New researches

Thursday, June 2, 2022

Food Contact Chemicals, Synthetic Brain Images, New Mexico Voting Misinformation, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, June 2, 2022

Food Contact Chemicals, Synthetic Brain Images, New Mexico Voting Misinformation, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, June 2, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Chemical Watch: Database reveals vast numbers of food contact chemicals not on radar. “Following a systematic review process, the scientists from the Food Packaging Forum (FPF), with help from Swiss and US academics, selected information from over 1000 published studies measuring chemicals in food contact materials (FCMs) and articles, including processing equipment and tableware. The resulting database, FCCmigex, contains many food contact chemicals (FCCs) for which little is known about use and migration into foods.”

HPC Wire: Nvidia Announces Database of 100K AI and HPC-enabled Brain Images. “Researchers at King’s College in London have curated the largest database of synthetic brain images in the world using Nvidia’s Cambridge-1 supercomputer and artificial intelligence. The database contains 100,000 images of brains and is being made freely available to healthcare researchers to advance cognitive disease research.”

KRQE (New Mexico): Secretary of State launches website to combat voting misinformation. “The Secretary of State’s office has launched a new website aimed to crack down on election misinformation. The Rumors vs. Reality page addresses concerns over voter secrecy and integrity, saying ballots remain private, even to election workers.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNN: Supreme Court temporarily blocks Texas’s social media moderation law. “The Supreme Court of the United States temporarily blocked a sweeping Texas law on Tuesday that restricts the ability of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to moderate content on their platforms. By a 5-4 vote, the justices granted an emergency request from the tech industry to block a lower court order that would have allowed the law to take hold, pending legal challenges.”

9to5Google: Twitter preps ‘Search Subscribe’ notifications for new tweets matching a search term. “In the latest pre-release version of the mobile app, Twitter is preparing a way to get notifications about new tweets that match a particular search term. When it comes to tweet-related mobile notifications, the best app for the job has always been the official Twitter app, albeit limited to only new tweets from accounts you follow. Meanwhile, on desktop, TweetDeck offers an expanded suite of notification possibilities combined with the speed of still being an official Twitter application.”

How-To Geek: Vivaldi Browser Pushes Customization With Editable Toolbars. “Firefox has allowed people to customize the main toolbar for years, including adding, removing, or moving buttons and search boxes. However, Chrome only allows you to move around extension buttons, and most Chromium-based browsers can’t do much better. Vivaldi 5.3, which starts rolling out today, adds Firefox-style toolbar customization — and even goes a bit further.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

SEO Roundtable: Rumor: Apple To Announce New Search Engine Next Week. “Robert Scoble posted a bunch of items around what to expect from the Apple WWDC (aka World Wide Developer Conference) that is happening Monday, June 6th. Robert said a bunch of things but specific to search he said ‘and a new search engine is coming too.'”

The Verge: The Murena One shows exactly how hard it is to de-Google your smartphone. “An Android phone without Google. No Google apps, no Google Play Services, no peppy Google Assistant. No Google surveillance and data snooping, no incessant ad targeting, no feeling like privacy is a pointless exercise. Some companies, like Huawei, have been forced to figure out how to build this kind of device. A few others have tried for the sake of maintaining your privacy and as a way to fight back against the tyranny of Big Tech. None of it has ever really worked.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Yahoo Finance: Google and Samsung smart products easy targets for hackers, Which? study finds. “From a doorbell to a wi-fi router and a mobile phone, smart products are easy targets for hackers, new research from consumer group Which? has found. In most cases, Which? tested devices that no longer receive software security updates, leaving cybercriminals free to steal data.”

University of Central Florida: When Hurricanes Strike, Social Media Can Save Lives. “In 2011 only about 10% of the U.S. population turned to social media for information during a crisis, according to several studies. Today that number is closer to 70%. A new study from the University of Central Florida found that social media isn’t just good for communicating. It can be a critical tool for collecting intelligence in real time to better deploy resources before and after hurricanes hit.” I have a rant about emergency responder services standardizing their social media information, but I’ll spare you…

RESEARCH & OPINION

Arizona State University: Closing the gap for real-time data-intensive intelligence. “The online world fills databases with immense amounts of data. Your local grocery stores, your financial institutions, your streaming services and even your medical providers all maintain vast arrays of information across multiple databases. Managing all this data is a significant challenge. And the process of applying artificial intelligence to make inferences or apply logical rules or interpret information on such data can be urgent, especially when delays, known as latencies, are also a major issue.”

Northwestern Now: Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth $3.4 million a year on Reddit alone. “The social networking platform Reddit relies on volunteer moderators to prevent the site from being overrun by problematic content—including hate speech—and ensure that it remains appealing for users. Though uncompensated, this labor is highly valuable to the company: According to a pair of new studies led by Northwestern University computer scientists, it’s worth at minimum $3.4 million per year, which is equivalent to 2.8% of Reddit’s 2019 revenue.” Good morning, Internet…

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June 2, 2022 at 05:25PM
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Wednesday, June 1, 2022

1990s Belgium Nightlife, Iceland Secondary Schools, iPhone Photos, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 1, 2022

1990s Belgium Nightlife, Iceland Secondary Schools, iPhone Photos, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 1, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Mixmag: Charlotte De Witte’s Label KNTXT Launches New Archive Dedicated To ‘90s Belgian Nightlife. “Charlotte de Witte’s label KNTXT has curated a brand new archive charting the history of Belgian nightlife through the late ‘80s and ‘90s. Époque promises to ‘bootleg, document and pay tribute to Belgian discotheque culture’ through photographs, flyers, stories, and other memoirs from Belgium’s clubbing heyday.”

Reykjavik Grapevine: New Website Shows Accessibility Performance At Secondary Schools. “The Union of Icelandic Secondary School Students has launched the Support Bank, which ranks school performance on accessibility and services for those with learning needs, RÚV reports. The website was developed with input from students with learning needs. Questionnaires were sent to schools to collect the data for the website.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: 7 Ways You Didn’t Know You Could Search for Photos on Your iPhone. “If you’ve been using your iPhone for years, you’ve probably experienced the struggle of finding an old photo. Thankfully, the Photos app has a pretty powerful search feature that, if used right, can help you find the pictures you’re looking for.” It’s a slideshow, but a good slideshow.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: They Did Their Own ‘Research.’ Now What?. “‘DYOR’ is shorthand for “do your own research,” a phrase that, on its face, amounts to excellent if obvious advice — a reminder to stay informed and vigilant against groupthink. But in the context of a broad collapse of trust in institutions and the experts who speak for them, it has come to mean something more specific. A common refrain in battles about Covid-19 and vaccination, politics and conspiracy theories, parenting, drugs, food, stock trading and media, it signals not just a rejection of authority but often trust in another kind.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Engadget: FTC fines Twitter $150 million for ‘deceptive’ ad targeting. “Twitter has paid a $150 million fine to the FTC over its ‘deceptive’ use of user data for targeted advertising. The fine stems from the company’s admission in 2019 that it had for years used Twitter users’ phone numbers and email addresses provided for two-factor authentication to also serve targeted ads.”

World Trademark Review: USPTO inadvertently makes applicant emails public, responds to community concern. “Trademark practitioners reacted with concern to the discovery that, on 24 May, the USPTO made the private email addresses of up to 21,000 applicants publicly available in its Trademark Status & Document Retrieval (TSDR) system. The USPTO has subsequently confirmed that it is taking measures to address the issue and prevent it from happening again.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Brookings Institution: How can digital public technologies accelerate progress on the Sustainable Development Goals?. “This paper focuses on ‘digital public technology’ (DPT), meaning digital assets that create a level playing field for broad access or use—by virtue of being publicly owned, publicly regulated, or open source. We consider how they could support greater progress toward the SDGs’ overarching 2030 deadline, with an emphasis on issues of extreme deprivation and basic needs.”

Ars Technica: Lidar reveals networks of pre-Columbian cities and towns in Bolivia. “An airborne lidar survey recently revealed the long-hidden ruins of 11 pre-Columbian Indigenous towns in what is now northern Bolivia. The survey also revealed previously unseen details of defensive walls and complex ceremonial buildings at 17 other settlements in the area, built by a culture about which archaeologists still know very little: the Casarabe.”

Environmental Investigation Agency UK: Groundbreaking stripe-pattern database to boost enforcement in fight against illegal tiger trade. “Our Tiger Campaign’s project aims to develop a tiger stripe detection AI tool to help identify individual tiger stripe pattern profiles. Tiger stripe patterns are as unique as human fingerprints and we plan to create a database comprising thousands of images of individual tiger stripe patterns, sourced by EIA staff and other organisations, which will allow the identification of tigers and skins seized in illegal trade.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

ScienceDaily: Just being exposed to new things makes people ‘ready to learn’. “A new study is one of the first to provide experimental evidence that people learn from incidental exposure to things that they know nothing about and aren’t even trying to understand.” Good afternoon, Internet…

June 2, 2022 at 12:47AM
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RB Search Gizmos: Make Location-Based Twitter Search Easy With Pam’s Pin

RB Search Gizmos: Make Location-Based Twitter Search Easy With Pam’s Pin
By ResearchBuzz

I have finally gotten far enough along with my JavaScript lessons that I could make a tool to address a frequent search annoyance: Twitter’s location-based search.

Did you know you could do a Twitter search by location? You might not know about it because as a search feature it’s unwieldy; you have to enter a lat/long pair to specify a specific address you want to search. Few people wander around with lots of lat/long pairs in their head. Sure, you can go look up a lat/long for an address but that’s time-consuming and, as I said, annoying. So Pam’s Pin (named for its inspiration, Pam Baker) does it for you. Pam’s Pin is available at https://pams-pin.glitch.me/ .

Enter an address, and the radius (in km) around the address that you’d like to search for tweets. It is possible to spoof location information, so you can also specify that your tweet results come only from verified Twitter accounts.

Once you click the button, Pam’s Pin will use an API call to translate the address you entered to a lat/long pair, will populate a Twitter search URL with the location data and your other options, and finally will open the Twitter search URL in a new window:

Pam’s Pin is the project I applied to the Bellingcat Tech Fellowship with. As far as features are concerned this is version .0000001. In Google Sheets, where I can just install APIs without worrying about code, I have a much more sophisticated version of Pam’s Pin that includes local features as noted by Wikipedia, street maps and links to various location-based data collections. I was also figuring out how to use map APIs to build lists of local street names for a hyperlocal news search. Still working on that.

I would like to bring all that to a Web-based tool, but I have to get some more learning under my belt if I’m going to do it on my own. I suspect this is going to be something I tinker with occasionally and update you on as I get more features to work. In the meantime I find just being able to directly search Twitter by address instead of having to go look up a lat/long to be pretty useful in itself!

I need to think about organizing, too. The tools I’ve been creating are things that I make because I want to use them. I do many searches a day — dozens? hundreds? I’m sure it’s hundreds sometimes — and I’m always thinking about little shortcuts and geegaws to make my life easier. Everything I’ve made has gone straight to my bookmarks bar, but since I’ve got about three dozen more ideas waiting in the wings, I need to either put them somewhere or get a bigger bookmarks bar. WordPress is not very embedded-JavaScript friendly and I don’t need to host everything on Glitch. I also need to make them look nicer.

Have you hipped to the fact that I have no damn idea what I’m doing? Still, maybe this little bit of appified knowledge will make your search life easier.

June 1, 2022 at 07:25PM
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Language Clubs, Stolen Camera Photography, Propaganda Bloopers, More: Ukraine Update, June 1, 2022

Language Clubs, Stolen Camera Photography, Propaganda Bloopers, More: Ukraine Update, June 1, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Trucking simulator shelves Russia-themed expansion after Ukraine invasion. “Euro Truck Simulator 2 has shelved an upcoming Russia-themed expansion pack after the country’s invasion of Ukraine, its developer SCS Software has announced. In a blog post, the Czech Republic-based developer said that it has cancelled the imminent release of the Heart of Russia DLC pack ‘so that it is not perceived in any way as being in support of or tolerance of the aggression.'”

Google Blog: Spotlight: The first Google for Startups Ukraine Support Fund recipients. “To help Ukrainian entrepreneurs maintain and grow their businesses, strengthen their community and build a foundation for post-war economic recovery, in March we announced a $5 million Google for Startups Ukraine Support Fund to allocate equity-free cash awards throughout 2022. Selected Ukraine-based startups will receive up to $100,000 in non-dilutive funding as well as ongoing Google mentorship, product support, and Cloud credits. Today, we are proud to announce the first cohort of recipients of the Google for Startups Ukraine Support Fund.”

BBC: Ukraine war: Eurovision trophy sold to buy drones for Ukraine. “Kalush Orchestra, the Ukrainian band which won this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, have sold their trophy for $900,000 (£712,000; €838,000) to raise money for the war in Ukraine. The crystal microphone was auctioned on Facebook, with the aim of buying drones for Ukraine’s military.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

PetaPixel: Ukrainian Family’s Stolen Camera Found with Photos of Russian Soldiers. “Ukrainian soldiers recently found a digital camera in a destroyed Russian armored vehicle. Apparently looted from a Ukrainian family, the camera’s memory card contained both photos by the family as well as casual snapshots revealing the lives of Russian soldiers as they invade Ukraine.”

Daily Beast: Ukrainian Intel Blasts Cringey Bloopers From Russian Military Propaganda. “Fighters from the Russian republic of Chechnya who have been recruited to fight in the war in Ukraine have been making videos of their attempts to look courageous and mighty in the war. But the videos appear to be staged, according to outtakes Ukrainian intelligence officials have obtained from one of the fighters.”

Notes from Poland: Russia using disinformation to stir hostility between Ukrainians and Poles, warn security services. “Russia is using disinformation to stir animosity between Poles and Ukrainians, warns the spokesman for Poland’s security services. As an example, he pointed to the response to a recent killing in Warsaw, which the Polish far right falsely sought to blame on Ukrainians.”

BBC: Students accuse lecturer of sharing Russia war lies. “In a lecture obtained by the BBC, Prof [Tim] Hayward outlined an argument that the renowned aid organisation, the White Helmets, may have helped fake a chemical attack in Syria. Russia has said the attack was ‘staged’. It comes after he and a number of other academics were accused of spreading misinformation about the war in Ukraine by MPs in the House of Commons in March – something Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi said the government would ‘crack down on… hard’.”

New York Times: For Russian-Speaking Ukrainians, Language Clubs Offer Way to Defy Invaders. “Since Russia’s invasion, a number of language clubs have opened in cities in western Ukraine. Teachers and volunteers are reaching out to millions of displaced people who have fled to the relative safety of western cities like Lviv from the Russian-speaking east — encouraging them to practice and embrace Ukrainian as the language of their daily lives. An estimated one in every three Ukrainians speaks Russian at home, according to researchers, and many of them — outraged by the violence of Russia’s invasion — are enthusiastically making the switch as a show of defiance.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

RTL Today: High-tech race to map Ukraine’s damaged historic buildings. “Many of Ukraine’s historic monuments have been destroyed in the three months since Russia invaded, but cultural experts are working to conserve their memory using cutting-edge technology and 3D scans. One of them is volunteer French engineer Emmanuel Durand, a specialist in 3D data acquisition, who is assisting a bevy of architects, engineers, historic building experts and a museum director to record buildings in Kyiv, Lviv, Chernigiv and Kharkiv.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Top10VPN: Russian VPN Spending Since the Invasion of Ukraine . “The Russian Federal Treasury has published over 200 official procurement documents for VPN technology with a combined value of almost $10 million since the invasion of Ukraine. The documents reveal state officials’ need to circumvent their own government’s censorship of the internet in Russia.”

Brown Political Review: Russia and the New Disinformation Regime. “The current Russian disinformation strategy is much different than propaganda of the past; it works in incredibly high volume, it’s so drastically detached from the truth, and it aims to confuse its citizens and enemies. Primed for the modern day, this strategy offers Russia an easy tool to achieve its goals while leaving few solutions to address it.”

New York Times: Russian Academics Aim to Punish Colleagues Who Backed Ukraine Invasion. “Some academic researchers in Russia are quietly working to prevent colleagues who have supported their country’s invasion of Ukraine from being elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences this month. If they succeed, they will deny those who back the war a prized credential that confers prestige in Russian institutions of higher learning. Their campaign could also show that some acts of protest remain possible despite a government crackdown on dissent.”

June 1, 2022 at 06:48PM
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Voices of Women Museum, Cuala Press Prints, Microsoft Teams, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, June 1, 2022

Voices of Women Museum, Cuala Press Prints, Microsoft Teams, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, June 1, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

IOL (South Africa): ‘Voices of Women Museum’ opens online. ” The ‘Voices of Women Museum’ is now virtual and will be launched on Friday…. Developed as a concept in 2012, the museum has a substantial collection of about 3 000 women’s narratives and story cloths.” You’ll have to give the site a minute to load, but it’s worth the wait. One of the more polished virtual spaces I’ve visited, well done.

Trinity College Dublin: Cuala Press Prints Digitised And Available Online As Part Of Virtual Trinity Library. . “The Library of Trinity College, Dublin is delighted to announce that as part of an ongoing Virtual Trinity Library project, over one hundred images of Cuala Press prints are now available to view online on Trinity College Dublin’s Digital Collections platform.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Microsoft Teams goes beyond screen sharing for real-time collaboration. “What’s cooler than just sharing your screen with colleagues? Sharing live projects that everyone can edit at the same time. That’s at the heart of Microsoft’s new Live Share feature, which make it easier for Teams apps to enable real-time collaboration.”

MyHeritage Blog: MyHeritage Census Helper Gets a Major Upgrade. ” In the initial release, the Census Helper calculated a list of family members to find in the newly released 1950 U.S. census records as well as all available U.S. census collections. Now, we have expanded the Census Helper to include census records from other countries, so people with roots in places outside the U.S. can take advantage of it as well — and we’ve added some handy interface improvements that we’ll expand on below.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 5 Travel Planning Apps With Live Maps to Plot a Trip Itinerary. “All the apps in this list come with maps that show all the locations you’re traveling to. It’s much better than using a Google Doc to write out your plan. Each app does something a little different or better than the others, so you’ll likely find exactly what you’re looking for in a travel planning app.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Pitchfork: On Discord, Music Fans Become Artists’ Besties, Collaborators, and Even Unpaid Interns. “Unlike on other apps where creators compete for attention, everyone in a fan Discord is there for the artist. ‘You’re one button away—if you drop a song, post the link, and @ everyone, it sends everyone a ping to their phones,’ says 24-year-old music streamer Niz, who runs his own community and has set up servers for major-label hyperpop acts like glaive. ‘A lot of people might not see your story on Instagram.’ Artists have used the platform to preview new songs, solicit merch feedback, host beat competitions, and simply shoot the shit.”

Library of Congress: New Article Explores Preservation and Access to Two Historical Literary Audio Archives. “Following the presentation and great enthusiasm about working with one another, the same colleagues–along with Marcus Nappier from the Digital Content Management Section–were invited to publish a longer article, ‘Eighty years of literary audio archives at the Library of Congress: Preserving collections from the physical to digital,’ that outlined the rich history of the audio archives, and provided more details on the the digital preservation workflows to make these resources available on loc.gov and the digital preservation practices ensuring the longevity of these assets.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Register: Zero-day vuln in Microsoft Office: ‘Follina’ will work even when macros are disabled. “Dubbed ‘Follina’, the vulnerability has been floating around for a while (cybersecurity researcher Kevin Beaumont traced it back to a report made to Microsoft on April 12) and uses Office functionality to retrieve a HTML file which in turn makes use of the Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) to run some code. Worse, it will work in Microsoft Word even when macros are disabled.”

NBC News: Trans woman’s photo used to spread baseless online theory about Texas shooter. “Social media users and trolls on 4chan, Twitter and Facebook are using Sam’s photos and images of at least two other transgender women to spread the baseless theory that the shooter was transgender. In some cases, they have created collages that place the women’s photos alongside images from an Instagram page believed to have belonged to the shooter.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Michigan Tech: Modeling the Mather B Helps Map Out Future for Old Mines and Clean Energy Storage . “A Michigan Tech student’s 3D model of an iconic Upper Peninsula iron mine helps researchers visualize and measure the energy storage potential that awaits in abandoned hard-metal mines.”

South China Morning Post: China forms grand plan to digitalise and connect the country’s cultural resources into a central database by 2025. “China has a grand plan to digitalise and connect the country’s cultural resources, from libraries to television channels, into a massive ‘digital culture infrastructure and platform’ by 2025. According to the newly published national strategy on ‘cultural digitalisation’ by the Chinese Communist Party and the State Council, the country will build a “national culture big data system” by 2035 to allow digitalised cultural products to be ‘shared by all people’.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Classic FM: India’s ancient temples that ‘sing’ thanks to intricate musical architecture. “Within the Vijaya Vittala Temple in Hampi, South India are 56 pillars, each 3.6 metres high, which when gently tapped produce delicate musical notes. Tourists have been travelling to the UNESCO World Heritage Site for years to hear the over 500-year-old temple’s mesmerising music. The pillars, named SaReGaMa, are so-called after the first four notes (svaras) of the standard scale in Indian classical music – similar to the Western Do Re Mi Fa (solfège).” Good morning, Internet…

June 1, 2022 at 05:33PM
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Tuesday, May 31, 2022

Missing Persons Support, Declassified Documents, Web Archiving Expertise, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 31, 2022

Missing Persons Support, Declassified Documents, Web Archiving Expertise, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 31, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

University of Liverpool: New website to help families and professionals navigate the complexities of missing persons. “The website signposts users to organisations that work with missing persons, how to get help, an explanation of terms and a library. For families and friends struggling to know how to deal with the loss of someone they care about, they can find out where to get help and what some of the terminology used means. Professionals can find other organisations, plus good practice documents and research. Academics can search for research that has already been published and, hopefully, help them to identify where there are gaps for new research.”

The Register: Declassified and released: More secret files on US govt’s emergency doomsday powers. “These government files are part of a larger collection of records that discuss the nature, reach, and use of secret Presidential Emergency Action Documents: these are executive orders, announcements, and statements to Congress that are all ready to sign and send out as soon as a doomsday scenario occurs. PEADs are supposed to give America’s commander-in-chief immediate extraordinary powers to overcome extraordinary events. PEADs have never been declassified or revealed before. They remain hush-hush, and their exact details are not publicly known.”

UK Web Archive Blog: What UKWA did at the IIPC Web Archive Conference 2022. “Between the 18 and 25 May 2022, we had the biggest annual event in the world of web archiving – The IIPC General Assembly and Web Archive Conference. Some of the sessions were for members only but many were free and open for anyone to attend. Here are the UKWA staff and research partners who gave presentations at the conference with links to their pre-recorded talks that have been uploaded to our YouTube channel.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Poynter: In Brazil, Telegram adds measures to block misleading information ahead of elections. “Telegram was evading emails from Brazilian authorities for months, until mid-March this year, when the Brazilian Supreme Court ruled to ban the application over misinformation concerns ahead of the country’s elections. Two days later, Telegram complied with the court’s requests, which included deleting a few of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s posts and suspending the account of one of his prominent acolytes. The court rescinded its embargo and not long after, Telegram and the Brazilian Electoral Court signed a cooperation agreement.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: Getting Started With Hugo: How to Create a Simple Website. “Hugo is a Static Site Generator that allows you to create a website with little to no coding experience. You can use pre-built themes as a base for your website design. This allows you to focus more on populating the site with your content. Because Hugo is mostly used for static websites, it’s perfect for creating blogs, portfolios, or documentation sites.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CNET: ‘The Internet’s Best Friend’: How One TikTok Comedian Gets Laughs While Raising Mental Health Awareness. “Social media can be a powerful tool for expressing yourself, bringing awareness to social issues and sharing compelling stories that resonate with your audience. Enter Elyse Myers, a comedian who uses platforms like TikTok and Instagram to share stories (like her infamous date where she bought 100 tacos), to make people laugh and to talk about her mental health. In a world of filters that give you bunny ears, there is Myers. She has become a staple of authenticity and honesty that people look to; she’s even lending her expertise to events like a mental health panel at VidCon next month.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

MIT Technology Review: How censoring China’s open-source coders might backfire. “Many suspect the Chinese state has forced Gitee, the Chinese competitor to GitHub, to censor open-source code in a move developers worry could obstruct innovation.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University College London: Top-rated educational maths apps may not be best for children’s learning. “The top 25 maths apps for children under five-years-old do not reflect best practices on how children learn and develop their early mathematical skills, according to a new report from IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society.”

Virginia Department of Health: The Virginia Department of Health in Collaboration with ESO Launches First-Ever Virginia Stroke Registry – Statewide View of Stroke Data will Improve Care for all People in Virginia . “The Virginia Department of Health (VDH) in partnership with ESO, today announced the launch of the first-ever Virginia Stroke Registry. ESO is the leading data and software company serving emergency medical services, fire departments, hospitals, state and federal agencies.”

University of Wisconsin-Madison: 3D scan will reveal the stories hidden within 1,200-year-old Wisconsin canoe. “[Lennon] Rodgers — who directs the Grainger Engineering Design and Innovation Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin–Madison — was there to help archaeologists better understand a 1,200-year-old, 15-foot dugout canoe recovered in 2021 from the waters of Lake Mendota, the largest of Madison’s four lakes and part of the ancestral home of the Ho-Chunk Nation. At the invitation of Wisconsin State Archaeologist James Skibo and Scott Roller, senior collections manager for the Wisconsin Historical Society, Rodgers scanned the canoe and created detailed 3D renderings that will preserve the boat’s legacy and allow researchers to study the craft while it undergoes a multiyear preservation process.” Good afternoon, Internet…

June 1, 2022 at 12:24AM
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Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Navigator, Trinidad & Tobago Girmityas, Georgia Land Conservation, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, May 31, 2022

Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Navigator, Trinidad & Tobago Girmityas, Georgia Land Conservation, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, May 31, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

GovTech: McKinsey Offers Tool to Help Explore Infrastructure Spending. “The free online tool, called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Navigator, is an interactive wheel filled with dots, where the outside of the wheel represents the current year and the innermost region represents 2027. The color-coded dots represent deadlines for programs and spending on the various projects included in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). The tool also contains filters to help those in the public sector — or those in the private sector interested in performing the work funded by the IIJA — narrow down projects. One could, for example, use the tool to display only competitive grants related to public transit.”

Trinidad & Tobago Guardian: Foundation launched to preserve legacies of Indian indentureship. “The Girmitya Foundation, which is a non-governmental organisation registered in T&T, was officially launched last week Sunday at The Mahatma Gandhi Institute for Cultural Cooperation. Founder Nutan Ragoobir stated that Indian immigrants were made to sign a Girmit (agreement) as part of their bonding to hard labour and as such were called Girmityas. Ragoobir stated that the foundation was able to successfully achieve its first goal of creating and implementing a digital library dedicated to Indian history—Girmitya Archives.” If “Girmitya” sounds a little familiar, it’s because on May 15th I indexed an article about Girmityas arriving in Fiji.

PRWeb: Georgia LandCAN, a New Resource to Conserve Farms, Forests, Ranches (PRESS RELEASE). “Whether the need is for information, technical assistance, training, grants, or other support, the Georgia Land Conservation Assistance Network… helps individuals navigate the overwhelming patchwork of resources provided by federal and state agencies, county and regional governments, professional organizations, and nonprofits—all in one easily searchable location.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechRadar: Microsoft takes on Wix, Squarespace with new website builder filled with goodies. “Previously, Power Pages existed as a feature within the Power Apps platform, which enables users to create mobile apps that run on Android, iOS, and Windows. However, Microsoft has now relaunched Power Pages as a standalone offering to help make it easier for developers to design, manage and publish sites for desktop and mobile.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 15 Relaxing Websites to Help When You Feel Overwhelmed. “Life gets overwhelming for us all. Even browsing the internet can be taxing, with the vitriol of social media or the depressing news. Occasionally, we just need to step back, take a deep breath, and relax. What’s the best way to do that? One way to help yourself is to use relaxing websites. We’ve rounded up some of the most relaxing corners of the web; sites designed for nothing more than clearing your mind and being present.”

PC World: This obscure Firefox tool is a must-use for privacy buffs. “I’ve seen other people online who say they sandbox their social media accounts in Edge, work email and services in Firefox, and personal stuff in Chrome (for example)…. Maybe you’ve been wanting this kind of tidy, privacy-friendly setup too, but just don’t want to learn a new browser. Or your taskbar has precious little real estate. I’ve got great news for you: With the Firefox Multi-Account Containers add-on, you can achieve the same effect in just one browser.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Hyperallergic: You’ve Heard of Wordle, But Have You Tried “Artle”?. “You want to get in on the Wordle craze but you just hate letters. Visual learners and those hoping to put their art history degree to some kind of use, rejoice! A new game, Artle, launched by the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC, invites art lovers to guess the artist in four attempts using visual prompts from their oeuvre.”

The Scotsman: Photographer gifts one million images that help tell the story of Scotland . “Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert has gifted his work to St Andrews University, with the acquisition doubling its photographic archive which dates back to the first half of the 19th Century. Everyday moments of ordinary people and their environments regularly feature in his collection as do the realities of industry – from North Sea fishing to coal mining – as he searches for the stories of our times.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

WIRED: Good Luck Not Accidentally Hiring a North Korean Scammer . “Last week, the US Treasury, State Department, and Federal Bureau of Investigation jointly issued a 16-page alert warning businesses to guard against a particular scam in which North Korean IT workers apply for freelance contracts—often with wealthy North American, European, and East Asian firms—to generate revenue for their country. The workers pose as IT workers of other nationalities, pretending to be remote workers from South Korea, China, Japan, Eastern Europe, or the US. The alert notes that there are thousands of North Korean IT workers taking on such contracts.”

NBC News: Parents accuse online sellers of price gouging on baby formula. “Parents struggling to find baby formula amid a nationwide shortage are reporting that price gougers are selling bottles and cans marked up by as much as 300 percent or more on websites like eBay, OfferUp, Amazon and Craigslist, and inside Facebook communities. But in many cases, they’re finding that the platforms are doing little to punish the predatory sellers.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TechCrunch: OpenAI: Look at our awesome image generator! Google: Hold my Shiba Inu. “The AI world is still figuring out how to deal with the amazing show of prowess that is DALL-E 2’s ability to draw/paint/imagine just about anything… but OpenAI isn’t the only one working on something like that. Google Research has rushed to publicize a similar model it’s been working on — which it claims is even better. Imagen (get it?) is a text-to-image diffusion-based generator built on large transformer language models that… okay, let’s slow down and unpack that real quick.”

New York Times: Accused of Cheating by an Algorithm, and a Professor She Had Never Met. “A Florida teenager taking a biology class at a community college got an upsetting note this year. A start-up called Honorlock had flagged her as acting suspiciously during an exam in February. She was, she said in an email to The New York Times, a Black woman who had been ‘wrongfully accused of academic dishonesty by an algorithm.’ What happened, however, was more complicated than a simple algorithmic mistake. It involved several humans, academic bureaucracy and an automated facial detection tool from Amazon called Rekognition.” Good morning, Internet…

May 31, 2022 at 05:32PM
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