress. “A recently approved research center will unite Penn State researchers to explore the use of artificial intelligence as a tool to dramatically accelerate the scientific process, an initiative that the center’s organizers say could rapidly accelerate scientific progress.” Good morning, Internet…

April 24, 2021 at 07:25PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/3tQfw4b