New researches

Saturday, January 29, 2022

Gräberfeld X, FishmiRNA, Cape Town University Fire, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, January 29, 2022

Gräberfeld X, FishmiRNA, Cape Town University Fire, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, January 29, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

University of Tübingen and machine-translated translated from German: Database records Nazi victims in the Tübingen anatomy. “1078 people were handed over to the anatomy department of the University of Tübingen after their death during the Nazi era – without having given their consent during their lifetime. The names and biographical data are now recorded in a research database, the first of its kind at a German university. The research project Gräberfeld X, an initiative of the University of Tübingen and the university town of Tübingen, brought together biographical data and all available anatomical information.”

University of Oregon: UO prof part of team developing microRNA database for fish. “An international team of researchers including UO biologist John Postlethwait has developed a new database that offers a wealth of information on the microRNA of ray-finned fishes. FishmiRNA fills a gap in resources for scientists studying a range of biological processes in fish species. The self-explanatory database contains detailed, manually curated microRNA annotations and expression data.” When I read this article my first question was “Are microRNA and mRNA the same thing?” The short answer is no; a much longer explanatory answer may be found at the Jackson Laboratory.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

GroundUp (South Africa): Parliament’s botched digitisation may mean millions of precious documents were lost in the fire . “A project about five years ago was supposed to create a digital store of Parliament’s archive. But quality-control samples suggest that nearly half the pages were not scanned properly, and there are troubling questions about how the project was managed, especially by Parliament itself.”

Ars Technica: Google relents: Legacy G Suite users will be able to migrate to free accounts. “There is hope for users of Google’s ‘legacy’ free G Suite accounts. Last week, Google announced a brutal policy change—it would shut down the Google Apps accounts of users who signed up during the first several years when the service was available for free. Users who had a free G Suite account were given two options: start paying the per-user monthly fee by July 2022 or lose your account. Naturally, this move led to a huge outcry outside (and apparently inside) Google, and now, the company seems to be backing down from most of the harsher terms of the initial announcement.”

The Verge: Google is adding an Offers tab to Google Play to help you find deals on games and apps. “Google is adding an ‘Offers’ tab to the Google Play app that’s intended to help you find deals on games and apps, the company announced Thursday. Google says the Offers tab will include things like sales on games and in-game items, rewards and bundled offers, discounts on movies and books, and apps offering free trials.”

USEFUL STUFF

Digital Photography Review: Edit.Photo is a fast, free web app for editing your photographs. “Edit.Photo is built on pintura, a Javascript Image Editor SDK also developed by PQINA. The web app works on both desktop and mobile browsers and is incredibly fast and intuitive. It offers all of the basic editing tools you might need to process a photo, including a crop/rotate tool, filters and a robust array of fine-tuning features, including brightness, contrast, saturation, exposure, color temperature, clarity, vignette and more.” I tried it. It’s so good I’m giving it my highest honor — a permanent pinned tab in my browser.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: The Rise of the Crypto Mayors. “The ballooning popularity of Bitcoin and other digital currencies has given rise to a strange new political breed: the crypto mayor. Eric Adams, New York’s new mayor, accepted his first paycheck in Bitcoin and another cryptocurrency, Ether. Francis Suarez, Miami’s mayor, headlines crypto conferences. Now even mayors of smaller towns are trying to incorporate crypto into municipal government, courting start-ups and experimenting with buzzy new technologies like nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, to raise money for public projects.”

BBC: Twitch: Concerns over streamers’ mental health. “Playing video games for a living is a dream job for millions of people. Streaming on platforms like Twitch has made that a reality for many – with the buzz of interacting live with fans from around the world as you play. However, for some streamers like Sam, the punishing schedule required to make a living from the site has taken a toll: ‘I don’t like opening my door to anyone anymore, I don’t go out, I don’t talk to anyone,’ she explains.”

New York Times: Buy GameStop, Fight Injustice. Just Don’t Sell.. “The beliefs underpinning last year’s meme stock phenomenon are stronger than ever. For a large number of individual investors, the stock market has become the battleground on which they join forces to right perceived wrongs and fight the powerful. So much so that when the stock market seesawed this past week, many small investors were undeterred. Falling prices were another opportunity to buy more shares of their favorite companies.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNN: The IRS website will soon require facial recognition to log in to your account. “The next time you try to log in to the Internal Revenue Service’s website you’ll be urged to use facial-recognition software to verify you are who you say you are. The verification process includes taking a picture of a photo ID, like a driver’s license or passport, and then taking a video selfie with a smartphone or computer so software can compare the two. It’s part of a partnership the IRS has with ID.me, a fast-growing company that uses facial recognition software as part of its identity-verification process.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Brookings Institution: Gender-based online violence spikes after prominent media attacks. “In order to analyze the relationship between attacks by prominent media figures and the quality of online discussion, we—NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and the International Women’s Media Foundation—collected data on three case studies: [Tucker] Carlson’s targeting of Taylor Lorenz above, the journalist Glenn Greenwald’s targeting of Lorenz on Twitter, and Carlson’s targeting of Virginia Heffernan in a separate segment on Fox News. Our analysis used large-scale quantitative data to assess how the public conversation surrounding these journalists changed in the aftermath of being targeted by prominent media personalities. The research findings showed sharp increases in harmful speech after the journalists were targeted by Carlson and Greenwald.”

TU Wien: Studying the Big Bang with Artificial Intelligence. “It could hardly be more complicated: tiny particles whir around wildly with extremely high energy, countless interactions occur in the tangled mess of quantum particles, and this results in a state of matter known as ‘quark-gluon plasma’. Immediately after the Big Bang, the entire universe was in this state; today it is produced by high-energy atomic nucleus collisions, for example at CERN. Such processes can only be studied using high-performance computers and highly complex computer simulations whose results are difficult to evaluate. Therefore, using artificial intelligence or machine learning for this purpose seems like an obvious idea. Ordinary machine-learning algorithms, however, are not suitable for this task. The mathematical properties of particle physics require a very special structure of neural networks. At TU Wien (Vienna), it has now been shown how neural networks can be successfully used for these challenging tasks in particle physics.” Good morning, Internet…

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January 29, 2022 at 08:03PM
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Friday, January 28, 2022

Zoom (TV Show), Women at MIT, Apple, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 28, 2022

Zoom (TV Show), Women at MIT, Apple, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 28, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

NPR: 50 years ago, ‘Zoom’ spoke to children about their real lives. “For pre-teens watching TV in the early 1970s, the opening to Zoom was captivating with seven, charismatic, barefoot kids in rugby shirts running, jumping, dancing and singing on a bare stage. They beckoned young viewers with the lyrics, ‘Come on and zoom, zoom, zoom-a zoom. You gotta zoom, zoom, zoom-a zoom.’… To celebrate Zoom’s 50th anniversary, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting has made more than 100 episodes available to stream online for the first time.”

MIT News: Immersive video game explores the history of women at MIT. “A new video game, ‘A Lab of One’s Own,’ creates an immersive environment in which players discover archival materials that tell the stories of women from MIT’s history. Created by multimedia artists Mariana Roa Oliva and Maya Bjornson with collections from MIT Libraries’ Women@MIT archival initiative, the project aims to create a multi-sensory, choose-your-own-adventure-style experience that challenges the idea that the past is behind us.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Apple creates personal safety guide as AirTag concerns mount. “On Tuesday, Apple quietly launched a Personal Safety User Guide to help ‘anyone who is concerned about or experience technology-enabled abuse, stalking or harassment.’ The guide is a resource hub to help people figure out what their options are if they wish to remove someone’s access to shared information, as well as personal safety features available across the Apple ecosystem. Most notably, it includes a ‘Stay safe with AirTag and other Find My accessories’ page at a time when an increasing number of people have come forward about being stalked with the devices.”

Tubefilter: Substack Is Launching Native Video. “Subscription newsletter platform Substack is testing native video in a private beta. The feature enables users to upload or record videos directly into Substack posts, and then make those videos available to everyone or exclusively to paid subscribers, the company said.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Johns Hopkins University: Project will digitize colonial records pertaining to enslaved and free Black people in Louisiana. “Johns Hopkins University historian Jessica Marie Johnson has received a $120,000 planning gra'”Kinship and Longing: Keywords for Black Louisiana’ project. The grant will support a collaboration of scholars and graduate students toward developing a digital, open-source, searchable edition of some 200,000 French and Spanish colonial records documenting enslaved and free people of African descent in Louisiana between 1714 and 1803.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Route Fifty: More States Enacting Potentially Conflicting Data Privacy Laws. “In recent years, there has been growing interest in establishing a national data protection law that would apply to a wide range of organizations and go beyond the nation’s many sectoral laws, according to a report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. But in the absence of comprehensive federal legislation, many states, including California, Colorado and Virginia, have passed or are enacting data privacy legislation, the report says.”

CNET: A lot more people reported being scammed on social media in 2021, FTC says. “2021 was a big year for scammers on social media, the Federal Trade Commission reported on Thursday. The 95,000 consumers who reported being scammed on social media was more than twice the number from 2020. The $770 million those consumers reported represented about one quarter of all reported fraud losses from 2021.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: Artificial intelligence can discriminate on the basis of race and gender, and also age. “AI is often assumed to be more objective than humans. In reality, however, AI algorithms make decisions based on human-annotated data, which can be biased and exclusionary. Current research on bias in AI focuses mainly on gender and race. But what about age-related bias — can AI be ageist?”

Yale News: Travel log: A new digital afterlife for museum exhibitions. “The Yale University Library, the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), and Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) have partnered with Edinburgh University, Oxford University’s E-Research Center, and Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in compiling a digital project that will use advanced computational techniques — such as text mining and machine learning — to capture all sorts of exhibition data and allow museums to make it easily accessible and shareable to scholars and the public.” Good afternoon, Internet…

January 29, 2022 at 02:11AM
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MemoGIS Prague, Space Junk, Arctic Construction, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, January 28, 2022

MemoGIS Prague, Space Junk, Arctic Construction, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, January 28, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Radio Prague International: New app tracks Holocaust as it happened in Prague streets. “On the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, on January 27, the Czech Academy of Sciences has launched a new mobile application, created together with the Multicultural Centre Prague and the Terezín Initiative Institute. Called MemoGIS Prague, it enables users to study the history of the Holocaust through an interactive map.”

ComputerWeekly: Space junk revealed by University of Texas graph database. “Moriba Jah, director of computational astronautical sciences and technologies for the Oden Institute at The University of Texas at Austin, says he would not willingly go into space. ‘No, not me, man.’ The aerospace engineer and self-described ‘space environmentalist’, who started his career as a security specialist for the US Air Force, spent over seven years at Nasa as a spacecraft navigation engineer and over eight at the US Air Force Research Laboratory, including as director for the Advanced Sciences and Technology Research Institute for Astronautics (Astria), knows whereof he speaks. And he is on a mission to make space transparent so it can at once benefit humanity and be cherished.”

The Arctic: Russia launches online Arctic development and construction database . “Russia has launched the Arctic Library digital platform with a database on Arctic construction and improvement projects, including architectural projects for permafrost regions. It also lists the main market players and investors.”

North Platte Telegraph: Nebraska newspapers launch statewide public notice website. “The Nebraska Press Association has launched a new public website to provide greater public access and notification to the workings of all government entities and courts in Nebraska. The website… is a cooperative effort of all Nebraska newspapers and is managed through the NPA.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Log Cabin Democrat: Arkansas plant health clinic’s updated plant disease image database now available. “For Arkansas growers, gardeners, and homeowners, the ability to identify plant health issues is critical to the success of their crop. The Arkansas Plant Health Clinic, located in Fayetteville and supported by the Cooperative Extension Service, serves these growers by providing resources to help solve plant disease problems. The clinic’s Plant Disease Image Database, an online image library that lists hundreds of plant diseases, has been recently updated by the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture’s Information Technology department. The database is now available on mobile devices.”

USEFUL STUFF

ProPublica: A Former Hacker’s Guide to Boosting Your Online Security. “More stolen personal data is available online than ever before. A man who once ran a website that prosecutors called the Amazon of stolen identity information offers his tips on the best ways to protect your data.”

Learning In Hand: Wordle Inspired Games for the Classroom. “Wordle has inspired the creation of many other grid-based word and number games. I’m listing some that teachers might like to offer students.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

PetaPixel: The First Standard to Assure a Photo’s Authenticity Has Been Created. “In an effort to combat online misinformation, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) has released the first-ever technical specification designed to certify the source and history of digital media.”

Library of Congress: Library to Archive American Society of Landscape Architects’ Award-Winning Projects. “The Library of Congress and the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) announced today a collaboration to archive the society’s Professional Award winning projects, the first time that collections representing the international landscape architecture profession will be archived by a U.S. federal institution.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BBC: Instagram: Iran arrests 17 pranksters over social media videos. “Police in Iran have arrested 17 people over a series of viral street prank videos posted on Instagram. The pranksters recorded themselves faking murders and throwing cake at escalator riders, all in front of shocked members of the public.”

The Register: China orders web operators to spring clean its entire internet . “The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has shared its spring-cleaning plans with the world – and suggested it’s time to make the Middle Kingdom’s web sites sparkle with wholesome content. The Admin’s edict lists many net nasties that it wants removed. But there’s not much new on the list – most of the items have already been the subject of warnings or bans.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

PsyPost: Teens who are “addicted” to TikTok experience worse depression and anxiety, and in turn, reduced working memory capacity. “A study among teenage TikTok users found that those who showed addictive tendencies toward the platform performed worse when recalling number sequences. The findings, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, further suggested that this working memory deficit was in part due to increased depression and anxiety.” Good morning, Internet…

January 28, 2022 at 06:25PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/3g331x5

Thursday, January 27, 2022

Metal Edge Magazine, Memory of the World, Illinois Expressway Shootings, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 27, 2022

Metal Edge Magazine, Memory of the World, Illinois Expressway Shootings, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 27, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Variety: Metal Edge Magazine Returns as Website, Archive of Classic Hard Rock Interviews. “Metal Edge, the colorful rock magazine whose monthly cover was collaged with photos of Bon Jovi, KISS, Skid Row, White Zombie and Dokken throughout the mid-’80s and ‘90s, is back. Initially published by Sterling, it shut in 2009 due to the waning popularity of both print and the mostly hair metal genre Metal Edge focused on. Metal Edge is now owned by Project M, the company behind other music and culture outlets including Revolver, Brooklyn Vegan, Goldmine, Inked and the Hard Times.”

Google Blog: Discover the Memory of the World with UNESCO. “On the occasion of International Day of Education, the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme is pleased to join forces with Google Arts & Culture to present Memory of the World, the records that hold the memory of our shared past. The digital collection brings together 66 inscriptions held by institutions across over 30 countries, all listed on the Memory of the World International Register, to tell their stories and highlight key moments in history that have left the world changed forever.”

WLS: New Illinois State Police map plots every reported expressway shooting since 2019. “Illinois State Police have launched a new tool to battle expressway shootings. The new interactive map plots out every reported shooting on every Illinois expressway since 2019. It provides details on the locations, timing and whether there were injuries or deaths linked to the shooting.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: TikTok will add PSAs to Holocaust-related content. “TikTok is adding PSAs and informational resources about the Holocaust in an effort to combat antisemitism in its app.”

KnowTechie: Twitter is testing its own version of Instagram’s Close Friends feature. “A new feature coming to Twitter will let you have virtual conversations with up to 150 of your closest friends. It’s called ‘Flock,’ and it’s currently in the developmental stage.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Make a YouTube Outro With These 3 Tools . “Your YouTube outro creates a long and lasting impression on viewers. For this reason, you should give it your best. In this article, we’ll cover three simple but powerful tools to make a killer YouTube outro.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

NiemanLab: How newsrooms are experimenting with Twitter Spaces. “Twitter Spaces, initially described as ‘ephemeral’ audio-only chats, are taking on a more permanent role. The social platform has added the ability for hosts to record the live sessions, introduced ticketing for those who want to monetize their Spaces, and devoted prime real estate in the app to the feature. They’re also actively encouraging newsrooms and journalists to take on the role of host.”

Davis Enterprise: Yan donates archive to UCD. “World-renowned celebrity chef Martin Yan’s collection of nearly 3,000 cookbooks, his first wok, thousands of photographs and other media will be the main ingredients in an archive to be established in his name at UC Davis. Yan and his wife, Susan, both UC Davis graduates, recently gifted the items and funds to create the Chef Martin Yan Legacy Archive in the UC Davis Library Archives and Special Collections.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: Jehovah’s Witnesses Sue German Museum for Archive of Nazi-Era Abuses. “The Jehovah’s Witnesses, a pacifist religious group, are pursuing legal action against the German government to claim a family archive that documents the Nazis’ persecution of the Christian denomination. The archive comprises 31 files of documents relating to the Kusserow family, whose members were arrested, imprisoned and murdered by the Nazi regime because of their faith.”

FOSS Force: EFF Asks Appeals Court to Find DMCA Provisions Unconstitutional. “The Electronic Frontier Foundation is taking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to court. This is nothing new. EFF has been fighting selected aspects of the DMCA since before the act was passed in 1998. In this case, EFF is taking aim at provisions of the law that have in recent years become specifically problematic for the right-to-repair movement.” Good afternoon, Internet…

January 28, 2022 at 02:01AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/3II47dN

Blue Whale Acoustics, Oregon Historical Society, Kobe Bryant Murals, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, January 27, 2022

Blue Whale Acoustics, Oregon Historical Society, Kobe Bryant Murals, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, January 27, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Christian Science Monitor: Blue whales: An acoustic library helps us find what we can’t see. “Reverberating through the ice shelves and gyres of the Southern Ocean are the undersongs of the largest animal that has ever lived on this planet, the Antarctic blue whale. Telling tales of the hunt for krill, of navigation and seduction, these tunes can carry for hundreds of miles. And the world is listening: Moored around Antarctica is a loose ring of passive acoustic monitoring devices, or PAMs, deployed by various academic institutions. Released by oceanographic research vessels, the devices sink to the seafloor where they record a remote and often hostile realm that is practically out of reach of scientists.”

KTVZ: Oregon Historical Society launches new online museum collection portal. “OHS’s museum preserves over 75,000 objects that document the history of the region, which includes clothing and textiles, Native American belongings, artworks, vehicles, equipment, and everyday items. At launch, the Portal provides access to the records for over 10,000 of these objects, with new records being added regularly.”

New-to-me, from ClutchPoints: a crowdsourced map of Kobe Bryant murals. “After the untimely passing of Kobe and his daughter Gianna, along with John, Keri, and Alyssa Altobelli, Sarah and Payton Chester, Christina Mauser, and Ara Zobayan — two years ago today — a poignant phenomenon commenced: grieving artists and fans from every corner of the planet began memorializing the victims on all types of canvasses: skin, courts, wood, skyscrapers, and — of course — walls. One lifelong Lakers fan, Mike, launched a hub to track these works and offer useful guides for those who want to visit them.”

International Labour Organization: ILO launches new online database on trade agreements that include labour provisions. “Aimed at policymakers, technical experts, and representatives of workers, employers and civil society, the Labour Provisions in Trade Agreements Hub (LP Hub) offers a comprehensive, structured compilation of the text of labour provisions in more than 100 regional trade agreements (RTAs) in about 140 economies. Labour provisions are obligations in trade agreements to protect and advance workers’ rights, including through different forms of cooperation and dialogue between trade unions, business organizations and the general public.”

Government of Newfoundland and Labrador: Vital Statistics (Deaths 1950-1968) Digital Collection Now Online. “Vital Statistics records for deaths registered in Newfoundland and Labrador from 1950 to 1968 are now available online via The Rooms website. In 2021, Digital Government and Service NL’s Vital Statistics Division provided an initial transfer of 59,698 death certificates, to allow public access for research purposes. This is the first time a collection of vital statistics records has been digitally transferred to The Rooms Provincial Archives.”

Google Blog: Surfacing women in science with the Smithsonian. “…today we are thrilled to announce a new phase in our long-term collaboration between the Smithsonian and Google Arts & Culture. Together, we’ve developed new machine learning tools for use by curators at the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative as we dive into the institution’s archives to help uncover and highlight the many roles women have played in science over more than 174 years of history.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Mashable: ‘Shared with You’ on iPhone organizes all of your shared content so you don’t have to. “One of your iMessage groups shared a link to a really interesting article. You vowed to read it, but you got distracted and forgot. Suddenly it’s on your mind again, but you can’t remember where it is in your group text. You could scroll through the avalanche of new messages, or you could take the easy route and use Shared with You.”

TechCrunch: Reddit tests allowing users to set any NFT as their profile picture, similar to Twitter. “Reddit is testing a feature that would allow its users to set any NFT they own as their profile picture — not only its own Ethereum-based NFTs, called ‘CryptoSnoos,’ released in limited quantities last year.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

NPR: Architect behind Googleplex now says it’s ‘dangerous’ to work at such a posh office. “For more than three decades, Clive Wilkinson has been among the most sought-after office designers in the world. He has planned spaces for the likes of Microsoft, Disney, Intuit and other companies seeking unorthodox approaches to work life. But he now has regrets about what is perhaps his most famous work: Googleplex, the tech giant’s posh headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NBC News: Ransomware hackers’ new tactic: Calling you directly. “Ransomware hackers, always in search of new ways to add pressure to organizations they extort, have increasingly roped in everyday people whose information is stored in computers they hacked, pestering them by phone and email to lobby the victim organization to pay.”

WWAY: NC Attorney General Josh Stein sues phone company over international scam calls. “Attorney General Josh Stein is suing a telephone service provider for allegedly facilitating illegal and fraudulent telemarketing calls. Stein announced today a lawsuit against Articul8 and its owner Paul K. Talbot of Texas for allegedly violating the Telemarketing Sales Rule. According to a news release, in a period of just a few months in 2020 and 2021, Articul8 routed more than 65 million calls to phone numbers in North Carolina – some North Carolinians received between 50 and 200 calls on a single day.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Madison 365: Madison doctoral student launches Twitter account to highlight Hmong in the bio sciences. “A new Twitter account launched last week to celebrate Hmong people in the biological sciences – and its creator calls it a ‘positive outcome’ of an unfortunate situation.” Good morning, Internet…

January 27, 2022 at 06:24PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/3r5oqMp

Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Facebook Roundup, January 26, 2022

Facebook Roundup, January 26, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Silicon Republic: Instagram trials subscriptions for creators in the US. “A small group of Instagram creators in the US are trialling a new feature that will allow them to monetise their content by making it some of it exclusive to followers who pay a monthly fee. The Subscriptions features will give followers of Instagram creators access to exclusive Lives and Stories to promote greater engagement with content and help creators earn money.”

Bloomberg: Mark Zuckerberg’s Stablecoin Ambitions Unravel With Diem Sale Talks. “The Diem Association, a cryptocurrency initiative once known as Libra backed by Meta Platforms Inc., is weighing a sale of its assets as a way to return capital to its investor members, according to people familiar with the matter. Diem is in discussions with investment bankers about how best to sell its intellectual property and find a new home for the engineers who developed the technology, cashing out whatever value remains in its once-ambitious Diem coin venture, said the people, asking not to be identified because the discussions aren’t public.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Digital Trends: Instagram’s hidden drug market for teens is out of control. “Instagram is not the healthiest social media platform, especially for teens. Even its own internal research that was recently leaked made it clear that the platform worsened mental health problems for some young users. But it also has a dark drug underbelly that is not even sparing minor users. The Tech Transparency Project (TPP) revealed some startling facts about the bustling online drug marketplace on Instagram just over a month ago.”

Washington Post: How Facebook and Amazon Rely on an Invisible Workforce. “You don’t see them, but they’re there: hundreds of thousands of people sitting at keyboards for hours on end to keep online services humming along seamlessly…. The market for on-demand, digital tasks is estimated by the World Bank to be worth $25 billion, with Facebook’s Meta Platforms Inc., Amazon Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube some of the biggest buyers. Over the years they have collected an array of global on-demand digital workers whom they have kept at arms length. Therein lies the problem.”

Reuters: Meta removes Iran-based fake accounts targeting Instagram users in Scotland. “Facebook parent Meta Platforms FB.O removed a network of fake accounts that originated in Iran and targeted Instagram users in Scotland with content supporting Scottish independence, the company’s investigators said on Thursday. The network used fake accounts to pose as locals in England and Scotland, posting photos and memes about current events and criticism of the United Kingdom’s government, Meta said.”

Deseret News: Report: Facebook offered poor countries free internet and then charged them for it. “In 2016, Facebook made a promise — free internet for the world’s poorest countries. While the social media company benefitted, those who are underprivileged were left with big bills that collectively added up to millions of dollars a month, according to The Wall Street Journal.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Star: Meta, Snap sued over social media ‘addicted’ girl’s suicide. “Meta Platforms Inc and Snap Inc are to blame for the suicide of an 11-year-old girl who was addicted to Instagram and Snapchat, the girl’s mother alleged in a lawsuit. The woman claims her daughter Selena Rodriguez struggled for two years with an ‘extreme addiction’ to Meta’s photo-sharing platform and Snap’s messaging app before taking her life last year.”

HT Tech: Facebook, Google face crackdown in Europe on race, religion and more. “Tech platforms such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook face tighter restrictions on how they target ads to users, after European lawmakers voted to toughen upcoming legislation. The European Parliament moved to favor rules that restrict platforms from using sensitive data — race or religion, for instance — for targeting purposes, and require them to make it easy for users to opt out of tracking while continuing to use their products.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CNN: Meta is building an AI supercomputer. “Facebook has long bet that artificial intelligence can help it with the difficult task of moderating posts from its billions of users. Now its parent company is taking a step that could move it closer to that elusive goal: building its first supercomputer.”

New York Times: Facebook’s Unglamorous Mistakes. “…ordinary people, businesses and groups serving the public interest like news organizations suffer when social networks cut off their accounts and they can’t find help or figure out what they did wrong. This doesn’t happen often, but a small percentage of mistakes at Facebook’s size add up. The Wall Street Journal calculated that Facebook might make roughly 200,000 wrong calls a day.”

Whistleblower Network News: Facebook Whistleblowers, Dozens of Organizations Call on Facebook to Release Human Rights Report. “Calls for accountability at Facebook continue as whistleblowers Frances Haugen and Sophie Zhang, former Facebook Vice President Brian Boland, and 25 advocacy organizations sent a letter to Facebook’s (now Meta) Director of Human Rights Miranda Sissons on January 19. The letter urges the company to release the Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA), which Facebook commissioned in 2020. The HRIA works to ‘evaluate [Facebook’s] role in spreading hate speech and incitement to violence on its services in India.'”

Media Matters: On Facebook, a Dr. Phil episode about nonbinary identity becomes a bonanza for right-wing hate. “Right-wing figures, particularly from the Daily Wire, weaponized a January 19 Dr. Phil episode to spread anti-trans hatred and drive Facebook engagement on their posts. The episode posited nonbinary identities as up for ‘debate’ and featured nonbinary people and allies alongside anti-trans parents and the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh.”

January 27, 2022 at 03:25AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/3g0nNxb

Chiang Ching-kuo, Jewish Genealogy, HathiTrust, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 26, 2022

Chiang Ching-kuo, Jewish Genealogy, HathiTrust, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 26, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Focus Taiwan: Former president Chiang Ching-kuo database goes online. “The Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) database went online Wednesday, comprising 55,000 written or multimedia records related to the late Republic of China (ROC) president that provide the public with a more comprehensive understanding of the country’s development and history, according to Academia Historica.”

Anash.org: New Database Documents Every Grave In Lubavitch. “A new database is enabling users to search and find matzeivos of those buried in the Jewish cemetery in the town of Lubavitch in Russia. For the past several years, the Lubavitch Organization in Russia, under the leadership of shliach Rabbi Gavriel Gordon, has been conducting research and restoration work at the historic Jewish cemetery in Lubavitch. Hundreds of matzeivos were uncovered, raised, cleaned and restored.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

EurekAlert: HathiTrust Research Center receives NEH support for open research tools. “The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), cohosted by the School of Information Sciences (iSchool) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Luddy School of Informatics at Indiana University, has received a $325,000 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. One of 15 awarded nationwide, this grant will support the development of a new set of visualizations, analytical tools, and infrastructure to enable users to interact more directly with the rich data extracted from the HathiTrust Digital Library’s collection of more than 17.5 million digitized volumes.”

CNET: Google launches .day domains to bring attention to special days. “Google has launched its new .day domain name system, allowing companies, charities, organizations and individuals to use the domain names to bring special attention to certain days and causes.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Designboom: wikipedia votes against classifying NFTs as art. “a group of editors on wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, has voted against categorizing nonfungible tokens (NFT) as a form of art. it all started on the platform the past december. the wikipidia editors were questioning if sales that reached up to 60 million dollars — like pak’s $ 91 million collections and beeple $ 69 million NFT — should be on the list. following a public debate, five wikipedia editors have voted not to classify NFTs as art and just one was opposed.”

Bloomberg: Google Team That Keeps Services Online Rocked by Mental Health Crisis. “In November, ‘team temperature’ surveys found dissatisfaction among Borg employees. Out of a top score of 10, Borg’s three sub-teams scored 5.07, 6.5 and 6.73—all short of the 7.5 rating Google considers satisfactory. In meetings with human-resources officials, some Borg employees described a toxic and overwhelming work environment, according to notes HR shared with the team that were reviewed by Bloomberg, but Google left the management team in place and promoted [Pierre] Aubert.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Techdirt: Why U.S. Robocall Hell Seemingly Never Ends. “According to the YouMail Robocall Index, there were 3.6 billion U.S. robocalls placed last December, or 115 million robocalls placed every single day. That’s 4.8 million calls placed every hour. Despite the periodic grumble, it’s wholly bizarre that we’ve just come to accept the fact that essential communications platforms have been hijacked by conmen, salesmen, and debt collectors, and we’re somehow incapable of doing anything about it.”

Gulf News: Harsher penalties for creating fake social media accounts, emails, websites in UAE. “The punishment for creating spoofed accounts for others, emails or websites for government entities has become harsher in the UAE, thanks to new amendments in the Cybercrime Law. The new law presents tougher penalties for email fraud or impersonating others on social media platforms for fraud purposes.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Vice: Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone. “Despite being just three years old, no Pixel 3 will ever receive another official security update. Installing security updates is the one basic thing everyone needs to do for their own digital security. If you don’t even get them, then you’re vulnerable to every security flaw discovered since your last patch. In response to an email asking Google why it stopped supporting the Pixel 3, a Googles spokesperson said, ‘We find that three years of security and OS updates still provides users with a great experience for their device.'” I’m using an iPhone 7 Plus as my phone. It came out in 2016.

Hakai Magazine: China’s Surprisingly Robust System of Marine Protection. “China, as the world’s largest producer and consumer of seafood, is well known for its voracious international fishing fleet. But a comprehensive understanding of the country’s efforts on marine protection, at least in its domestic waters, has remained elusive—even to many experts within China. Now, an international group of researchers has compiled the first database of marine conservation efforts in the country, and it is more extensive than many expected.” Good afternoon, Internet…

January 27, 2022 at 02:04AM
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