New researches

Monday, August 9, 2021

Good Neighbor Council, Storm Surges, ISS Missions, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, August 9, 2021

Good Neighbor Council, Storm Surges, ISS Missions, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, August 9, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

State Archives of North Carolina: Good Neighbor Council Digital Collection. “On January 18, 1963, Governor Terry Sanford established the Good Neighbor Council. The council consisted of 24 citizens appointed by the governor. David S. Coltrane served as the first Chairman and Executive Director until his death in 1968. The two main missions of the council were to encourage the employment of qualified people without regard to race, and to urge youth to become better trained for employment.”

University of Central Florida: UCF Researchers Create Global Storm Surge Database. “The researchers also visualized the data by creating an online map that displays 802 tide gauges from around the world and all relevant data corresponding to each tide gauge covering the entire 1900s and most of the 1800s. Users can click on the tide gauge and download multiple daily maximum surge datasets.”

EVENTS

Digital Trends: How to watch Northrop Grumman launch its 16th cargo mission to the ISS this week. “This Tuesday, August 10, an uncrewed Cygnus spacecraft will be launched on a resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS), packed with scientific research and supplies for the crew. NASA will be streaming the launch of the craft so you can watch along live at home, and we’ve got all the details.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

New Zealand Herald: Saints be praised: Social media giant Facebook rolls out a prayer tool. “The social media giant has rolled out a new prayer request feature, a tool embraced by some religious leaders as a cutting-edge way to engage the faithful online. Others are eyeing it warily as they weigh its usefulness against the privacy and security concerns they have with Facebook.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Calvert Journal: Follow @theneweastisqueer, the account celebrating past and present LGBTQ+ creatives from Eastern Europe. “The platform was created to show that ‘the New East is, and has always been, queer,’ through interviews and profiles of figures from a mix of generations. The artists featured include Lulla La Polaca, a Polish 82-year-old drag queen, and Admina, a non-binary techno artist and DJ who has been storming Romania’s clubbing scene.”

The Orange Leader: USM Professor, Students Conduct Examination of Historic Louisiana Cemetery. “A geography professor at The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) Gulf Park in Long Beach and six of his students are engaged in a project collecting information about a historic Louisiana city cemetery, using the latest technology featuring geographic information systems (GIS) and ground penetrating radar (GPR).”

Caracas Chronicles: How to Navigate Twitterzuela. “…in 2011, a report by Comscore showed that Venezuela held the fifth highest Twitter penetration rate in the world. In a month, 21% of internet users in Venezuela passed through the Twitter website. As the crisis in Venezuela developed, this early adoption was combined with multiple historical and political factors.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NPR: Your Facebook Account Was Hacked. Getting Help May Take Weeks — Or $299. “In July, NPR received 19 emails from listeners complaining that their Facebook accounts had been hacked or disabled. People share similar tales of woe on Reddit forums and Twitter every day. Some became so desperate that they shelled out hundreds of dollars to buy a virtual reality headset in an attempt to get Facebook to restore their accounts.”

InfoSecurity Magazine: #DEFCON: A Bad eBook Can Take Over Your Kindle (or Worse). “The primary purpose of the Kindle is to enable users to read books. Slava Makkaveev, security researcher at Check Point Software Technologies, had another idea, though; he wanted to see if he could load a book that would exploit the Kindle. At the DEF CON 29 conference, Makkaveev outlined the process by which he was able to exploit a Kindle with a malicious eBook that he was able to create.”

Wired: All the Ways Spotify Tracks You—and How to Stop It . “Of Spotify’s 365 million monthly users, 165 million of them subscribe to not listen to ads. The other 200 million put up with them. So how much does Spotify really know, and how can you limit its data collection?”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Science: Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free to all. “The United Kingdom currently has one of the highest rates of open-access publication in the world, with many researchers posting their research papers on websites that make them publicly available for free. But the country’s leading funding agency today announced a new policy that will push open access even further by mandating that all research it funds must be freely available for anyone to read upon publication.”

New York Times: YouTube Is Underwhelming. “It’s hard to imagine the internet without YouTube. Buying the video site in its relative infancy was one of the smartest things Google ever did. But after nearly 15 years of being part of Google, the most successful money machine in internet history, it’s still not clear that YouTube has fulfilled its financial potential both for itself and everyone involved in its vast digital economy.” Good morning, Internet…

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

August 9, 2021 at 05:32PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/2VIXDIg

Sunday, August 8, 2021

Google Play, Google Hangouts, TikTok Beauty Filters, More: Sunday Evening ResearchBuzz, August 8, 2021

Google Play, Google Hangouts, TikTok Beauty Filters, More: Sunday Evening ResearchBuzz, August 8, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Wired: What You Should Know About the Google Play Store Changes. “GOOGLE IS INTRODUCING a major shift in the way that apps work on Android—and while the changes might not be too noticeable to consumers, it’s important to be aware of what’s happening and why, if you’re a user of Google’s mobile operating system.”

Gizmodo: Google Is Signing Out Free Hangouts Users on Mobile, Gets Closer to Finally Killing the Thing . “It’s been nearly an entire year since we started talking about how Google Hangouts was officially set to disappear. Since then, it seems like we’ve been repeating the same thing every few months, only for Hangouts to stubbornly persist living. If apps could talk, Hangouts would probably declare, ‘what is dead may never die.’ However, Google on Friday took one more slow step toward shutting off the lights at Hangouts for good.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Mashable: TikTok beauty filters can be super realistic—unless you’re a person of color . “When I first came across the Glow Look filter on TikTok, I dragged my self-absorbed ass into the video maker to try it on. I was expecting to be wowed by my own hotness, just like all the other girls on my For You Page. Instead, I tapped the filter on, and immediately guffawed. It looked ridiculous, to say the least. The enlarged, bright blue eyes, flushed cheeks, and noticeably thinner nose looked extremely out of place on my Vietnamese face.”

PC Magazine: Virtual Clothing: A Waste of Money or a Way to Save the Planet in Style?. “A Gucci bag going for several thousand dollars is not news. But a Gucci bag that you can only wear in the metaverse going for more than its IRL counterpart is certainly eye-catching.”

Stylist: Archaeology is trending on TikTok – here’s how to make it your new hobby . “From verified accounts that share videos about new finds and favourite artefacts, to videos of people metal detecting and a plethora of hilarious archaeology-themed memes, it seems plenty of students, academics and eager hobbyists are finding that #archaeologytiktok is a great space to share their enthusiasm for digging up old stuff and working out what it can tell us about the history of humankind.” An interesting, informative article saddled with an absolutely wretched headline.

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Actively exploited bug bypasses authentication on millions of routers. “Threat actors actively exploit a critical authentication bypass vulnerability impacting home routers with Arcadyan firmware to take them over and deploy Mirai botnet malicious payloads. The vulnerability tracked as CVE-2021-20090 is a critical path traversal vulnerability (rated 9.9/10) in the web interfaces of routers with Arcadyan firmware that could allow unauthenticated remote attackers to bypass authentication.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Fast Company: This is where hateful trolls go after they are banned from mainstream social media. “Ever wonder what happens to Twitter or Facebook users after they’re thrown out for hate speech? A team of researchers from Germany, the U.K., and the United States found out. Their research process was creative: They gathered 29 million posts from Gab, a right-wing platform known for its neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists, and anti-Semitism, and then backtracked to find users’ other profiles on Twitter or Reddit, some of which had been suspended.”

Times of Israel: New Google project in Israel aims to use AI to help detect colon cancer. “Google’s Verily Life Sciences has said it will open a research and development center in Israel that will focus on applying artificial intelligence technology to biomedical problems. The R&D center will move forward with research conducted by Google Health and the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, Verily said on Thursday.”

dot LA: Venture Cash Is Pouring Into AI that Can Diagnose Diseases. Doctors Aren’t Sure They Can Trust It.. “Beyond its most promising attributes, AI-driven technology could also dramatically decrease wait times at hospitals and doctors’ offices by automating some of the most tedious work, allowing doctors to see and treat more patients. But critics of the unregulated technology say results can be inconsistent.”

OTHER STUFF I THINK IS COOL

Digital Trends: Frantic Fanfic is a party game about writing terrible fan faction Typo in headline. “…at its most basic, Frantic Fanfic allows a group of friends to each write down character names that will then be shuffled around, names will be chosen by the group, and then each player will be prompted to write a different section of several fan fictions using the chosen characters under a time limit. Once every section of each fan fiction has been written, the group will then be prompted to read each out loud.” Good evening, Internet…

August 9, 2021 at 05:42AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/2VEl5GK

Livestreamer Music, Google, Facebook, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 8, 2021

Livestreamer Music, Google, Facebook, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 8, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: How to Play Music on Your Livestream Without Getting Banned. “Machine learning has helped solve many of our biggest tech-related problems, and now it can help you find and create auto-generating, royalty-free music to play on your videos and livestreams so you won’t get hit with a copyright violation.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BBC: Larry Page: Google co-founder granted New Zealand residency. “Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and one of the world’s richest men, has been granted New Zealand residency under a category for wealthy investors. Applicants are required to invest at least NZ$10m ($7m, £5m) in New Zealand over three years. Mr Page entered New Zealand in January, when its borders were still closed because of Covid-19.”

Bloomberg: The Woman Who Did Facebook’s Racial Audit Is About to Be Really Busy. “[Laura] Murphy spent most of her career navigating politics and policy, but recently she’s taken her talent to the corporate world, moderating conflicts between companies and advocates who criticize their impact on racial and social justice. She’s emerged as a pioneer of the corporate civil rights audit, a new tool for getting companies to confront their role in perpetuating racial disparities.”

New York Times: Oil producers used Facebook to counter President Biden’s clean energy message, a study shows.. “Soon after Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a presidential candidate, released his $2 trillion climate plan last year that promised to escalate the use of clean energy in the United States, the world’s major oil and gas dialed up their presence on Facebook. Overnight on Facebook’s U.S. platforms, 25 of the biggest oil and gas producers, industry lobby groups and advocacy organizations unleashed a surge in ads promoting fossil fuels, according to ad spending data analyzed by InfluenceMap, a London-based watchdog that tracks corporate influence on climate policy.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Wired: AI Wrote Better Phishing Emails Than Humans in a Recent Test. “NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING continues to find its way into unexpected corners. This time, it’s phishing emails. In a small study, researchers found that they could use the deep learning language model GPT-3, along with other AI-as-a-service platforms, to significantly lower the barrier to entry for crafting spearphishing campaigns at a massive scale.”

Bleeping Computer: Microsoft Edge just got a ‘Super Duper Secure Mode’ upgrade. “Microsoft has announced that the Edge Vulnerability Research team is experimenting with a new feature dubbed ‘Super Duper Secure Mode’ and designed to bring security improvements without significant performance losses. When enabled, the new Microsoft Edge Super Duper Secure Mode will remove Just-In-Time Compilation (JIT) from the V8 processing pipeline, reducing the attack surface threat actors can use to hack into Edge users’ systems.”

The Verge: Apple places female engineering program manager on administrative leave after tweeting about sexism in the office. “Apple has placed senior engineering program manager Ashley Gjøvik on indefinite administrative leave after she tweeted about sexism in the office. The company is currently investigating claims Gjøvik made about a hostile work environment.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Daring Fireball: Apple’s New ‘Child Safety’ Initiatives, and the Slippery Slope. “My first advice is to read Apple’s own high-level description of the features, which ends with links to detailed technical documentation regarding the encryption and techniques Apple is employing in the implementations, and ‘technical assessments’ from three leading researchers in cryptography and computer vision.”

Protocol: Want to succeed on GitHub? Your odds are better if you’re white. . “Software developers with white-sounding names may have more success on GitHub than developers whose names are perceived as Black, Hispanic or Asian-Pacific Islander, according to a recently published study.”

Vietnam Net: Vietnam looks to become AI hub in ASEAN by 2030. “The Vietnamese Government has issued a national strategy on the research, development and application of artificial intelligence (AI) till 2030 with a view to gradually turning Vietnam into an innovation and AI hub in ASEAN and the world.” Good afternoon, Internet…

August 8, 2021 at 11:43PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/3Cw3UZ2

Facebook, OneNote, VR Fitness, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, August 8, 2021

Facebook, OneNote, VR Fitness, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, August 8, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Facebook restores policy it ‘lost’ three years ago. “Last month, Facebook’s Oversight Board chastised the company for losing an important policy for three years. At the center of the ruling was an Instagram post about Abdullah Öcalan, which encouraged people to talk about his political imprisonment.”

SlashGear: Microsoft is giving OneNote a fresh design and version tweak. “During the pandemic, many people who never used Microsoft OneNote in their working lives have begun using the application to take notes and to view shared notes from their supervisors in many companies. With the increased popularity of OneNote, Microsoft has taken the time to talk about some changes coming to the application for Windows over the next year. The updates include a major visual refresh for the service.”

USEFUL STUFF

Search Engine Journal: Facebook Video Tips: 15 Ideas for More Engagement. “Creating a message that captivates people is critical. The most crucial factor when it comes to creating engaging Facebook videos is exactly that: engage the user. And you have just seconds to do it. Here are a few methods that can result in greater overall engagement for your Facebook videos.”

Lifehacker: What I’ve Learned About Working Out in VR. “I set out to learn whether virtual reality games can give you a good workout, and last week you heard about a bunch of my favorites. Now that I’ve adventured through the virtual world, I have returned to you with opinions.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Arizona State University: ASU Library awarded $249K digital preservation grant. “Stacey Erdman, digital preservation and curation officer and acting digital repository manager for the ASU Library, will serve as the principal investigator of the three-year grant and manager of the multi-organizational project, which will deliver an innovative digital preservation training program to practicing librarians and archivists struggling to provide ongoing care for their digital collections.”

How-To Geek: The First Website: How the Web Looked 30 Years Ago. “Titled ‘World Wide Web,’ the world’s first public website served as a bare-bones introduction to the concept of the web itself for those outside of CERN who might have been interested in the technology. Amazingly, CERN still hosts a copy of the site that you can view in your modern browser, which reportedly dates to some time in 1992. Sadly, though, the original December 1990 version is lost to history.”

The Drum: China explores restricting social media algorithms to promote ‘culture and art reviews’. “China is looking at how it can limit the role of algorithms in content distribution to align online content with the state’s agenda in order to shape the country’s minds and mainstream views.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Techdirt: Home Depot Tech Will Brick Power Tools If They’re Stolen. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? . “Thanks to internet connectivity, hardware you own can be bricked or downgraded to the point where you lose essential features. Or, just as often, obnoxious DRM means you have to jump through all kinds of bizarre hoops to actually use the thing you thought you owned, whether that’s Keurig using DRM to prevent you from using competing coffee pods, to printer manufacturers using DRM to keep you from buying cheaper cartridges. Now Home Depot is experimenting further with DRM at the point of sale.”

The Verge: Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow lawsuit has unearthed a huge problem with streaming. “This summer’s biggest Hollywood attraction is a multimillion-dollar battle between two of the industry’s best-known players: Scarlett Johansson and Disney. Johansson sued Disney last week over its day-and-date release of her Marvel superhero film Black Widow, which put the movie on Disney Plus the same day it hit theaters, potentially depriving her of a huge box-office-infused paycheck. The aftermath has been chaotic, but it’s more importantly illuminated the myriad ways that streaming has forever changed the way we experience movies and the implications for the creatives and talent who make them.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Limerick Post: MIC researcher awarded multi-national funding for innovative research into online communications. “MARY Immaculate College (MIC) Applied Linguistics researcher, Dr Anne O’Keeffe, has been awarded significant funding to investigate whether the sudden shift to virtual communications in the workplace has impacted how we communicate.”

The Next Web: Algorithms are providing a way to fairly select citizens’ assemblies. “In the UK and France, for example, citizens’ assemblies have been convened to deliberate responses to climate change. But selecting the members of these bodies is a complicated task. Ideally, citizens’ assemblies should be both representative and randomly selected. Balancing these two requirements is challenging as the volunteers tend to be unrepresentative of the whole population.”

SEO Roundtable: Microsoft Bing Announces Make Every Feature Binary (MEB). “Microsoft announced their next AI model, a large-scale sparse model that complements our production Transformer models, they are calling MEB or ‘Make Every Feature Binary.’ Microsoft said this makes the search results on Bing more relevant. In fact, MEB is running in production for 100 percent of Bing searches, in all regions and languages.” Good morning, Internet…

August 8, 2021 at 05:25PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/3fGs1du

Saturday, August 7, 2021

NASA Perseverance Rover, WhatsApp, Web Crawling, More: Saturday Evening ResearchBuzz, August 7, 2021

NASA Perseverance Rover, WhatsApp, Web Crawling, More: Saturday Evening ResearchBuzz, August 7, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Screen Rant: Track NASA’s Perseverance Rover With This Interactive Map. “For those who want to see exactly where the NASA Perseverance rover has been in its search for life on Mars, NASA has developed an interactive map. One of the many goals of the rover mission is to find ancient life on Mars. To do that, the rover will make quite a long journey across the Jezero Crater, covering different terrains and taking some incredible shots along the way.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Mashable: WhatsApp won’t use Apple’s child abuse image scanner, citing vague privacy fears. “Just because Apple has a plan — and a forthcoming security feature — designed to combat the spread of child sex abuse images, that doesn’t mean everyone’s getting on board. WhatsApp boss Will Cathcart joined the chorus of Apple critics on Friday, stating in no uncertain terms that the Facebook-owned messaging app won’t be adopting this new feature once it launches.”

Search Engine Roundtable: Official Google Crawling Exam. “Google has posted an exam to test your SEO knowledge on crawling. Google said this is to test your knowledge on how Google crawls and indexes websites. This is a true and false test, with explanations on why the answer is right or wrong.”

USEFUL STUFF

The Guardian: Avoiding recipe regret: how to record and revive your family recipes. “If some of your family recipes remain unwritten or are scribbled on scraps of paper, here are some ways to record, revive and preserve them to avoid recipe regret for yourself, and future generations.”

MakeUseOf: How to Set Up Your Own Website in 2 Hours or Less. “About a decade ago, if you wanted to build even the most basic websites, you would have needed to spend lots of hours writing HTML, CSS, and Javascript—or you would have had to pay someone to do it for you. Thankfully, times have changed, and you can have a stunning website up and running in very little time. If you follow all the steps we’ll share with you, you shouldn’t need any more than two hours!” Okay I HATE this lede. I was running a perfectly fine Web site in 1998 – over two decades ago – using Microsoft FrontPage. It was a WYSIWYG editor and my basic HTML skills were only required for doing a little code cleanup (WYSIWYG code was awful back then.) But the rest of the article is quite good. If you ever wanted to create a Web site and needed an article to lay out the general steps you need to take to just go for it, here you go.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BBC: How a fake network pushes pro-China propaganda. “A sprawling network of more than 350 fake social media profiles is pushing pro-China narratives and attempting to discredit those seen as opponents of China’s government, according to a new study. The aim is to delegitimise the West and boost China’s influence and image overseas, the report by the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) suggests.”

CNBC: Google is planning a new Silicon Valley campus with hardware hub, plans show. “Google is planning yet another Silicon Valley campus, which will sit adjacent to a new center partly devoted to hardware, according to preliminary plans obtained by CNBC.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Engadget: Twitter appoints ‘grievance officer’ to obey India’s internet rules. “Twitter is scrambling to reassure India and reclaim its liability protections for user-made content. Bloomberg reports that Twitter has told an Indian court it appointed grievance and nodal officers to honor new rules demanding local full-time staff to handle handle issues like compliance and law enforcement matters.”

CNET: US taps tech giants to help fight ransomware, cyberattacks. “The initiative, called the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, was unveiled Thursday by Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security. The effort, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, will initially focus on combating ransomware and developing a framework to deal with cyberattacks that affect providers of cloud services.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Recode: “People do not trust that Facebook is a healthy ecosystem”. “New York University researcher Laura Edelson is at the center of the latest major Facebook controversy over the misinformation that’s eroding our democracy and encouraging Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy. Earlier this week, Facebook abruptly shut down the personal Facebook accounts and research tools of Edelson and two of her colleagues at the NYU Ad Observatory, which studies political advertisements and misinformation on the platform.” Good evening, Internet…

August 8, 2021 at 05:18AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/37qwFYy

Mobile Broadband, CBP Encounters, Robocalls, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 7, 2021

Mobile Broadband, CBP Encounters, Robocalls, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 7, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Route Fifty: FCC Releases First U.S. Mobile Broadband Map “The Federal Communications Commission released a new map Friday detailing where the nation’s four largest mobile carriers provide voice and data service, part of a broader effort to improve broadband and internet service across the United States. The map shows where Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile US and UScellular offer LTE voice and data coverage, providing a way for consumers to search coverage by a specific address or geographic area.”

CBS News: ACLU arm publishes database tracking fatal encounters with Customs and Border Protection. “The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas has identified 177 fatal encounters with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel dating back to January 2010 – including 34 deaths in custody. A new database launched Friday by the non-profit organization tracks fatal encounters with CBP officials, including U.S. Border Patrol agents.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

PR Newswire: Total Robocalls Decrease by 3% in the First Month of STIR/SHAKEN Release (PRESS RELEASE). “RoboKiller, the app that eliminates 99% of spam calls and text messages, reveals Americans received an estimated 5.74 billion spam calls in July 2021—a 3% decrease from June. Spam text volume also increased to 7.1 billion spam texts for July, a 5% increase from June.”

TechRadar: Google just got a mystery wireless streaming device approved by regulators. “It looks like there’s yet more new hardware on the way from Google: following the unveiling of its revamped Nest smart home gadgets, another ‘wireless streaming device’ has passed through the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the US.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Conversation: Secret history: the release of the Mountbatten archives and the fight to access royal diaries. “An immense trove of the most important royal historical material for decades has quietly been released in the United Kingdom. These are the diaries of Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife Lady Edwina, from the 1920s until 1968…. But the release of this material doesn’t just shed light on the royal family. It again highlights the significant barriers to accessing our history; specifically, the claimed ‘convention of royal secrecy’ that imposes strict secrecy over royal communications across the Commonwealth nations.”

Cornell Chronicle: History, music, physics harmonize in keyboard project. “Closely allied with the Cornell-based Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, the leading international organization for historical keyboard studies, the [Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards] brings together scholars and musicians from across the globe for its programs on the long history of keyboard music and instruments, technologies, repertoires and aesthetics – from the baroque organ to the player piano to the Moog synthesizer.”

CNN: Nigeria’s social media comedians are making laughter pay. “In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, an emerging crop of young comics are leveraging social media to create video content that makes people laugh — and makes money. What started as a hobby is now turning into a lucrative business opportunity. By leaning on the growing internet access across the continent, these comics are creating characters and skits on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter that can be sold to brands.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reporters Without Borders: NSO/Pegasus: 17 journalists from 7 countries join RSF’s complaint in Paris and before the UN. “Seventeen journalists from seven countries who were listed as potential or actual victims of Pegasus spyware have filed complaints with prosecutors in Paris, against NSO Group and all other persons the investigation will identify. Their complaints complement the one Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and two journalists with French and Moroccan dual nationality already filed on 20 July. RSF has also referred their cases to the United Nations.”

Bleeping Computer: Google expects delays in enforcing 2FA for Chrome extension devs. “Google says that enforcing two-step verification on Google accounts of Chrome Web Store developers will take longer than expected. As first announced in June, Google will require all Chrome extension developers to enable 2-Step Verification (aka 2FA, dual-factor authentication, or 2SV) to publish or update their extensions after August 2nd.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Inside Higher Ed: Colleges and Universities Need More Rappers. “The fact is that, although learning another language was not a requirement for my program, it would be useful to require a class on critical composing or listening practices like Writing Rap, The Black Voice or Composing Mixtapes, which I currently teach at the University of Virginia. If more students were exposed to the critical practices that rappers utilize, I know from experience it would foster a more thoroughly engaged student body that is equipped to think through pressing conversations about race, identity, culture, class, art, aesthetics and so on.” Good afternoon, Internet…

August 8, 2021 at 12:17AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/3jBG3ya

North Carolina Black History, Illinois State University, K-Pop, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, August 7, 2021

North Carolina Black History, Illinois State University, K-Pop, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, August 7, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

QCity Metro: Take a walking tour of historic Brooklyn with a new mobile app. This is a former neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina, not a place in New York. “Imagine a time machine that could take you back to Brooklyn, the historic Black community that once thrived in the heart today’s uptown Charlotte. You could see streets and buildings as they were back then, learn of places long since gone, and hear the voices of people who lived, worked and played there. It’s not exactly a time machine, but a new app developed by the Levine Museum of the New South and Johnson C. Smith University comes close.”

Illinois State University: Milner Library launches new finding aids database. “Staff at the Dr. JoAnn Rayfield Archives and Milner Library’s Special Collections department are excited to announce the launch their new finding aids database. This new database allows researchers to search both Archives and Special Collections repositories at once from anywhere with an internet connection.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Twitter Blog: K-pop sets another record on Twitter with 7.5 billion Tweets in a year. “Fans turn to Twitter to connect with their favorite K-pop artists and the #KpopTwitter community around the world. In the recent year between the period from July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021, there were 7.5 billion Tweets about K-pop, setting yet another record for the most number of Tweets annually related to K-pop.”

Legal Genealogist: Ancestry retreats. “According to Ancestry now, users who upload content to Ancestry still give Ancestry a perpetual and non-revocable license to use the content. But, it says now, ‘perpetual and non-revocable’ doesn’t mean ‘perpetual and non-revocable.'”

The Verge: Facebook’s justification for banning third-party researchers ‘inaccurate,’ says FTC. “When Facebook banned the personal accounts of academics researching ad transparency and misinformation on its platform this week, it justified the decision in part by saying it was only following rules set out by the Federal Trade Commission. But the FTC itself says this is ‘inaccurate’ and that its rules require no such action, reports The Washington Post.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Union College: College receives National Archives grant to digitize its popular Bigelow Collection . “The National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the National Archives has awarded Union a grant to support the digitization of its massive John Bigelow Collection. A member of the Class of 1835, Bigelow was a prominent author, lawyer, diplomat and distinguished man of letters in the 19th and early 20th centuries.”

The Irish Times: TikTok becomes StripTok: Why sex workers are taking to social media. “[Teauryajya] DuBenion is part of a growing American community of strippers on the social-media platform who post under the hashtag #Striptok. Instead of gathering around a water cooler, they have built an online network to exchange professional advice, safety tips and good old-fashioned strip-club gossip.”

AdAge: Tiktok Takes Gold For Olympic Sponsors. “Olympic sponsors shelling out $3.3 billion to participate in the Tokyo Games have had to contend with the uncertainty around COVID-19, lack of in-person spectators, lagging TV viewership and absence of some high-profile athletes. But one bright spot in an otherwise chaotic Summer Games has been ByteDance’s short-form video app TikTok, which has become the app du jour to reach Gen Zers.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Hurriyet Daily News: Prosecutor launches probe into ‘Help Turkey’ social media posts. “The Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office has launched a probe into social media posts that asked for foreign help with the hashtag ‘Help Turkey’ amid the massive wildfires. In a statement on Aug. 5, the prosecutor’s office argued that the posts were trying to show the country as ‘incapable’ and ‘attempted to create panic, fear and concern among the public.'”

Ars Technica: Google+ class action starts paying out $2.15 for G+ privacy violations. “Google’s Facebook competitor and ‘social backbone’ was effectively dead inside the company around 2014, but Google let the failed service hang around for years in maintenance mode while the company spun off standalone products. In 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google+ had exposed the private data of ‘hundreds of thousands of users’ for years, that Google knew about the problem, and that the company opted not to disclose the data leak for fear of regulatory scrutiny.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Washington Post: Opinion: The Arizona ‘audit’ is a big problem. Online disinformation will make it worse.. “It is obvious to anyone who is paying attention that the sham ‘audit’ of 2020 votes underway in Arizona is not about actually reaffirming the vote count. It’s about furthering the spread of more disinformation about the outcome in the state — and about the 2020 outcome overall. Here’s something that could make this problem even worse: The proliferation of disinformation online.”

Anti-Defamation League: ADL Condemns Facebook Decision to Shut Down Independent Study of Targeted Political Ads. “The urgency of allowing independent research and promoting transparency has never been clearer. ADL’s recent Online Antisemitism Report Card shows that Facebook is not doing enough to stop hate and harassment, especially identity-based harassment, on its platform.” Good morning, Internet…

August 7, 2021 at 05:31PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/3rWVcOA