New researches

Thursday, March 3, 2022

Ukraine Population Density, Hawaiʻi Climate Data Portal, Parthenon Frieze Artwork, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 3, 2022

Ukraine Population Density, Hawaiʻi Climate Data Portal, Parthenon Frieze Artwork, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 3, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Airwars: Airwars launches interactive Ukraine population density map. “Airwars has launched an interactive population density map of Ukraine, providing vital support for researchers and others seeking to understand the human impact of the war…. The data, sourced by the WorldPop initiative from different academic institutions, dates from before Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on February 24th.”

This is one of those resources that I learn about from a firmly-paywalled article, careen around looking for more details and a non-paywalled source, don’t find one, and give up with a Spotted via Google Alerts: Hawaiʻi Climate Data Portal. It’s apparently officially launching later today. From the home page: “The overarching goal of the HCDP is to provide streamlined access to high-quality reliable climate data and information for the State Of Hawai‘i. This includes the production of both near-real-time monthly rainfall and daily temperature maps and a user-friendly tool to visualize and download them. Easy access to high quality climate data, information and products through the HCDP allows researchers to focus more time on their analyses and less time on data collection and processing.”

Greek Reporter: Entirety of Parthenon Frieze Featured on New Website. “The upgraded website enables art lovers from around the world to analyze and marvel at the incredible frieze, which portrays a procession for the ancient festival called the Panathenaia. A stunning array of nearly 400 human figures, including charioteers and people on horseback, as well as hundreds of animals and countless offerings to the goddess Athena is emblazoned on the frieze.”

USEFUL STUFF

Search Engine Journal: How To Migrate A WordPress Site From One Host To Another. “The bad news first… migrating a website to a new host will always make your heart race and your palms sweat, no matter how many times you’ve done it. Good news: Migrating a WordPress site to a new host is essentially a series of steps that you can repeat each and every time. It’s practically the same for every website you migrate. This step-by-step guide to seamlessly migrate your WordPress website will make the entire process a little less stressful.”

Android Police: 9 top tips and tricks to tame your Google Photos collection. “Although unlimited storage is a thing of the past, Google Photos is still one of the best photo management apps available for Android. Its straightforward design paired with a recent Material You makeover makes it a solid choice for anyone looking to organize their library of photos and videos. However, there’s a lot more to Google Photos than meets the eye. We’ve delved into Google Photos and collected nine of the best tips & tricks so that you won’t be left out of the picture.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BBC: Ukraine crisis: Satellite data firm asks for war images. “Firms and space agencies that collect satellite imagery are being urged to share Ukraine and Eastern Europe data. The plea comes from Ukrainian-based satellite data firm EOS Data Analytics (EOSDA). It has said that it will put data suppliers in touch with Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov.”

New York Daily News: Not progressive enough on records preservation: The Manhattan DA’s office, like others, is making it hard for New Yorkers to find predecessors’ work . “The Manhattan DA’s office is now a case study in how quickly a decade of still-relevant public information can disappear, and why lawmakers should mandate the retention of online material of state and local offices through searchable digital archives. Absent that, gone from efficient public access are documents related to topics as varied as the sanctions investigations; congressional testimony on cybersecurity; the comprehensive marijuana reform report that led to decriminalization in New York; documents related to the prosecution of Harvey Weinstein; and even the case against Anna Sorokin, the basis for the current Netflix series ‘Inventing Anna.'”

Ars Technica: Google Play app downloaded more than 10,000 times contained data-stealing RAT. “A malicious app downloaded from Google Play more than 10,000 times surreptitiously installed a remote access trojan that stole users’ passwords, text messages, and other confidential data, a security firm reported.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CNET: Extinct Ice Age Animals Like the Woolly Mammoth Will Roam the Metaverse. “On a remote Arctic island, some 4,000 years ago, woolly mammoths took their last steps on Earth. Around 6,000 years prior, the final few sabre-toothed cats preyed across the Americas. And 3,000 years before that, majestic dire wolves became creatures of the past. Scientists are revving up to bring these now-extinct animals, and more, into the domain of augmented reality.”

Penn Today: Bridging Wikipedia’s gender gap, one article at a time. “A new study co-authored by Isabelle Langrock, a Ph.D. candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, and Annenberg associate professor Sandra González-Bailón evaluates the work of two prominent feminist movements, finding that while these movements have been effective in adding a large volume of biographical content about women to Wikipedia, such content remains more difficult to find due to structural biases.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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March 4, 2022 at 01:43AM
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Northwest US Hydropower, Women Art Dealers Digital Archives, Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, March 3, 2022

Northwest US Hydropower, Women Art Dealers Digital Archives, Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, March 3, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Foundation for Water & Energy Education: New Web Site Dedicated to Making Hydropower Easily Understood. “The Foundation for Water and Energy Education (FWEE) has launched a new web site with a simple mission: give teachers, students, opinion leaders, and the public balanced, reliable information about the use of hydropower in the Northwest.” Includes educational material as well as database of hydroelectric projects throughout the northwest US.

The Art Newspaper: This digital archive brings women art dealers back into the story of Modern art. “A popular hashtag every March during Women’s History Month challenges people to name #5womenartists. But can you name five women art dealers? A new project aims to prove there are many to choose from, they just have not been mined from the margins of art history with the same vigor devoted to artists.”

WGMD: 60th Anniversary of the Storm of ’62 – New Digital Archive Available. “This week is the 60th anniversary of the Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962. Delaware Public Archives has put together a treasure trove of previously unreleased photographs. The three-day nor’easter started on Tuesday, March 5, 1962, continued to slowly grind up the Atlantic coast on Wednesday, March 6, 1962, and moved away from Delaware on Thursday, March 7, 1962. By the time that the skies cleared and the winds calmed, the damage along Delaware’s Atlantic and Delaware Bay coasts was substantial with cost estimates of $50 million (roughly $465 million today.) The storm claimed seven lives in Delaware and a total of 40 lives along the East Coast.”

NCAR: Scientists Map Underwater Topography Of More Than 1.4 Million Lakes And Reservoirs Worldwide. “Lakes and reservoirs have a profound influence on ecosystem functions, local streamflow levels, and the movement of water across landscapes. But water managers often are in the dark when it comes to subsurface topography, which affects the ecology, volume, temperature, and rate of evaporation of a waterbody, as well as inflows and outflows. Now a team of scientists has developed artificial intelligence techniques to create a publicly available dataset of the underwater topography, or bathymetry, of more than 1.4 million inland lakes and reservoirs around the world.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: Reinvention and Nostalgia: The Project to Remake Twitter. “A decentralized Twitter could take years to emerge and might look much the same as it does today. But it could allow users to set moderation rules for their own communities and ease the pressure Twitter faces from lawmakers over how it moderates content. It might also open new revenue streams for the company.”

Business Insider India: The ex-news director of Russia’s largest search engine urged his former colleagues to quit, accusing the company of censoring Russia’s invasion into Ukraine. “Lev Gershenzon worked at Yandex in various roles for four years, according to his LinkedIn profile. He took to Facebook early Tuesday morning to warn people still working at the company — which is one of the largest search engines in Russia — that it was contributing to the censorship of the country’s invasion into Ukraine.”

BBC: Ukraine’s tech community rises to challenges of war. “With a thriving technology scene, Ukraine was fast becoming a key hub in Eastern Europe and last year recorded its first ‘decacorns’ – start-ups valued above $10bn (£7.5bn). Now, many are focused on raising funds for the army.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Associated Press: US returns billionaire’s plundered artifacts to Jordan . “American authorities have returned nine looted artifacts to Jordan that were seized from a U.S. billionaire collector as part of a landmark deal announced in December. The artifacts were among 180 items seized by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office as part of an agreement with collector Michael Steinhardt to surrender trafficked artifacts and avoid prosecution. The deal capped a four-year investigation into Steinhardt’s possession of looted antiquities.”

Reuters: Ukrainian cyber resistance group targets Russian power grid, railways. “A Ukrainian cyber guerrilla warfare group plans to launch digital sabotage attacks against critical Russian infrastructure such as railways and the electricity grid, to strike back at Moscow over its invasion, a hacker team coordinator told Reuters.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WIRED: Google’s New Tech Can Read Your Body Language—Without Cameras . “It sounds futuristic and perhaps more than a little invasive—a computer watching your every move? But it feels less creepy once you learn that these technologies don’t have to rely on a camera to see where you are and what you’re doing. Instead, they use radar. Google’s Advanced Technology and Products division—better known as ATAP, the department behind oddball projects such as a touch-sensitive denim jacket—has spent the past year exploring how computers can use radar to understand our needs or intentions and then react to us appropriately.”

Brookings Institution: The surprising performance of Kremlin propaganda on Google News. “Over the past week, the Kremlin’s propaganda apparatus consistently returned the top search result for two key terms related to the conflict—’DPR’ and ‘LPR,’ abbreviations for the break-away regions in Ukraine’s east, the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic, respectively. On five of the past seven days, searches for ‘DPR’ and ‘LPR’ on Google News surfaced Russian state media as the top result. On each of the past seven days, for the same searches, Russian state media was among the top two results.”

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy: New Citizen Lab Report: Digital Transnational Repression. “While transnational repression is not a new phenomenon, such tactics are expanding through the market growth for digital technologies and the spread of Internet-connectivity, among other factors. This digital dimension of transnational repression—which we refer to as digital transnational repression—is rapidly becoming the cornerstone of ‘everyday’ transnational repression and is a threat to the rights and freedoms of dissidents and activists living in exile.” Good morning, Internet…

March 3, 2022 at 06:25PM
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Wednesday, March 2, 2022

Thomas Edison Recordings, Discord, Snapchat, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 2, 2022

Thomas Edison Recordings, Discord, Snapchat, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 2, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

I know that the RBs for the last few days have been really heavy with Ukraine/Russia news. I do believe that we are at a historical intersection of social networks, intelligence access, and military conflicts, and that it’ll be important to look back later at the technology coverage.

What did we talk about first? How quickly was propaganda/disinformation stifled (if at all)? Did any platforms fail capacity? How quickly were citizens cut from Internet access? Did supportive countries assist on an Internet culture level (memes, etc)? Is OSINT a general scrum or are there organized team efforts?

I’m thinking about these things as I decide to index articles or not. If the volume gets unbearable I’ll create yet another topic-specific newsletter. As always, thanks for reading. Much love.

NEW RESOURCES

Morristown Daily Record: Thousands of original Thomas Edison recordings digitized, available for free streaming. “History’s on-demand playlist has expanded significantly with the release of 2,400 Edison sound disc recordings — some recorded by the famed inventor himself — that have been digitized for free listening by the public. The collection, which has been preserved for years at Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, features many rarities, including unissued test pressings that were recorded in New York and European cities between 1910 and 1929.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Discord’s new policy will ban harmful medical advice, taking aim at anti-vaxx groups. “Discord is overhauling its policies and community guidelines to tackle health misinformation, off-platform behavior, and hate speech, the company announced on Friday. It’s the first big policy update for Discord in nearly two years and is designed to target groups or individuals that participate in organized violence, spread harmful anti-vaccination material, or harass other Discord users with hate speech.”

CNET: Snapchat Joins Tech Giants in Halting Ad Sales in Russia. “Snapchat has followed suit after Facebook, Twitter and YouTube began pausing ads on Friday, saying it has now stopped all advertising running in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

Mashable: Reddit has quarantined r/Russia due to misinformation. “Reddit has quarantined subreddit r/Russia due to misinformation, as the internationally condemned Russian invasion of Ukraine continues into its sixth day. r/RussiaPolitics has also been quarantined, just days after it was created in order to host invasion-related discussions.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Washington Post: How Ukrainians have used social media to humiliate the Russians and rally the world. “A flood of real-time videos across Facebook, Telegram, TikTok and Twitter has blunted Kremlin propaganda and rallied the world to Ukraine’s side as it fights to defend its democracy from a military behemoth. It has also potentially saved lives: Ukrainians have raced to disseminate defensive strategies, plot escape routes and document the brutality of a raging clash. Some expect that the phone footage recorded in recent days could play a critical role in investigating war crimes after the combat ends.”

San Francisco Chronicle: It started with a viral TikTok video of steak and mashed potatoes. Now, this Black “trailblazer” has nearly 2 million followers. “Five months ago, one of his videos might have gotten a few thousand views. Now Emmanuel [Duverneau] is one of TikTok’s Black Trailblazers, a group of ‘trendsetting’ Black creators that the app has spent February highlighting. Such is the life of a freshly minted TikTok star in the year 2022.”

Rolling Stone: China’s Propaganda Machine Gears Up for Putin — and Blames America for the Invasion. “So far, the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda has stopped short of fully supporting Russia in the bloody conflict in Ukraine, experts say. Rather, the overarching point of this campaign is to depict China as a rational, sober world power, and the United States and the West as a reckless, violent, and imperialistic forces that threaten global peace.”

Slate: How the Russian Invasion of Ukraine Is Playing Out on English, Ukrainian, and Russian Wikipedia. “With deadly explosions in Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv and a developing refugee crisis, it might seem odd to cover the play-by-play of a digital encyclopedia. But internet-savvy Ukrainians, including the country’s own Ministry of Foreign Affairs, recognize that how the facts are represented on Wikipedia matters. Right now, the number of people reading about Ukraine on Wikipedia is at an unprecedented high—spiking to more than 22 million English page views in the past month versus roughly 290,000 in February 2021. Meanwhile, Russia is coupling its lethal military campaign with a Goebbels-like propaganda blitz.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

University of Alabama in Huntsville: UAH helping create AI cell phone forensics tool to help police solve mass crimes. “There can be lots of forensic evidence on many people’s cell phones when a mass incident like a shooting or bombing is happens, but winnowing out the relevant material and putting it in context can be a time-consuming and tedious affair for law enforcement. That’s why The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), Florida State University (FSU) and Purdue University have teamed to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to help law enforcement target, extract and collate cell phone evidence related to an incident.”

BuzzFeed News: How Open-Source Intelligence Is Helping Clear The Fog Of War In Ukraine. “Countering propaganda is welcome, but some OSINT analysts also wonder about the ethical implications of their work. Melissa Hanham, an OSINT specialist affiliated with the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, told BuzzFeed News that she believes that practitioners need to wrestle with some difficult questions: ‘Are OSINT analysis now actors in an active conflict? Can OSINT analysts change conflicts?'” Good afternoon, Internet…

March 3, 2022 at 01:34AM
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Russia-Ukraine Monitor Map, Afrofuturism, LinkedIn, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, March 2, 2022

Russia-Ukraine Monitor Map, Afrofuturism, LinkedIn, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, March 2, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Bellingcat: Follow the Russia-Ukraine Monitor Map. “The Russia-Ukraine Monitor Map is a crowdsourced effort by Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) and the wider open source community to map, document and verify significant incidents during the conflict in Ukraine. Its aim is to provide reliable information for policymakers, journalists as well as justice and accountability bodies about the evolving situations both on-the-ground and online. Bellingcat, Mnemonic and the Conflict Intelligence Team have also begun to contribute to the map in recent days.”

Google Blog: Exploring Afrofuturism on Google Arts & Culture. “This February and March 2022, Carnegie Hall invites New Yorkers and the world to participate in a journey of discovery through one of its signature citywide festivals — Afrofuturism — a movement where music, visual arts, science fiction and technology intersect to imagine alternate realities and a liberated future viewed through the lens of Black cultures. Together with Google Arts & Culture, and coinciding with Black History Month, we are pleased to invite audiences around the world to learn more about this exciting movement as part of a new online hub: The Afrofuture is Now.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: LinkedIn wants to normalize career breaks with new feature. “Business-oriented social network LinkedIn says it’s trying to end the stigma surrounding career breaks by encouraging users to highlight what they learned from these experiences. The Microsoft-owned company is releasing a feature on Tuesday that will allow people to add a career break to their LinkedIn profiles through the desktop site or mobile app, giving them a way to explain the gaps in their resume.”

KnowTechie: TikTok is rolling out 10-minute videos so you can waste even more time on the app. “TikTok continues to explode in popularity as a short-form video platform. But now, it’s looking to expand upon that. TikTok has recently added the ability for users to upload videos up to 10 minutes long, a big increase over the previous three-minute limit.”

The Verge: Google is ditching Chrome’s data saver mode on Android. “Google has announced it will soon remove a feature of Chrome for Android that for years helped people cut down on their mobile data usage. Per 9to5Google, Chrome’s ‘Lite mode’ will go away with the release of Chrome version M100 in late March. Lite mode was originally known as Data Saver when Google first introduced it on Android back in 2014.”

USEFUL STUFF

Make Tech Easier: How to Screen Record on Your Chromebook. “Whether it’s for school or work, recording your Chromebook screen can have many different use cases. Thankfully, Chromebooks make it incredibly easy with a built-in tool that ensures that you don’t need any extra software. Released with ChromeOS 89 in March 2021, the revamped screen capture menu added the native screen recorder on top of the ability to screenshot your display. Let’s take a look at how to start and stop a screen recording on a Chromebook.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Guardian: Australian online anti-vaccine groups switch to Putin praise and Ukraine conspiracies. “Australian anti-vaxxer groups are awash with conspiracy theories praising Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an attack on the ‘deep state’, with some followers of the Covid-sceptic movement expressing admiration for Vladimir Putin.”

BuzzFeed News: Google Maps Is Blocking Edits In Ukraine After Claims That User-Generated Tags May Have Been Used To Coordinate Russian Air Strikes. “Responding to claims that its Maps were being used to coordinate Russian military activity in Ukraine, Google on Tuesday began removing user-added tags within the borders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. The company is removing new content such as location pins ‘out of an abundance of caution,’ a Google spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.”

The National Herald: The Cyprus Institute and the V.I. Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine Establish Research and Educational Ties. “The Cyprus Institute (CyI) and the V.I. Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine (VNLU) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to collaborate on joint Ukrainian-Cyprus research and educational activities that highlight the historical and cultural relations between the two countries.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Government Technology: Maryland Proposes New K-12 Student Data Privacy Law. “Responding to lessons learned from the implementation of a 2015 student privacy law, Maryland lawmakers want new measures to redefine protected information and require oversight of technology used by students.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: From ‘Vladdy daddy’ to fake TikToks: how to guide your child through Ukraine news online . “Much of what tweens and teenagers know about the Russia-Ukraine conflict comes from TikTok, Snapchat or Instagram. Their social media feeds contain images of tanks, bombs and propaganda. Our kids could stumble across extreme footage and we’ll likely never know…. Here’s how to help your child navigate social media ‘news’ content about war, while minimising any distress.”

Cornell Tech: This New Tool Prevents Bots From Taking Over NFT Drops. “In September 2021, Time Magazine launched thousands of NFTs, but their launch was taken over by scalper bots, despite precautions put in place to limit the number of NFT purchases per person. This drop also resulted in inflated transaction fees on the blockchain network. A new tool developed by researchers at Cornell Tech, led by PhD student Yan Ji and research engineer Tyler Kell, aims to enforce a one-NFT-per-person drop policy. A successful demo took place at ETH Denver this week, where attendees established unique identities to participate in a free NFT drop with prominent digital artist Zach Lieberman.” Good morning, Internet…

March 2, 2022 at 07:18PM
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Tuesday, March 1, 2022

Higher Education ROI, Russian Oligarch Jets, Twitter, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 1, 2022

Higher Education ROI, Russian Oligarch Jets, Twitter, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 1, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Yahoo Finance: New database ranks 4,500 US colleges and universities by return on investment. “A new database released by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) ranks 4,500 colleges and universities based on their return on investment (ROI)…. The ranking assessed schools on a variety of factors, including tuition and costs, average student debt, graduation rates, and net earnings after enrollment.”

NBC News: Where are the Russian oligarchs? This Twitter feeds follows their private jets. “The comings and goings of powerful Russian elites have come under intense scrutiny since Vladimir Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine last week, an attack that has drawn international condemnation. And that’s why Jack Sweeney, 19, a University of Central Florida student, started tracking them on the Twitter feed Russian Oligarch Jets, which he launched over the weekend and which already had more than 52,000 followers Monday afternoon.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Reuters: Twitter will label, reduce visibility of tweets linking to Russian state media. “Twitter (TWTR.N) is adding labels and reducing the visibility for tweets containing content from Russian state-affiliated media websites like RT and Sputnik, the social media company said on Monday.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Verge: The Internet Is A Force Multiplier For Ukraine. “After being widely credited for Trump’s election in 2016, and preparing to initiate the biggest war of the social network era, Russia might have been expected to excel at information warfare. Instead, like the rest of the war, it has gone quite badly for them. It is Ukraine that has been masterful in its use of social media — and while that may not prove decisive in whether or not it overcomes Russia’s superior military, at the very least it complicates our understanding of big tech and democracy. Today, let’s talk about how.”

Rolling Stone: Exclusive: Ukraine Pushes to Unplug Russia From the Internet. “Ukrainian officials are asking a key organization responsible for the operation of the internet to disconnect all Russian sites from the global computer network of networks, Rolling Stone has learned. It’s the latest attempt to turn Russia into a pariah state in retaliation for the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine. Experts call it a massive — and ill-advised — step.”

BBC: The chefs using TikTok to reinvent their careers. “The Covid crisis saw thousands of restaurants temporarily or permanently close their doors, prompting some chefs to turn to TikTok to reinvent themselves.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Hundreds of eBike phishing sites abuse Google Ads to push scams. “A large-scale campaign involving over 200 phishing and scam sites has tricked users into giving their personal data to fake investments schemes impersonating genuine brands. The fraudulent operation relies upon the abuse of Google Ads and SEO to draw victims to hundreds of fake websites targeting the Indian audience.”

ZDNet: How to avoid being unwillingly drafted as a cyber combatant in the Russia-Ukraine war. “Got a security roll-out plan for the next few years? Escalate it. Thinking about recruiting more security engineers? Start hiring. Looking for the right time to patch vulnerabilities and refresh passwords? Now’s the time. The Ukraine conflict may feel far away to some of you, but the risk of your network being caught in the crossfire is increasing.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Toronto Star: Legislation to level playing field between Big Tech and news organizations is needed now. “Since 2013, we have lost 300 trusted news titles in Canada. The time for Canadian parliamentarians to act is now. A made-in-Canada approach, along the broad strokes of what the Australians have done, is what we need. This is not a one-and-done silver bullet, but receiving fair market value for content Canadian journalists produce is an important step to putting the news business on a more stable commercial footing.”

MIT Sloan School of Management: As content booms, how can platforms protect kids from hate speech?. “From July to September of 2019, YouTube purged roughly half a billion comments in violation of the company’s hate speech policy — a twofold increase over the previous quarter. The same year YouTube introduced a setting to automatically hide toxic comments until channel owners could review them. ‘We often talk about the idea of viral videos or virality in social media,’ said Catherine Tucker, a marketing professor at MIT Sloan. ‘We were interested in the dark side of that: How viral is hate? How viral is the use of abusive language towards children?'” Good afternoon, Internet…

March 2, 2022 at 01:29AM
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Learning AI, LGBTQ History, Color Our Collections 2022, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, March 1, 2022

Learning AI, LGBTQ History, Color Our Collections 2022, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, March 1, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Google Blog: An intro to AI, made for students. “To celebrate Digital Learning Day, we’re releasing a new lesson from Applied Digital Skills, Google’s free, online, video-based curriculum (and part of the larger Grow with Google initiative). ‘Discover AI in Daily Life’ was designed with middle and high school students in mind, and dives into how AI is built, and how it helps people every day.”

Harry Ransom Center: More Than 60,000 Digitized Items From LGBTQ Pioneers Launch Online. “The Ransom Center houses the papers of British author Radclyffe Hall, author of the 1928 lesbian landmark novel, ‘The Well of Loneliness,’ and partner, artist Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge. The archive includes notebooks, draft typescripts, correspondence, photographs and scrapbooks that document Hall’s career as a writer, Troubridge’s work as a sculptor and translator, and their personal and creative partnership.”

Open Culture: Free Coloring Books from 101 World-Class Libraries & Museums: Download and Color Hundreds of Free Images. “The free, downloadable adult coloring books that the New York Academy of Medicine solicits from museums and university and state libraries for its #ColorOurCollections celebration each February enliven our month far more than any Valentine or Presidents Day sale. They’re not just a great way to while away winter’s last gasp. They’re also a wonderful portal for discovering cultural institutions that have thus far flown beneath our radar, owing to size, geography, and/or field of study.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: YouTube blocks Russian news channels RT and Sputnik. “YouTube has blocked Russian news channels RT and Sputnik across Europe in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Alphabet-owned company confirmed the news on Twitter, saying it would ‘take time for our systems to fully ramp up’ and that it would continue to ‘monitor the situation around the clock to take swift action.'”

City AM: Following Google’s lead: Microsoft axes Russia Today and bans state-owned media ads. “Microsoft have stated in a blog post that it will be removing Russian state-owned media outlet RT’s mobile apps from the Windows App store, as well as cutting ads on Russian state-sponsored media…. Microsoft said it would not display any state-sponsored RT and Sputnik content, de-rank search results on Bing and not place any ads from its ad network on those sites.”

USEFUL STUFF

Mashable: A guide to writing accessible image captions. “Making your social media profiles accessible to the majority of people stumbling across your posts is an intentional practice. From Instagram and Twitter photo descriptions to captioning audio on your TikTok videos, you have to consciously add these accessibility considerations. It’s something you should absolutely do to ensure your accounts are navigable by people with various disabilities. Don’t fret: You have most of the tools at your disposal.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New Yorker: The Oddly Addictive Quality of Google Alerts. “If you set a Google Alert for “hot-dog cannon,” then chances are it works exactly as intended: infrequently delighting you with news about launchers designed to hurl hot dogs great distances. Broader terms, however, present a problem, especially when Boolean search isn’t an option: if ANDs, ORs, or NOTs might exclude the exact results you’re looking for, you end up suffering through the semi-relevant and not-at-all relevant in the hopes that, someday, the alert will turn up something actually relevant.” Oh dear. On the one hand, I’d love to talk to her about this. On the other hand, she’d have to listen to me rant for an hour and who wants that?

Associated Press: Tech tool tribe uses to save language. “By itself, being able to read smartphone home screens in Cherokee won’t be enough to safeguard the indigenous language, endangered after a long history of erasure. But it might be a step toward immersing younger tribal citizens in the language spoken by a dwindling number of their elders. That’s the hope of Principal Chief Richard Sneed of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, who is counting on more inclusive consumer technology — and the involvement of a major tech company — to help out.”

CNN: How CNN geolocates and verifies social media footage from Ukraine. “CNN’s investigative team has been monitoring the constant stream of information from social media by using several tools to filter through the noise and select relevant videos for our coverage to geolocate and verify.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

USA Today: Rape survivors, child victims, consensual sex partners: San Francisco police have used DNA from all of them for 7 years. “It’s not only sexual assault survivors whose DNA has been stored by the San Francisco Police Department’s crime lab – and routinely searched for matches to suspects in criminal cases. For the last seven years, the department’s crime lab has also been keeping all processed DNA – including, for example, from victims of violent crimes, child victims, or individuals entirely uninvolved in the crime like roommates and consensual partners – according to the police chief and a copy of the lab’s standard operating procedures obtained by USA TODAY.”

Independent: Russian ransomware hackers pledge support to Putin and immediately have secret chats exposed by Ukrainian leaker. “The leak, shared with malware research group VX-Underground, contained 400 files of tens of thousands of chat logs in Russian dating back to January 2021; the group only formed in mid-2020. The gang provides ransomware-as-a-service, letting customers buy access to its attack facilities. Estimates suggest the group was received over $30 million in ransomware payments to date. Reportedly, the chat logs contain Bitcoin addresses and payments made to the gang.”

New York Times: Russia Intensifies Censorship Campaign, Pressuring Tech Giants. “Last week, Russian authorities warned Google, Meta, Apple, Twitter, TikTok and others that they had until the end of this month to comply with a new law that requires them to set up legal entities in the country. The so-called landing law makes the companies and their employees more vulnerable to Russia’s legal system and the demands of government censors, legal experts and civil society groups said.” Good morning, Internet…

March 1, 2022 at 06:28PM
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Tampa Bay Black History, Google Maps, Siri, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 28, 2022

Tampa Bay Black History, Google Maps, Siri, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 28, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

University of South Florida: New web portal documents and catalogues the Black experience in Tampa Bay. “The USF Institute on Black Life (IBL) has created a new web portal to better document Tampa Bay’s historic and contemporary African American communities. The African American Neighborhood Project portal offers a multitude of resources accessible to the community, including oral histories, heritage sites, archival photographs and research addressing anti-Black racism.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Reuters: Google temporarily disables Google Maps live traffic data in Ukraine. “Alphabet Inc’s Google confirmed on Sunday it has temporarily disabled for Ukraine some Google Maps tools which provide live information about traffic conditions and how busy different places are. The company said it had taken the action of globally disabling the Google Maps traffic layer and live information on how busy places like stores and restaurants are in Ukraine for the safety of local communities in the country, after consulting with sources including regional authorities.”

The Verge: Siri gets a new voice in iOS 15.4 beta. “The latest beta of iOS 15.4 adds a fifth American voice for its Siri voice assistant. Apple’s user-facing interface simply calls it ‘Voice 5,’ but iOS developer Steve Moser reports that its filename refers to the new voice as ‘Quinn.’ The voice has arrived a little under a year after Apple added its last two American Siri voices, and stopped defaulting to using a female-sounding voice.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

NBC News: Facebook, Twitter remove disinformation accounts targeting Ukrainians. “Facebook and Twitter removed two anti-Ukrainian ‘covert influence operations’ over the weekend, one tied to Russia and another with connections to Belarus, the companies said. One of the operations, a propaganda campaign featuring a website pushing anti-Ukraine talking points, was an offshoot of a known Russian disinformation operation.”

Mashable: A bot named Ashley is ruining playlists on Spotify. “The latest internet villain just reared its head and it isn’t a corporate mega-billionaire, wayward politician, or Twitter troll, but rather an unassuming Spotify bot named Ashley. Multiple users have complained that their public, collaborative playlists — designed to allow Spotify users and their friends to curate songs in real time together — have been commandeered by bots masquerading as normal users, primarily one account simply named ‘Ashley.'”

Reuters: Google, Facebook, Twitter must combat Ukraine fake news – Polish, Baltic leaders. “Alphabet unit Google and its subsidiary YouTube, Facebook and Twitter must do more to tackle disinformation related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the premiers of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia said.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ukrainian Truth: Russian invaders burn down Ivankiv Museum. Maria Prymachenko’s artwork destroyed. “The Ivankiv Museum of Local History in Kyiv region was burned down. The museum housed valuable artwork by the Ukrainian folk artist Maria Prymachenko.”

The Guardian: Hundreds of US geographic sites to be renamed to eliminate offensive words. “US officials have come up with a list of potential replacement names for hundreds of geographic sites in three dozen states that currently include an offensive word, kicking off a public comment period that will run through late April.”

TorrentFreak: Google Punishes Pre-Release Piracy Sites Harder in Search Results. “Google’s voluntary anti-piracy measures have gradually expanded over the years, resulting in some unique responses. When Google removes an allegedly copyright-infringing URL from its search engine, it will disable ads on this URL as well. In addition, the search engine has added a ‘still-in-theaters/prerelease’ tag for DMCA notices, so reported sites can be punished more severely.” Good afternoon, Internet…

March 1, 2022 at 04:54PM
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