New researches

Monday, June 27, 2022

Deaf and Disabled Performers Australia, First Ladies Fashion, Royalty-Free Sound Effects, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 27, 2022

Deaf and Disabled Performers Australia, First Ladies Fashion, Royalty-Free Sound Effects, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 27, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

IF Australia: CGA and Showcast launch database for Deaf and disabled performers. “The Casting Guild of Australia (CGA) has partnered with casting resource Showcast to create a dedicated platform to showcase Deaf and disabled performers. Hosted on Showcast’s website, the database will be made available to casting directors, agents and producers, and include self-taped video footage of individual performers, as well as a headshots and CVs.”

WWD: Untold Stories of Designers Who Dressed First Ladies Is Focus of New Virtual Exhibition. “Eight unsung and primarily lesser-known seamstresses, dressmakers and fashion designers, who dressed first ladies for some essential public appearances, are getting their due in the new digital exhibition, ‘Glamour and Innovation: The Women Behind the Seams of Fashion at the White House.'”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: The 11 Best Places to Find Royalty-Free Sound Effects for Your YouTube Videos. “When making YouTube videos, you need to ensure that you have the right to use particular sound effects. Many websites allow you to download royalty-free sound effects, but not all sites are created equal. This article introduces the best places to find royalty-free sound effects for your YouTube videos.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Associated Press: Why captions are suddenly everywhere and how they got there. “In recent years, smartphone apps like Otter; Google’s Live Transcribe; Ava; InnoCaption, for phone calls; and GalaPro, for live theater performances, have emerged. Some are aimed at people with hearing loss and use human reviewers to make sure captions are accurate. Others, like Otter and Live Transcribe, instead rely on what’s called automatic speech recognition, which uses artificial intelligence to learn and capture speech.”

Mashable: A centuries-old secret society is hanging out in Facebook groups. “Centuries ago, Rosicrucians were only able to maintain their society through their ability to be invisible. But over the past several hundred years, the world has changed — and, along with it, so has the need for Rosicrucians to stay shielded from the public. Now, they’re finding new ways to connect, by pivoting away from secrecy with the help of the most public tools they could find: Facebook, Zoom, and YouTube.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Hill: Federal government getting ready to open its books and show us the receipts. “As members of Congress and staff dig into President Biden’s 2023 budget request, they have a new tool for tracking when, where, and how the president is authorizing federal agencies to spend money — but Congress, and the public, needs to know this new tool exists. It comes in the form of apportionment transparency, an instrument designed to reinforce Congress’s power of the purse.”

ITPro Today: My Body, My Data Act Tackles Online Privacy in Wake of Roe v. Wade Decision. “Government action to protect reproductive health data is already in the works in the form of the My Body, My Data Act, which was introduced simultaneously in the Senate and House of Representatives on June 16. If enacted, the legislation will create a national standard to protect personal reproductive health data by restricting the data that can be collected and retained. Additionally, the legislation would prevent the data from being disclosed or misused.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Heriot Watt University: New project helps Amazon create dataset to advance multilingual language understanding research. “Researchers at the National Robotarium, hosted by Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh, have created a Spoken Language Understanding Resource Package (SLURP) aimed at making it easier for AI and machines to understand spoken questions and commands from humans. One of the items included in the package is an open dataset in English spanning 18 domains. Amazon recently localised and translated the English-only SLURP dataset into 50 typologically diverse languages, creating a new multilingual dataset called MASSIVE.”

PetaPixel: The Smithsonian is Shifting to a Future of Digital Museum Experiences. “The Smithsonian’s collection of historical artifacts is so large that only 1% of its 150 million piece collection is showcased at any given time. Mixed with age and fragility, the museum is quickly virtualizing its collection to be viewed online. The goal of the Smithsonian Digitization Program Office (DPO) is to digitally scan these historical artifacts and publish those scans online for future generations to enjoy and interact with.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

The Scotsman: Great Scottish books to get Scots translation. “Works such as Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, Dracula by Bram Stoker, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Outlander by Diana Gabaldon and Peter Pan are to get the Scots treatment in a new project designed to promote the language. Braw Beginnings is being run as part of Scotland’s Year of Stories, with Scots language ambassador Alistair Heather leading the work for VisitScotland.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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June 28, 2022 at 12:34AM
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Setting Up a GitHub Full of Search Gizmos

Setting Up a GitHub Full of Search Gizmos
By ResearchBuzz

When I applied for the Bellingcat Tech Fellowship, it served to make me very aware of what I don’t know. I mean, I realize I know exactly nothing at least three times a day doing ResearchBuzz, but the lack of real programming ability felt more like an internal missing Lego block than a mere fact of ignorance.

So at the beginning of May I resolved to start learning JavaScript. So I got a good shot of JavaScript under my belt, took a brief detour to SQL so I could understand a couple of concepts, and am now playing around with JavaScript and Python. I’m learning enough that I’m getting ideas that I want to implement.

(Though I’m still terrible. If you feel compelled to email me and tell me I’m not a good programmer, I assure you I already know and don’t need a reminder.)

Consequently I’m making a bunch of experimental Google filters with JavaScript and HTML, and I’m keeping them on GitHub. I’m also hosting them on GitHub Pages so you can try them. My GitHub’s at https://github.com/ResearchBuzz , and my GitHub Page site’s at https://researchbuzz.github.io/ .

Here are the applications you can try at https://researchbuzz.github.io/ . None of them require API keys or any kind of registration, and you’re always welcome to grab the files from GitHub and make your own copies. I find they work fine when I host them locally on my machine.

Stay tuned, I suspect the more I learn the more I’ll make.

Twitter Receipts: — https://researchbuzz.github.io/Twitter-Receipts/index.html

Twitter Receipts has you enter a Twitter handle and a date, then queries The Wayback Machine for the closest snapshot of the Twitter handle to that date. The Wayback Machine page opens in a new URL. Sometimes the API is a little slow so give it a few seconds.

Back That Ask Up: — https://researchbuzz.github.io/Back-That-Ask-Up-/

Enter a Google News query and the number of days/months/years’ worth of the most recent news items you want to eliminate. BTAU will construct a date-restricted search query in Google News and open it in a new window.

The Anti-Bullseye Name Search: — https://researchbuzz.github.io/The-Anti-Bullseye-Name-Search/

TABNS takes a name and generates a Google search that searches for the name in reverse order (Lastname Firstname) and specifically excludes the most common expression of firstname lastname. It changes the tenor of the search results completely, surfacing many more legal- and data- based results. It also removes a lot of commercial clutter from your search (Amazon, eBay, Pinterest, etc) and gives you the option of adding focusing keywords to the name search.

Sinker Search: — https://researchbuzz.github.io/sinker-search/index.html

Sinker Search takes full advantage of Google’s 32-word query limit by letting you choose an emphasized word in your search which will be repeated until Google’s query limit is reached.

Blogspace Time Machine: — https://researchbuzz.github.io/blogspace-time-machine/index.html

A Google filter for exploring recently-created (current month) content in blogspace, with the option of seeing the same search in blogspace from one, three, five, ten, or fifteen years ago.

Blog Shovel: — https://researchbuzz.github.io/Blog-Shovel/index.html

A Google filter unearthing blog content, from the early days of the Web until now. For much older content than the Blogspace Time Machine (goes back to 1995.)

June 27, 2022 at 09:17PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/lBXhIEL

California Heatwaves, WWII Facial Recognition, Archive File Formats, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, June 27, 2022

California Heatwaves, WWII Facial Recognition, Archive File Formats, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, June 27, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

UCLA: New Online Mapping Tool Helps California Prepare for Extreme Heat. “The online mapping tool developed by UCLA and the Public Health Alliance of Southern California allows users to find information about temperature extremes, explore vulnerable populations, understand community health situations and seek out state resources such as air conditioners for low-income households.”

Times of Israel: Google engineer identifies anonymous faces in WWII photos with AI facial recognition. “Walking past the countless photos of Holocaust survivors and victims at Warsaw’s POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in 2016, New York-native Daniel Patt was haunted by the possibility that he was passing the faces of his own relatives without even knowing it…. he set to work creating and developing From Numbers to Names (N2N), an artificial intelligence-driven facial recognition platform that can scan through photos from prewar Europe and the Holocaust, linking them to people living today.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Chrome Unboxed: ChromeOS can now open 7z, ISO, RAR and many other newly supported archival formats. “Most notably among the above newly supported formats are ISO and 7z. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve already received 7-zip folders from others or transferred them myself (RAR is a thing of the past for me), and simply couldn’t open them. I think the more users see that ChromeOS can do what Windows can – at least for the basics, the more they will be willing to invest in it or integrate it as a part of their workflow.”

USEFUL STUFF

Mashable: Stardust is the first period tracker app to offer end to end encryption. “…period tracking app Stardust, which combines traditional menstruation tracking with the movements of our moon and the planets, has come out ahead of many others by announcing itself as the first recognized app to offer end-to-end encryption for all users.”

MakeUseOf: Identify Bird Sounds With BirdNET-Pi on Raspberry Pi. “You may well have seen various bird species in your backyard or garden, but there may well be many more roosting nearby that you have only heard. To identify them, you don’t need to be an expert in ornithology, however: all that’s required is a Raspberry Pi equipped with a mic and the BirdNET-Pi software.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: Challenges of the Future Confront the Art World. “Should the British Museum return the ancient sculptures known as the Parthenon Marbles to Greece? Is the art world contributing to global warming? Is the hot market for digital art known as NFTs over? These are among the most vexing challenges facing the art world today, especially the question of how — or even whether — to return what many view as plundered art, like the Parthenon Marbles, to their rightful owners.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TorrentFreak: Digital Trails: How Bungie Identified a Mass Sender of Fake DMCA Notices. “In response to persons unknown sending large numbers of fake DMCA notices to YouTube while impersonating its anti-piracy partner, Bungie filed a lawsuit in the US seeking millions in damages. At the time the name of the ‘Doe’ defendant was unknown. This is how a Bungie investigation followed digital breadcrumbs to track down and identify that person by name and physical address.”

Bleeping Computer: LGBTQ+ community warned of extortionists abusing dating apps. “According to the FTC, the criminals pose as potential romantic partners on LGBTQ+ dating apps, sending explicit photos to their targets and asking them to reciprocate. If they fall for it, the victims get blackmailed into paying a ransom, usually in untraceable gift cards, under the threat of having sexual imagery they shared with the scammers leaked to their family, friends, or employers.”

Reuters: Exclusive: Google Hit With Antitrust Complaint by Danish Job Search Rival. “Google was hit with an antitrust complaint on Monday after a Danish online job-search rival took its grievance to EU regulators, alleging the Alphabet unit had unfairly favoured its own job search service. The complaint could accelerate EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager’s scrutiny of the service, Google for Jobs, three years after it first came under her microscope.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

World Bank: 70% of 10-Year-Olds now in Learning Poverty, Unable to Read and Understand a Simple Text. “As a result of the worst shock to education and learning in recorded history, learning poverty has increased by a third in low- and middle-income countries, with an estimated 70% of 10-year-olds unable to understand a simple written text, according to a new report published today by the World Bank, UNESCO, UNICEF, UK government Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), USAID, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”

TechRadar Pro: Why this chess grandmaster left Google behind. “When [Tal] Shaked arrived at Google in 2004, the company had just 3,000 employees and looked nothing like the sprawling megacorporation it is today. He was brought on as a junior engineer to work on Google Search. At the time, Google’s search rankings were not powered by any form of intelligence. Instead, a dedicated team of engineers was tasked with managing a complex rule-based system designed to serve up the best and most relevant results to users.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Dalhousie University: ‘It takes a village to build a whale’: Dal’s Blue Whale Project set to soar this fall. “Since 2017, Dalhousie’s Blue Whale Project has left a big impression on everyone who’s encountered it, from students and faculty to community members and volunteers. Now, just months away from the blue whale arriving at its final resting place in Dal’s Steele Ocean Sciences Building, there is a buzz of excitement around the university.” Good morning, Internet…

June 27, 2022 at 05:31PM
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Sunday, June 26, 2022

Brendan O’Regan, Repurposing Old Smartphones, Downloading Movies, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 26, 2022

Brendan O’Regan, Repurposing Old Smartphones, Downloading Movies, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 26, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Clare Herald: New website showcases life of Brendan O’Regan. “Brendan O’Regan’s many achievements include setting up the world’s first duty-free airport retail outlet at Shannon Airport. In economic terms, he initiated Ireland’s first programme of foreign direct investment in manufacturing, based on a favourable enterprise climate. Internationally, he is acknowledged as the father of the €70 billion a year airport duty-free business.”

USEFUL STUFF

CNET: Turn Your Android Into a Wireless Mouse and More. Here’s How. “If your phone’s too old to command a high trade-in value, or you’re looking to save some money on a webcam, a Google Home, a wireless mouse, or you just like to tinker, there are some pretty ingenious ways to repurpose your old device and turn it into something you’ll actually want to use.”

MakeUseOf: How to Legally Download Movies to Watch Offline for Free. “Almost all of us now use streaming services to catch the hottest new movies and TV shows. However, streaming still has one major flaw… you need an internet connection. Which means they aren’t all that convenient when you’re traveling. Fortunately, many of the best streaming services now allow you to download movies to watch offline; and all for free, as part of your normal account. So, in this article, we’ll show you how to download movies to watch offline, free and legally.”

How-To Geek: The Best Raspberry Pi 4 Alternatives. “A semiconductor shortage combined with a surge in popularity has led to a significant supply shortage of Pi 4s. Manufacturers say the device won’t be back in stock until April next year, and in the meantime, the few that are around tend to be priced at a premium — up to 400% more than its intended retail price. But alternatives are available. Some may be slightly expensive, and others may not have the power a Pi 4 has, but they are all in stock and ready to go straight into your next project.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Wall Street Journal: The Surprising Reason Your Amazon Searches Are Returning More Confusing Results than Ever. “If you want to be reminded just how tiny you are, you could travel to a remote part of the world and behold the night sky, or stand atop a mountain and contemplate its immensity, or you could try to find the best garlic press on Amazon… Granted, there are many more stars in the night sky than the 300 or so garlic presses visible on Amazon’s U.S. site. But wading through page after page of those listings, for items with tens of thousands of collective reviews, is, like many searches on Amazon, increasingly an exercise in frustration, despair and confusion.”

Input Magazine: Inside the subreddit dedicated to busting shoplifters. “Because others don’t understand the thrill of busting shoplifters, people like [Alex] McLeod are increasingly turning to Reddit to find people who do. He’s one of the many shoplifting-prevention staff employed by corporations across North America who’s joined r/LossPrevention, a 55,000-member hub for corporate employees battling crime.”

WIRED: Charity TikTok Videos Put an Uncomfortable Spin on Morality. “The hashtag #honestytest has 51.5 million views on the platform—among other tests, creators drop bundles of cash in front of people as a ‘social experiment,’ filming them to see if they’ll pocket the money (some of these people are experiencing homelessness; many of these videos are clearly staged). Ultimately, ‘dishonest’ people are embarrassed in front of millions of viewers, while ‘honest’ people are rewarded financially.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Verge: Google says attackers worked with ISPs to deploy Hermit spyware on Android and iOS. “A sophisticated spyware campaign is getting the help of internet service providers (ISPs) to trick users into downloading malicious apps, according to research published by Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) (via TechCrunch). This corroborates earlier findings from security research group Lookout, which has linked the spyware, dubbed Hermit, to Italian spyware vendor RCS Labs.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

BBC Sport: Homophobia large portion of online abuse aimed at footballers and basketballers – study. “Homophobia is responsible for a large portion of abuse aimed at footballers and basketballers in the men’s and women’s game, according to a new report. Of more than 1,500 abusive posts included in the report, homophobic abuse was 40% of posts targeted at male footballers, 27% of that sent to female football players, 46% of the abuse aimed at male basketballers and 19% of that posted to female basketball players.”

Phys .org: A quest to digitize 1 million plant specimens. “The Australian National Herbarium in Canberra is imaging nearly a million plant specimens using an automated system developed by Netherlands company Picturae. CSIRO Group Leader for Digitization & Informatics, Pete Thrall, who oversees digital assets at the National Research Collections Australia, managed by CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, said the project would help inform bushfire recovery and biosecurity.” Good afternoon, Internet…

June 27, 2022 at 12:26AM
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British Coatings Federation, Chromebooks, CodeWhisperer, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, June 26, 2022

British Coatings Federation, Chromebooks, CodeWhisperer, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, June 26, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Coatings World: British Coatings Federation Launches Online History. “This year marks the 110th year since the inaugural meeting of The National Federation of Associated Paint, Colour and Varnish Manufacturers of the United Kingdom in 1912. As part of the celebrations, the British Coatings Federation (BCF) has created an online resource of the history archives of the many different associations that make up the BCF’s long history.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Blog: Your Chromebook now works better with your other devices. “During CES and I/O this year, we announced a few new Android and Chromebook features designed to help your phone and laptop work better together. Soon you’ll see some of those features roll out to your Chromebooks so you can try them yourself.”

TechCrunch: Amazon launches CodeWhisperer, a GitHub Copilot-like AI pair programming tool. “At its re:Mars conference, Amazon today announced the launch of CodeWhisperer, an AI pair programming tool similar to GitHub’s Copilot that can autocomplete entire functions based on only a comment or a few keystrokes. The company trained the system, which currently supports Java, JavaScript and Python, on billions of lines of publicly available open source code and its own codebase, as well as publicly available documentation and code on public forums.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Verge: Khaby Lame is now the most-followed TikToker in the world. “TikTok has a new reigning champion. Khaby Lame, a 22-year-old Senegalese-born creator, became the most-followed person on TikTok last night, surpassing American TikTok star Charli D’Amelio, who formerly had the distinction. Lame now has more than 142.7 million followers compared to D’Amelio’s 142.3 million.”

Gizmodo: Elon Tells Twitter He Needs Moar Data, Twitter Gives It to Him. “Earlier this month, Twitter finally succumbed to Musk’s better-late-than never complaints around bot proliferation on the platform and provided him with a ‘firehose’ of data. Apparently, that wasn’t enough to assuage Musk’s concerns, and now Twitter will reportedly sent the billionaire even more user data.”

BuzzFeed News: WeChat Became The Platform For Shanghai Residents To Speak Out About China’s Zero-COVID Policy. “A six-minute video posted on Chinese social media platform WeChat painted a harrowing timeline of what was happening inside Shanghai during the city’s latest strict COVID lockdown. After the video went viral, it was taken down by government censors. It got reposted, then taken down again. And again, and again.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

WIRED: Google Warns of New Spyware Targeting iOS and Android Users. “IN HEARINGS THIS week, the notorious spyware vendor NSO group told European legislators that at least five EU countries have used its powerful Pegasus surveillance malware. But as ever more comes to light about the reality of how NSO’s products have been abused around the world, researchers are also working to raise awareness that the surveillance-for-hire industry goes far beyond one company.”

Vice: Dad Learns His Photos Are Being Used to Sell ‘Happy Ending’ Massages on Grindr. “Over the past two years, [Dr. Scott] Liptzin has been made aware of seven different accounts of erotic masseurs using his photos. He said some of the Instagram accounts using his pics have more likes and views than his original posts do.”

Bloomberg: Pinterest must face suit by Oakland woman who says she helped create it. “Pinterest Inc. must face a lawsuit from a digital marketing strategist who says she helped conceive the social media platform, but not one of its founders, a California judge ruled. Late on Thursday, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Richard Seabolt denied the company’s motion to dismiss the suit, but he eliminated co-founder Paul Sciarra as a defendant because he left Pinterest a decade ago.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CNET: Google’s Parti Generator Relies on 20 Billion Inputs to Create Photorealistic Images. “Pathways Autoregressive Text-to-Image, or Parti, studies sets of images, which Google calls ‘image tokens,’ using them to construct new images, the search giant said on a research website. Parti’s images become more realistic when it has more parameters — tokens and other training material — to review. The model studies 20 billion parameters before generating a final image.”

The Atlantic: How to Fix Twitter and Facebook. “Can we govern ourselves? Can we trust strangers? These questions go to the heart of a functioning civic society. No answer is preordained, but getting to a good one requires building distributed architectures, online and off, to foster cooperation among the many and to contend with the few who want to wreck it.”

KnowTechie: IKEA’s app digitally removes your furniture and replaces it with theirs. “IKEA just launched a new design tool meant to help you envision its furniture right in your living room. Ikea Kreativ’s Scene Scanner lets you scan a room with your phone and place furniture how you see fit. You can ‘erase’ your own first, and then start placing Ikea-branded products like you’re arranging a home in Animal Crossing.” Good morning, Internet…

June 26, 2022 at 05:34PM
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Saturday, June 25, 2022

Coronavirus in Boston, Slack, WeChat, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 25, 2022

Coronavirus in Boston, Slack, WeChat, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 25, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

News@Northeastern: Want To Understand The Impact Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On Boston? Northeastern Researchers Have Built A Database. “Sudden disruptions to society were immediately apparent: School closures, business shutdowns, new—and in some cases, unprecedented—public health policies. But other pandemic impacts remain hidden, locked away in datasets and public records not yet meaningfully analyzed. The determination to uncover that data—and make it widely available—led a group of Northeastern researchers to construct a ‘data-support system’ from multiple information sources in and around the city of Boston that, when combined, paint a portrait of how communities and neighborhoods were impacted by the pandemic, with particular emphasis on communities and neighborhoods of color.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

WIRED: The Future of Slack Looks a Lot Like Zoom. “Last June, the popular workplace chat app Slack introduced Huddles, an audio-only feature designed to replicate the real-life thing. It was an immediate hang space, launched easily from within a Slack channel or a direct message. And it has been, according to Slack, a hit.”

CryptoPotato: WeChat Bans All Crypto-Related Content Following ToS Update. “Some form of digitally-related research is still underway in China, notably around CBDCs [Central Bank Digital Currency]. However, in an update to its ToS, WeChat – the largest social network in the country, with over 1.1 billion users – has decided to ban all content believed to be promoting digital assets.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 5 Apps for Spending Time Outside and Connecting With Nature. “If you want to spend more time in nature but need a little nudge to get out there, then look to your smartphone or tablet for help. Whether you want to spend more time hiking and camping or simply take a lap around the block occasionally, this collection of apps can help you make the most of your time in nature.” I had no idea this category of app existed.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Mashable: 5 interactive tools for learning about abortion access in your state . “Despite the ruling, a network of activists and professionals have spent decades preparing for and fighting against this now-reality. Reproductive rights organizations, legal institutions, and news organizations have created numerous resources to help guide people through the new restrictions, including many interactive maps and infographics about nationwide policies and access.”

Poynter: YouTube takes flak on the third day of GlobalFact. “YouTube came under fire in Oslo on Friday during a ‘fireside chat’ at GlobalFact 9, a large fact-checking conference hosted by the International Fact-Checking Network. During the Q&A, multiple fact-checkers in the audience criticized the tech giant for a failure to enforce quality standards, a general lack of communication and an alleged failure to act on mis- and disinformation on its platform.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: U.S. Tech Industry Frets About Handing Data to States Prosecuting Abortion . “The technology industry is bracing for the uncomfortable possibility of having to hand over pregnancy-related data to law enforcement, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Friday to overturn the Roe v. Wade precedent that for decades guaranteed a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.”

Comparitech: Ransomware attacks on US schools and colleges cost $3.56bn in 2021. “In 2021, 67 individual ransomware attacks affected 954 schools and colleges, potentially impacting 950,129 students. We estimate that these attacks cost education institutions $3.56 billion in downtime alone. Most schools will have also faced astronomical recovery costs as they tried to restore computers, recover data, and shore up their systems to prevent future attacks.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Lidar Magazine: Bodie Heritage Kept Alive With 3D Digital Archive. “Scientists from the University of California (UC) Merced have digitally mapped the fragile remains of the once-flourishing gold rush ‘ghost’ town of Bodie, California, as part of the Bodie 3D Project.”

Euronews: Russia’s Yandex opens public access to AI large language model. “Russian technology company Yandex said on Thursday it had made a large language model for artificial intelligence research open to the public, hoping to spawn faster and deeper development of certain AI technologies.” Good afternoon, Internet…

June 26, 2022 at 12:27AM
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British Library Endangered Archives, Maternal Health Resources, Google Docs, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, June 25, 2022

British Library Endangered Archives, Maternal Health Resources, Google Docs, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, June 25, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

British Library Endangered Archives Blog: New online – June 2022. “We have another 4 new projects online to bring to your attention. This time from Indonesia, Iran, India, and West Africa.”

National Library of Medicine: Birthing a Capstone: A Prenatal and Postpartum Health Toolkit for Public Librarians. “Using PubMed and MedlinePlus as well as curating more online resources, this new toolkit gives librarians a ready-made, customizable bank of resources so that they can distribute pre-prepared resources or customize our resources templates to suit their specific library’s needs and ensures that librarians have access to high-quality, evidence-based information about prenatal, expecting, and postpartum needs to distribute to patrons, with the option to tailor it to suit their patrons’ needs.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

WIRED: How to Use Markdown in Google Docs . “Google Docs can convert markdown to its native formatting in real time, but only a small subset of what’s called Markdown is supported. Still, it’s the fastest way to bold and italicize text, and add links, in Google Docs. If you don’t know what Markdown is, you’re not going to be interested in this feature, but if you (like me) find yourself using it reflexively, you will want to enable it. Here’s how it works.”

Reuters: Google News re-opens in Spain after eight-year shutdown. “Alphabet… reopened Google News in Spain on Wednesday, eight years after it shut down the service because of a Spanish rule forcing the company and other news aggregators to pay publishers for using snippets of their news.”

USEFUL STUFF

Computerworld: The business user’s guide to Google Voice. “Google Voice is one of Google’s most complex, confusing, and poorly promoted services. But it’s also one of its most powerful — if you take the time to figure out exactly what it does and how it can work for you.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Book Riot: How To Start A BookTok. “TikTok is here to stay, and, as in most corners of the internet, the bookish world has carved out its own niche there. Authors, bookstores, and bookfluencers all have accounts, and the publishing industry is increasingly taking notice and tapping into the power of the platform to sell books and spread enthusiasm about reading. So how do you get started on BookTok?”

I feel like it’s a shade too early for this sort of thing, but just to give you a peek at the horizon, from Search Engine Land: Virtual environment optimization (VEO) is coming. Ready for it?. “VEO is the task of working within a virtual environment and utilizing the resources available to best position the clients’ products and services within an alternative reality.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: Cybercriminals Steal $100 Million in Cryptocurrency. “Cybercriminals made off with $100 million in cryptocurrency after hacking Horizon, a so-called blockchain bridge, the company said. Harmony, the blockchain startup behind Horizon, tweeted late Thursday that that it had discovered the theft and was working with forensic specialists and law enforcement in hopes of tracking down those responsible.”

City of Chicago: City of Chicago Launches Data Dashboard to Support Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement Program. “Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot, the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH), the Office of Emergency Communication and Management (OEMC), the Chicago Fire Department (CFD), and the Chicago Police Department (CPD) launched the Data Dashboard. The new resource will provide information on the City’s Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement (CARE) Program. The primary goal of the CARE program is to improve outcomes for individuals experiencing a behavioral health crisis requiring an emergency response.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Reuters: Chinese authority launches probe into Chinese academic database CNKI. “China’s internet security authority has launched an investigation into the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), about a month after the market regulator targeted the online academic database with an antitrust probe.”

Heriot Watt University: AI algorithm to help tackle ‘epidemic’ of gender-based online abuse. “Researchers at the National Robotarium, hosted by Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh, are developing advanced ‘machine learning’ algorithms that will significantly improve the detection, intervention and prevention of online gender-based abuse.”

University of Manchester: Digital psychosis monitoring system trial launches. “A groundbreaking smartphone app for remote digital data collection which aims to predict if an individual will relapse into psychosis is to be trialled across the UK in a £12.5 million study. Led by University of Manchester researchers, the system will be tested across six Higher Education Institutions and their partnering NHS Trusts in England, Wales and Scotland. The work is also being conducted in partnership with The McPin Foundation.” Good morning, Internet…

June 25, 2022 at 05:32PM
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