Facebook, Apple Maps, iCloud Photos, More: Tuesday Evening ResearchBuzz, August 24, 2021
By ResearchBuzz
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
CNET: Facebook test brings voice and video calling back to main app. “Facebook is bringing voice and video calling back to its main mobile app, according to a Monday report from Bloomberg. The features have been absent from the main mobile app since 2014, when Facebook moved them into its separate Messenger app. The features reportedly began appearing for some users on Monday as part of a test.”
MacRumors: Apple Expands Native Maps Rating and Review Feature to the U.S.. “Apple appears to be expanding on the native Apple Maps review functionality that it first introduced in iOS 14, allowing Apple Maps users in the United States the option to review places of interest, restaurants, and other locations.”
USEFUL STUFF
Lifehacker: How to Organize All Your iCloud Photos. “One of the great things about iCloud is that you can store lots of pictures. One of the bad things about iCloud is that you can store lots of pictures. Here are some tips to help you back up and organize all your thousands of photos without doing too much sifting through memories of Halloween 2017.”
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
The Well UNC: Carolina Performing Arts announces ‘Southern Futures’. “Southern Futures at CPA will produce new works, collaborations and research on social justice, racial equity and the American South. The organization has named Grammy and MacArthur Award-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens to a three-year research residency at the core of the initiative, beginning in spring 2022. Giddens will focus on discovering and sharing cultural artifacts and local histories that challenge entrenched narratives and monolithic thinking on topics central to Southern Futures, a collaborative initiative of the College of Arts & Sciences, University Libraries, Carolina Performing Arts and The Center for the Study of the American South.”
British Library: The Backstory to Digitising the Barbados Gazette. “Today is the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. Today also sees the launch of the second crowdsourcing task of the Agents of Enslavement project. To coincide with these two events we are delighted to share this guest post by Dr Lissa Paul, a literary scholar at Brock University who specialises in children’s literature and Caribbean literary studies.”
CNN: Irish tech firm helps kids’ voices be heard. “While personal artificial intelligence (AI) assistants are becoming increasingly integrated in our everyday lives, they are just one use of voice tech — and are primarily designed for adults. Irish tech startup SoapBox Labs wants that to change. The Dublin-based firm has developed speech recognition technology designed specifically for children — and it’s already in use across a range of applications, from toys to education apps.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Ubergizmo: Hacker That Stole $600 Million In Cryptocurrency Has Returned All Of It. “As some of you might have heard, about $600 million worth of cryptocurrency was stolen from the Poly Network not too long ago. However, in an interesting twist, the hacker who stole it returned half of it. Some speculated that it was due to the difficulty of unloading stolen crypto, while the hacker claimed that it was always their intention to return it. That being said, an update from Poly Network has revealed that the full amount that was stolen has since been returned to them.”
9to5Mac: Apple already scans iCloud Mail for CSAM, but not iCloud Photos. “Apple has confirmed to me that it already scans iCloud Mail for CSAM, and has been doing so since 2019. It has not, however, been scanning iCloud Photos or iCloud backups. The clarification followed me querying a rather odd statement by the company’s anti-fraud chief: that Apple was ‘the greatest platform for distributing child porn.'”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Data Center Knowledge: What Has to Happen for Quantum Computing to Hit Mainstream?. “If you stretch the timeline of quantum computing onto the timeline of IBM computers, we’re somewhere between the vacuum-tube-powered machines of the 1940s and the models built on transistors, integrated circuits, and silicon of the 1960s. And we’re much closer to the former.”
AFP: ‘Always there’: the AI chatbot comforting China’s lonely millions. “After a painful break-up from a cheating ex, Beijing-based human resources manager Melissa was introduced to someone new by a friend late last year. He replies to her messages at all hours of the day, tells jokes to cheer her up but is never needy, fitting seamlessly into her busy big city lifestyle. Perfect boyfriend material, maybe — but he’s not real.” Good evening, Internet…
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August 25, 2021 at 05:18AM
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Ben Grosser Digital Art, Asia Pacific Climate Change, GPO, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 24, 2021
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Illinois News Bureau: Illinois artist Ben Grosser’s solo show imagines ‘Software for Less’. “A University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor of new media in the School of Art and Design, the co-founder of the Critical Technology Studies Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and a faculty affiliate with the School of Information Sciences and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, [Ben] Grosser makes artwork that provides alternative ways of experiencing software and considers its cultural, social and political effects, how it changes our behavior and who it benefits.”
BusinessWorld: UN ESCAP launches risk and resilience database for Asia Pacific. “THE UN ECONOMIC and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP) has announced the launch of an online portal to track various hazard hotspots as well as climate adaptation efforts across the Asia Pacific region, featuring up-to-date information from over 50 countries including the Philippines.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Google Blog: Experience the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics with Google and YouTube. ”
While some of the Tokyo 2020 Games are over, others are just beginning: The Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games are right around the corner. And just like earlier this summer, there are few ways you can enjoy the action from home.”I think they mean “a few” and this is an unfortunate typo…
GPO: GPO Makes Available Statute Compilations In USLM XML Format. “The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) and its legislative data partners in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate have made Statute Compilations available in USLM XML format. This new format makes documents easier to use, read, and download. The public can access the compilations on GPO’s trusted digital repository govinfo, the one-stop site for information published by the Government.” USLM stands for United States Legislative Markup. You can read the schema user guide here.
Ubergizmo: WhatsApp Launches Public Beta Program For Its Desktop App. “The app already has betas for its mobile apps on iOS and Android, but now according to WABetaInfo, it seems that WhatsApp is also working on bringing its public beta program for its desktop app as well.”
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
Wired: On Roblox, Kids Learn It’s Hard to Earn Money Making Games. “ROBLOX has become a video game titan, in recent years dominating the world of kids’ gaming and earning $454 million in revenue last quarter alone. A new report argues that success is built on exploiting young game developers, many of them children, who are making content for the game.”
Washington Post: In China’s blossoming live-streaming scene, new stars take root: Succulents. “The thick, fleshy plants have been growing in popularity in China for nearly a decade, but only recently collided with live-streaming in e-commerce, a $60 billion industry that got a massive boost during the pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of people are logging on daily to admire these vegetating celebrities, oohing as chattering hosts turn and twirl them around, showing off blushes of new color, entire centimeters of growth, or — what a treat! — some velvety new leaves.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
10 Boston: New Hampshire Town Loses $2.3M in Taxpayer Money to Cyberattack. “Peterborough, a town of just over 6,000 residents, is located in southern New Hampshire, about 35 miles west of Manchester. [Tyler] Ward and [Nicole] MacStay said town officials learned on July 26 that the ConVal School District, which serves Peterborough and eight other surrounding towns, had not received its monthly $1.2 million transfer form the town.”
The Conversation: The more video streaming services we get, the more we’ll turn to piracy. “We now have more than a dozen ‘subscription video on demand’ services to choose from, with many dozens more options available worldwide to anyone with a VPN to get around geoblocks. But all this competition isn’t actually making things easier. It’s likely all this ‘choice’ will see more of us turning to piracy to watch our favourite films and televisions shows.” Or maybe finding something else to watch? Just an idea.
OTHER STUFF I THINK IS COOL
BBC: JMW Turner painting goes on display for first time since 1833. “A Turner painting of Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire has gone on public display for the first time in nearly 200 years. The watercolour is being shown at the town’s local museum, as part of a scheme to encourage people back to small museums and heritage sites. Other objects going on display around the UK include a 160-million-year-old crocodile, a rare Bronze Age sword and the original Jolly Fisherman painting.” Good afternoon, Internet…
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August 24, 2021 at 11:26PM
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Backstop Your Google Alerts With Bing News RSS Feeds
By ResearchBuzz
Oh to be Odin. That guy didn’t need any Internet monitoring tools. He had Huginn and Muninn, his ravens, who flew around the world and brought him information. But I don’t have ravens, so I rely on things like curated Twitter lists and RSS feeds and Google Alerts.
Using several tools for information curation isn’t to be flashy or complicated. It’s to make sure that I’m looking in all the corners of the Internet for useful news and resources. Of course there will be some overlap with my results, but I see that as a good sign: it means my coverage is thorough.
But when I lose one of my curation sources it puts a serious crimp in my information flow. When Nuzzel shut down, I had to build out more alerts and RSS feeds to work around that loss. And now Google Alerts is acting flaky; I’ve gotten only a few Google Alerts in the last three days.
Google Alerts surfaces a lot of news for me. What am I to do? I can’t just sit around and wait for it to be fixed. I need an alternative.
There aren’t huge numbers of news search engines anymore since the Facebook / Google juggernaut has kind of flattened everything. But good news: there’s still Bing News. And better news: it has RSS feeds!
This afternoon I figured out how to take my Google Alerts and turn them into Bing News RSS feeds. It takes several steps but they’re not complicated. If you don’t have a ton of Google Alerts it won’t even take you that long.
Here we go!
Grab your Google Alerts List
Start by going to https://www.google.com/alerts . It’ll show you a list of Google Alerts that looks something like this:
Yes, I have 176 Google Alerts, though some of them are searches I’m trying to get right for a Patreon patron.
Google has a data export service called Google Takeout, but as far as I can tell it does not allow export of Google Alert data. So we’ll have to do this the sloppy way.
Right-click on your Google Alerts page and choose Save As… and just save the whole HTML file. You should end up with an HTML file in your Downloads folder that looks something like Google%20Alerts%20-%20Monitor%20the%20Web%20for%20interesting%20new%20content.html .
Now we need to winkle out the meat of the file – all those useful Google Alerts.
Get The Good Stuff and Clean It Up
Open Google Drive and choose New, then Google Docs. DO NOT choose File Upload because you’ll get a screen full of garbage.
Once you’re on a blank Google Docs page, choose File -> Open, and upload your Google Alerts HTML file.
Once you’ve uploaded the file, it’ll look unformatted and gunky but that’s okay, we’re gonna make it look nice. You’ll get some Web page stuff at the top, and some Web page stuff at the bottom, and your Google Alerts in the middle. They’ll be in a list that looks like this:
Highlight and copy just the list of Google Alerts.
Give Your List a Scrub, Part One: Review, Remove, and Possibly Add
Paste the list of your Google Alerts into the text editor of your choice. If you have a lot, you might need to go through them and remove anything you don’t want to reproduce in Google Alerts. In my case I took out several marginal alerts and a few I wanted to tweak with Bing’s syntax before I tried them. If you only have a few Google Alerts you won’t have to do a thorough once-over, but give your list a quick glance and see if there’s anything you want to adjust or even alerts you want to add (just put them at the end of your list, with a new line for each one.)
Give Your List a Scrub, Part Two: Remove Formatting, Alphabetize, and Add Line Breaks
After you’ve removed all Google Alerts you don’t want to include and added any you want to keep, go to https://www.textfixer.com/tools/remove-duplicate-lines.php . Paste your list in the top box and choose Alphabetical Sort. (You don’t have to, but it’s easier if you have lots of alerts to review them in alphabetical order.) Click the Remove Duplicate Lines button and you’ll get a cleaned up, alphabetized list of your Google Alerts. Copy that list.
You’re not quite done with your list. If you tried to copy it to Google Sheets the way it is, you’d get all your Google Alerts in the same line and that won’t work for making RSS feeds. You need to add line breaks. Lucky for you the TextFixer people have you covered. Go to https://www.textfixer.com/tools/add-line-breaks.php . Copy your list to the top box and choose Convert line breaks to paragraph breaks.
Copy your newly line-break’d list. Now we can get serious.
Make a Google Sheet
Go into Google Docs and create a new blank Google Sheet, then copy your cleaned up, line-break’d list to the first column.
Get rid of those blank lines in about two seconds by clicking Data -> Sort Sheet byColumn A, A→Z .
Let’s look at what we have. We have a Google Sheet full of your Google Alerts, alphabetized. Now we’re going to get our Bing News URL, encode our queries, and concatenate the queries and the URLs into RSS feeds. It sounds complicated but it’s easy thanks to Google Sheet functions.
Setting Up the Bing URL
Select the first two lines of the sheet, right-click and choose Insert 2 Above. Your sheet should look like this:
We’re going to use that first row as a staging area for our Bing News URL. Here’s what a basic Bing News search RSS feed looks like, with QUERY taking the place of our actual query.
To make our RSS feeds, we need to be able to combine the beginning of the URL with our Google Alerts query, then add the &format=rss at the end to get it as RSS. To do that we need to split the URL into parts.
With the Bing News URL broken up into parts, we’re just about ready to concatenate our RSS feeds. But we need to do one more thing – encode!
Encode your Google Alerts
It’s possible that your Google Alerts are all numbers and letters and don’t have any pesky symbols like ” or ( in them at all. But mine aren’t! When special characters like ” or ( appear in URLs, they can break the URL’s functionality or make the search engine respond in a weird way. We need to make sure that Bing News can read our queries, so we need to encode them.
Go to cell B3 on your spreadsheet and enter =ENCODEURL($A3) . The ENCODEURL part will change the characters in your query to make them more acceptable to a search engine (and also might make them look weird to your eyes.) After you’ve entered it, use the dragging tool on the lower left part of the cell B3 (it’s the blue block in the lower left corner that you see after you click on a cell) to click-and-drag all the way down column B until you’ve generated encoded text for all your Google Alerts. Here’s what mine looks like.
We’ve got our Bing News URL set up, and our queries encoded, so let’s make some RSS feeds!
Make A Bunch of RSS Feeds Instantly and Feel Like a Wizard
Go to cell C3 and enter this: =CONCATENATE($A$1,$B3,$B$1)
This is telling Google Sheets “Take the first part of the Bing News URL, then add my query, then add the last part to make it an RSS feed.” Hit enter and you’ll have an RSS feed in that cell! You can even copy it and open it in your browser, though it won’t be nicely formatted since it’s an RSS feed.
Use the dragging tool again to drag that formula all the way down to the end of your Google Alerts. Here’s what my page looks like with a fresh list of URLs. Now you’ve got all your Google Alerts as Bing News RSS feeds!
But does that mean we have to enter each of the feed URLs separately into an RSS feed reader? No way. I am far too lazy to want to do that. We’re making an OPML file. An OPML file is a file used by RSS readers to import a bunch of feeds at once.
Whip Up an OPML File
Copy that list of URLs. Then take it to https://opml-gen.ovh/ . This is a very basic site: there’s a text box into which you paste your list (remove the example URLs first). Click Generate and it should immediately drop a file in your downloads called subscriptions.xml.
(Warning: this site does no error checking! Make sure you paste in a list of URLs and ONLY a list of URLs or you won’t have a valid OPML file. This tool will create an XML file for anything, as I found out when I typed in some of the lyrics to The Trolley Song.)
Import Your OPML file
Now that you’ve got a bunch of RSS feeds, where should they go?
You may have an RSS feeder you already like. In that case you should be able to find an Import OPML option and add the feeds to your existing list. On the other hand, maybe you want to keep them separate and only use them when Google Alerts is misbehaving. I’m going to walk through adding an OPML list to Feedly ( https://feedly.com/ ), a popular RSS reader.
For the purpose of this example I’m assuming you have a Feedly account. If you don’t, go ahead and set that up. Once you’re logged in, go to https://feedly.com/i/organize/me . That’ll show your feeds and give you a IMPORT OPML button. Click it.
Feedly will ask you to upload a file and after that will start importing your content. As each feed is added it’ll get a checkmark. Even with my bunch of feeds it only took a few minutes.
And voila! Your Google Alerts are now Bing News RSS feeds.
If your Google Alerts are basic and don’t use a lot of special syntax, you should be good to go; you now have an alert system that’ll watch for news even when Google Alerts isn’t cooperative. Unfortunately I use LOTS of syntax in my Google Alerts, so I suspect I’ll have to review and adjust the feeds until I’m getting a flow of information that I like.
But adjusting a flow is a million times better than not having the flow in the first place. And who knows? Bing News might point me to some sources I didn’t know about before.
When you read news stories about search engines and news searching, it seems like all you hear about is Google. But there are other sites to access news (like Bing) and there are definitely other formats to consume the news, like RSS. Take advantage!
August 24, 2021 at 06:45PM
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UFO Sightings, Google Search, Building Permit Visualization, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, August 24, 2021
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Dazed: This website allows you to track UFO sightings. “As scientists at Harvard University continue their search for alien life, a new website allows you to track and record UFO sightings across the USA. UFO Discovery features sightings of unidentified flying objects dating back to the 1960s. With over 70,000 recorded sightings, users can search the site by city, state, shape of ‘aircraft’, year, and duration.”
Google Blog: Helping people and businesses learn how Search works. “Today, we’re launching a fully-redesigned How Search Works website that explains the ins and outs of Search — how we approach the big, philosophical questions, along with the nitty-gritty details about how it all works.” Well, maybe a little nitty-gritty, but I wouldn’t be expecting too much.
EVENTS
US Census Bureau: How You Can Leverage Census Bureau’s New Building Permit Visualization Tool. “The Census Bureau’s new visualization and extraction tool empowers users to engage this rich, sub county-level source of information about the critical first step in construction – the building permit. This webinar will demonstrate how anyone – academic researchers, builders, contractors, mainstream media – can engage this tool to understand building permit trends across one or multiple markets.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
RiotACT: Key National Archives reforms on the backburner. “The National Archives of Australia may have won funding to cover the backlog of at-risk records in need of digitisation but its greater ambitions to take a more commanding role in preserving and protecting documents across government will have to wait.”
The Verge: Google plans to customize Play Store app ratings for users’ country and device. “In place of one rating for an entire app, which can come in a variety of forms and levels of relative goodness depending on the device, Google plans to break things down with specific ratings for the country your device is registered in and specific ratings for the form factor of the device you’re using to browse the Play Store.”
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
Route Fifty: The Plantation and the Pizza Hut: A Suburban County Reconsiders Its History. “The United States is in the midst of an awakening about its history, especially when it comes to issues of race. That’s playing out at the national level, in state capitals, at county and municipal government offices, and at sites like Oak Hill and another historic community nearby whose centerpiece was eventually replaced by a Pizza Hut. Fairfax County officials have pledged to add more Black voices to its story. That won’t be easy, and will require a new approach to how its history is researched and interpreted.”
Manila Bulletin: For its 134th anniversary, National Library pivots with a digital library initiative. “Among the key plans of the NLP is to continue the enhancement of its building and at the same time procure necessary equipment which would be vital in the development of its online facilities, among others, as part of its vision to focus on enhancing services and facilities contributing to the social and cultural development of Filipino society.”
CNN: Kickstarter: ‘We were wrong’ about men’s guide to women. “‘We were wrong.’ With that, Kickstarter said Friday that it had erred in not moving quickly to remove from its website a request for money for a book that critics described as a guide for would-be rapists.”
Aju Business Daily: S. Korea’s agricultural ministry to establish microbiome resource center to create database . “South Korea’s agriculture ministry will build a microbiome resource center to create a database of microorganisms by collecting resources and genetic information. The database will be shared with various sectors including the medical and food sectors to help enterprises beef up their capabilities.”
TechCrunch: TikTok is building its own AR development platform, TikTok Effect Studio. “Both Facebook and Snap offer tools that allow developers to build out augmented reality (AR) experiences and features for their own respective family of apps. Now, TikTok is looking to do the same. The company recently launched a new creative toolset called TikTok Effect Studio, currently in private beta testing, which will allow its own developer community to build AR effects for TikTok’s short-form video app.”
OTHER STUFF I THINK IS COOL
San Antonio Express-News: Wash and Learn: Libraries Without Borders uses laundromats to expand internet access in San Antonio. “When Lisa Alvarenga was a child, she spent weekends lugging plastic bags filled with clothes to and from the laundromat with her mother….Alvarenga, the San Antonio project coordinator for Libraries Without Borders, is now a part of the Wash and Learn Initiative. Through the program, laundromats are equipped with tablets and pre-loaded computers with educational portals and curated databases for all ages.” Good morning, Internet…
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August 24, 2021 at 05:26PM
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Minnesota Family Services, Redbird Roadshow, Browser Patches, More: Monday Evening ResearchBuzz, August 23, 2021
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Minnesota Department of Health: New website helps young families connect to local services . “Pregnant and parenting families with children from birth to 8 years of age now have a new tool to connect to services in their local communities that support healthy child development and family well-being. Help Me Connect is a website designed to help Minnesota’s families navigate local community, county, and state resources.”
EVENTS
Illinois State University: Dive into Archives with the virtual Redbird Roadshow. “Hear about Hovey’s famous sword, how students sought out their favorite dance partners in the early 1900s, the rivalry of Illinois Wesleyan and Illinois State Normal University, and who is ‘stinky dog.’ Viewers are in for a treat as Anderson-Zorn shares some fun, some unusual, and some impressive items from the University’s rich history.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Ubergizmo: Microsoft, Google Release Urgent Update That Patches Browser Vulnerability. “If you are using either Microsoft Edge or Google’s Chrome, then you might want to update your browsers ASAP. This is because both companies have pushed out an urgent update for both their browsers due to a Level 4 Drive-by exploit that has been discovered that could lead to disastrous consequences.”
Museums + Heritage Advisor: Millionth item digitised and made freely available via Bodleian Libraries website. “The University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries has reached a significant milestone, with the millionth digitised version of an item held in its collections now having been uploaded for free public access anywhere in the world.”
USEFUL STUFF
PRNewswire: Depositphotos Releases a Free Tool to Upscale Images Without Losing Quality (PRESS RELEASE). “Depositphotos, an international content marketplace with over 210 million images, music, and videos released a new online tool that helps users quickly double-size images. The AI-powered tool allows users to enlarge an unlimited number of files.”
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
CNN: Whatever happened to the ringtone?. “In the early- to mid-2000s, the ability to play a customized sound for incoming calls – usually a blaring few seconds of a favorite song called a ‘mastertone’ – was a fun novelty for people buying their first cellphones. Ringtones became an aural fashion accessory, as people scrambled to personalize their phones with the newest or coolest tunes. Mastertones mimicked the clarity of what one could hear on the radio, making the ringtone an easy and addictive way to hear snippets of one’s favorite music.”
Vice: These Tweets Show Britain’s Classic Camp TV Moments. “A BBC newsreader sits politely as she adjusts her hair, seemingly unaware the camera is still rolling. Seconds later, EastEnders legend Natalie Cassidy bursts onto the screen, and chaos ensues for a solid two minutes over the face of the oblivious newsreader. This is not the confused end of a coronavirus press briefing, but the start of one of Twitter user Jake McBain’s .avi videos, which he posts routinely on his account to the attention of celebrities including Radio 1 DJ Greg James, Olly Alexander and Drag Race UK’s Divina De Campo.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
StateScoop: Sierra Vista, Arizona, will let college students try to hack its computers. “The City of Sierra Vista, Arizona, announced an agreement with the University of Arizona and a cybersecurity company on Friday to give students and city staff real-world experience in understanding cyberattacks. Students at the University of Arizona’s College of Applied Science and Technology, which is based in the 43,000-person city located just south of Tucson, will have the option to enroll in a course that allows them to attempt non-malicious cyberattacks on city employee computers through the new partnership.”
The Guardian:
Revealed: how California police chased a nonexistent ‘antifa bus’. “The actions of officials in Shasta and Humboldt counties last summer were outlined in internal documents obtained through a public records request by Property of the People, a not-for-profit transparency group, and shared with the Guardian…. The records also show how the agencies’ response to those unsubstantiated allegations helped spread misinformation rooted in online conspiracy theories. The files were particularly troubling, experts said, because antifa conspiracy theories have inspired armed rightwing vigilantes to organize in response, sometimes with violent demonstrations.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Monash University Lens: Treasure quest: Researchers embark on a pre-modern manuscript mission. “Thousands of stories have been written about the impact of COVID-19. One overlooked group is historians in Australia whose research efforts have been stymied by travel restrictions. Medieval scholar Guy Geltner’s solution is to search for any ‘pre-modern’ manuscripts that may be lurking in private collections in Victoria.” 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!
August 24, 2021 at 05:23AM
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Nitrogen Oxide Emissions, YouTube, Taylor Swift, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 23, 2021
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
University of Central Florida: Mitsubishi Power and UCF Develop NOx Tracking Tool. “Mitsubishi Power Americas and the University of Central Florida have formed an industry-education partnership to establish a reliable and accessible source of information that tracks nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions as the U.S. power generation industry undergoes an energy transformation to decarbonize. The online Power Generation NOx Tracker uses data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency database as analyzed by UCF’s Center for Advanced Turbomachinery and Energy Research (CATER) to show trends over time.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Tubefilter: There Are Now 2 Million Creators In YouTube’s Partner Program. “YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki recently said that the number of channels joining the YPP doubled in 2020 compared to 2019. Creators who are part of the Partner Program can make money off ads run on their videos, and also through YouTube’s stable of what it calls ‘alternative monetization’ features–Super Chat, Super Stickers, Super Thanks, and Channel Memberships.”
CNET: Taylor Swift joins TikTok ahead of Red re-release. “Some of us have been living on Taylor Swift TikTok for a while now, but it’s just been missing one thing — Taylor herself. All that changed on Monday when the global megastar joined the video-first social network by posting her very first TikTok.”
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
Upworthy: Meme artist raises more than $2 million in 5 hours to rescue Afghans on Taliban kill list. “We’ve all spent several days watching the news from Afghanistan with a mixture of horror, sadness, and frustration. Images of crowds of people clamoring to get onto planes at the Kabul airport, human beings clinging to a flying jet before falling to their deaths from the sky, hordes of men, women, and children desperate to escape a violent, extremist regime crammed like sardines into U.S. cargo planes—it’s all too much. We know there are so many people we can’t help. That’s the tragic reality. But there are people we can help. And that’s happening, right now, on the internet and on the ground in Afghanistan.”
Mashable: Meet the designer who makes high-tech nail art and fights facial recognition with flowers. “Based in North Carolina, [Joselyn] McDonald is the co-founder of Blink Blink Creative Circuit Kits, which makes gender inclusive STEM education products, and previously served as creative technologist in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Media Lab.”
Washington Post: Only Facebook knows the extent of its misinformation problem. And it’s not sharing, even with the White House.. “The Biden team, according to the three officials, asked how many people had been exposed to misinformation about covid-19 on Facebook and its sister platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp. How many users were still sitting on the fence about whether to take the vaccine? And when Facebook blocks its algorithm from spreading unwanted content, how many people are still exposed to it? For almost as long as Facebook has had its singular cache of data about the behavior and attitudes of billions of people, outsiders have sought to obtain it. But, increasingly, the social network is taking steps to restrict access to the very data needed by the public to understand the scope of the problems and to potentially combat them, some experts and insiders say.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Krebs on Security: Wanted: Disgruntled Employees to Deploy Ransomware. “Criminal hackers will try almost anything to get inside a profitable enterprise and secure a million-dollar payday from a ransomware infection. Apparently now that includes emailing employees directly and asking them to unleash the malware inside their employer’s network in exchange for a percentage of any ransom amount paid by the victim company.”
BetaNews: Security: plug in a Razer mouse or keyboard and gain admin privileges in Windows 10. “A worrying security flaw has been discovered in Razer Synapse software which can be exploited to gain administrator privileges in Windows 10. What is particularly concerning about this vulnerability — aside from the fact that there is no patch available yet — is that exploitation is possible by simply plugging in a Razer mouse, keyboard or dongle.” Of course this also means that an attacker also has to have physical access, but GEEZ.
RESEARCH & OPINION
Quanta Magazine: How Big Data Carried Graph Theory Into New Dimensions. “Graph theory isn’t enough. The mathematical language for talking about connections, which usually depends on networks — vertices (dots) and edges (lines connecting them) — has been an invaluable way to model real-world phenomena since at least the 18th century. But a few decades ago, the emergence of giant data sets forced researchers to expand their toolboxes and, at the same time, gave them sprawling sandboxes in which to apply new mathematical insights. Since then, said Josh Grochow, a computer scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, there’s been an exciting period of rapid growth as researchers have developed new kinds of network models that can find complex structures and signals in the noise of big data.”
The Register: We spoke to a Stanford prof on the tech and social impact of AI’s powerful, emerging ‘foundation models’. “Typically, these models are giant neural networks made up of millions and billions of parameters, trained on massive amounts of data and later fine-tuned for specific tasks. For example, OpenAI’s enormous GPT-3 model is known for generating prose from prompts, though it can be adapted to translate between languages and output source code for developers. These models – drawing from vast datasets – can therefore sit at the heart of powerful tools that may disrupt business and industries, life and work. Yet right now they’re difficult to understand and control; they are imperfect; and they exhibit all sorts of biases that could harm us. And it has already been demonstrated that all of these problems can grow with model size.” Good afternoon, Internet…
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August 24, 2021 at 12:03AM
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