Design Card Decks, California Groundwater Projects, Snapchat, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, August 10, 2022

Design Card Decks, California Groundwater Projects, Snapchat, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, August 10, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation: IPLC Launches the Design Card Decks for Ideation and Exploration Web Archive. “The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation is pleased to announce the launch of the Design Card Decks for Ideation and Exploration Web Archive, curated by librarians at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University. Card decks are used in design fields as a game-based methodology for ideation and stakeholder participatory collaboration.”

California Department of Water Resources: DWR Launches New Web-Based Mapping Tool Showing Nearly 3,000 Groundwater Sustainability Projects. “The California Groundwater Projects Tool is an interactive mapping tool that allows users to explore a database of nearly 3,000 projects initiated in California over the last decade to protect groundwater resources.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Snapchat Now Lets Parents See Who Their Kids Are Messaging. “Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, launched a set of parental control tools on Tuesday that allow adults to see who their children are contacting on the messaging app.”

PC Magazine: Google’s ‘Read Along’ Learning Tool Now Available on the Web. “The app, which is supposed to help children learn how to read, has been exclusive to Android since it was released in India in 2019. (It was called Bolo at the time; Google changed the name for its global launch in 2020.) Now it’ll finally be available to kids without Android devices.”

USEFUL STUFF

Hongkiat: 20 Desktop Tools to Generate & Manage Passwords – Best Of. “Here are 20 desktop tools to generate and manage passwords. From ‘one password for all accounts to generating hundreds of passwords in seconds, these tools offer a gamut of features to benefit from. Let’s check the full list below.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Lifehacker: Do You Need Locket, the Latest Trendy Photo-Sharing App?. “The latest hot photo-sharing app, Locket, recently raised $12.5 million in funding, making it potentially worth checking out even though it’s still relatively unknown. After launching on New Year’s Day this year, it did rack up over 20 million downloads, but it’s still nowhere as well-known as its peers, Instagram or BeReal…. But what makes Locket different?”

SF Gate: Google says data center ‘electrical incident’ unrelated to Monday’s Google outage. “Three electricians who were transported to a local hospital with burn injuries after an arc flash outside a Google data center are now in stable condition, according to a Google spokesperson.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot. “Twitter yesterday slammed Elon Musk’s response to the company’s lawsuit in a 127-page filing in the Delaware Court of Chancery that says Musk’s claims are “contradicted by the evidence and common sense.” Twitter’s court filing also said Musk’s spam analysis relied on a tool that once called his own Twitter account a likely bot.”

Bleeping Computer: Thousands of hackers flock to ‘Dark Utilities’ C2-as-a-Service. “Security researchers found a new service called Dark Utilities that provides an easy and inexpensive way for cybercriminals to set up a command and control (C2) center for their malicious operations.”

PC Magazine: South Korea Will Investigate Google, Apple Over In-App Payments (Again). “South Korea will once again investigate Google and Apple over their in-app payment policies. The Korea Communications Commission (KCC) says it’s launching an investigation into the companies—as well as the One Store marketplace that recently expanded(Opens in a new window) beyond South Korea—to ‘identify violations of prohibited acts by app market operators” within the country.'”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Knowledge At Wharton: Who Is Falling for Fake News?. “New research from Wharton’s Ken Moon and Senthil Veeraraghavan recommends a data-driven solution for social media platforms to deal with fake news.”

Engadget: People spent much less time watching gaming streams this spring, report says. “The number of hours streamed and watched across Twitch, YouTube Gaming and Facebook Gaming have dropped significantly over the last year, according to the latest Streamlabs and Stream Hatchet report on the landscape of livestreaming. Between April and June, streamers on the three platforms were live for 273 million hours. That’s down 19.4 percent from Q2 2021 and 12 percent from the previous quarter.” Good morning, Internet…

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August 10, 2022 at 05:29PM
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ACLU Of Delaware, Michigan Algae Blooms, Equiano Internet Cable, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 9, 2022

ACLU Of Delaware, Michigan Algae Blooms, Equiano Internet Cable, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 9, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

WBOC: ACLU of Delaware Launches Public Archive to Highlight Their Civil Impact on Delaware’s History. “The American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU of Delaware has been advocating for civil liberties and civil rights in Delaware since 1961. Earlier this month the organization launched a public archive to preserve records and highlight the ACLU of Delaware’s involvement in the civil rights history of Delaware.”

State of Michigan: New tool available to track harmful algal bloom reports. “The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) and the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) are reminding Michiganders to be aware of the potential for harmful algal blooms (HABs) in bodies of water. To help the public know where HABs have been reported, a new Michigan Harmful Algal Bloom Reports map is now available online at Michigan.gov/HABsMap.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Tech Central: Google’s giant Equiano Internet cable has landed in South Africa. “The Equiano subsea Internet cable was landed at Melkbosstrand north of Cape Town on Monday, the last stop on the route south for the 12-fibre-pair system that promises to drive down Internet costs in South Africa when it comes online in the coming months.”

USEFUL STUFF

Tom’s Guide: The best photo storage and sharing sites in 2022. “Some have free tiers of service, while others are geared more towards professionals. Whatever your needs, there’s sure to be a photo storage site for you; we’ve rounded up our favorites below.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

A Current Affair (Australia): Warning over ‘fake’ Google reviews. “A Melbourne dentist has denied deceiving the public, after her clinic was found to be receiving glowing five-star online reviews from patients that likely do not exist. It comes as A Current Affair can reveal the extent that consumers are being fooled by bogus testimonials.”

News@Northeastern: How TikTok Made Reading Fun Again. “Thanks to TikTok users posting reviews of their favorite books with the hashtag #BookTok, a crop of books has skyrocketed in popularity, and some Gen Zers are discovering that reading can be fun.”

International Journalists’ Network: New tool helps media in Kenya combat spread of false information. “To address the spread of disinformation during the 2022 election season and beyond, the Media Council of Kenya (MCK) in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme launched the iVerify Network of Fact-checking Desks, a digital platform that newsrooms and journalists can use to fact-check information before they publish or broadcast. New to Kenya, iVerify has in the past been used successfully elsewhere in Africa.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Scientists hid encryption key for Wizard of Oz text in plastic molecules. “Scientists from the University of Texas at Austin sent a letter to colleagues in Massachusetts with a secret message: an encryption key to unlock a text file of L. Frank Baum’s classic novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The twist: The encryption key was hidden in a special ink laced with polymers.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Nature: A deep learning approach to fight illicit trafficking of antiquities using artefact instance classification. “We approach the task of detecting the illicit movement of cultural heritage from a machine learning perspective by presenting a framework for detecting a known artefact in a new and unseen image. To this end, we explore the machine learning problem of instance classification for large archaeological images datasets, i.e. where each individual object (instance) is itself a class that all of the multiple images of that object belongs.”

Stanford Daily: Is Google’s AI sentient? Stanford AI experts say that’s ‘pure clickbait’. “Following a Google engineer’s viral claims that artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ‘LaMDa’ was sentient, Stanford experts have urged skepticism and open-mindedness while encouraging a rethinking of what it means to be ‘sentient’ at all.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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August 10, 2022 at 12:40AM
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Facebook Roundup, August 9, 2022

Facebook Roundup, August 9, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Associated Press: Meta quieter on election misinformation as midterms loom. “Facebook owner Meta is quietly curtailing some of the safeguards designed to thwart voting misinformation or foreign interference in U.S. elections as the November midterm vote approaches.”

Bloomberg: Meta Among Companies Making Summer Interns Nervous About Job Offers. “Internships at Meta Platforms Inc., the Facebook and Instagram owner, are coveted for their selectivity, high compensation, lavish perks — and most of all, the potential job offer waiting at the end of the summer. This year, that’s more elusive.”

Bloomberg: Metaverse Jobs Are Disappearing as Hiring Slows at Google, Facebook . “Meta Platforms Inc., grappling with its first-ever quarterly sales slump, now has another problem: Jobs in the metaverse are disappearing.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BusinessWorld (Philippines): Facebook took down 5 million pieces of content leading up to PHL elections — Meta. “Facebook, the Meta-owned social media platform, removed five million pieces of content on Facebook and Instagram in the four months leading up to the Philippine national elections and the week following (Jan. 9–May 16).”

Poynter: How Facebook pages exploit Russia’s war in Ukraine with false videos. “Twin Facebook pages advertise themselves as providing newsy and up-to-the-minute coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine. But on a given day, their followers might see videos claiming Norwegians raided Russian ships, Vladimir Putin was defeated on ‘all fronts,’ or that a single British ship blocked a Russian fleet. None of those headlines are true. But that doesn’t stop the pages Fios Vinks and Fiosl Liesi from earning clicks, views and a monetizable following through false reporting on the war.”

Engadget: Facebook faces suspension in Kenya over ethnic-based hate speech. “Kenya’s National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC), a government agency that aims to eradicate ethnic or racial discrimination among the country’s 45 tribes, has given Facebook seven days to tackle hate speech related to next month’s election on its platform. If the social media fails to do so, it faces suspension in the country.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

San Diego Union-Tribune: Administrators of popular Facebook page Tijuana 664 gunned down outside their home . “Anonymous Facebook pages in Tijuana often purport to be offering news, but the content can run the gamut from memes to copy-and-pasted stories from mainstream news organizations to insider crime blogs that offer explicit details about violence in the border city. Many local journalists have publicly spoken out about how the existence of these anonymous pages puts their safety at risk by both encouraging violence and by creating confusion among the public about the role of journalists.”

Bloomberg: Meta Asks Court to Force Snap to Hand Over Data as It Fights FTC Antitrust Lawsuit. “Meta Platforms Inc. is asking a judge to force Snap Inc. to hand over data it says is needed to help the Facebook owner defend against a US government antitrust lawsuit.”

Bleeping Computer: Meta, US hospitals sued for using healthcare data to target ads. “A class action lawsuit has been filed in the Northern District of California against Meta (Facebook), the UCSF Medical Center, and the Dignity Health Medical Foundation, alleging that the organizations are unlawfully collecting sensitive healthcare data about patients for targeted advertising.”

Ohio Attorney General: Ohio Selected as Lead Plaintiff in Class-Action Lawsuit Against Facebook. “A federal judge in California yesterday agreed to consolidate a series of lawsuits against Facebook and appointed Ohio the lead plaintiff in the securities class-action case against the social-media giant. Attorney General Yost will lead the class action on behalf of Ohio and any other affected investors.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

San Diego Union-Tribune: Opinion: Instagram is a cult by every measure. Here’s why you’re not going anywhere.. “I’ve personally been on Instagram for about 11 years — starting at the age of 13 — and I now have a career that requires me to run numerous social media accounts. I’m somebody who’s unhappy with their weekly screen time, my tendency to ‘doom scroll’ and the way social media impacts my self-perception. I know my life would be better if I deleted it, but I don’t. And I won’t.”

Washington Post: Facebook wants to be more like TikTok. That’s a bad idea.. “The thing about network effects is that they work both ways. When your network is growing, it keeps getting steadily more valuable. But if it starts to shrink, each departing user makes the service slightly less attractive to those who remain. This is why Facebook has been so aggressive (too aggressive, the trustbusters murmur) about acquiring potential competitors and adding features that are popular on other apps. It needs to protect that nice, wide moat — which is frankly looking a bit stagnant.”

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August 9, 2022 at 07:13PM
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Law & Justice Journalism Project, AdObservatory, Caregiving Lifehacks, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, August 9, 2022

Law & Justice Journalism Project, AdObservatory, Caregiving Lifehacks, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, August 9, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

NiemanLab: The Law & Justice Journalism Project aims to help journalists covering crime and the U.S. legal system. “The impact of bad crime reporting is widespread and it can take years to repair broken trust with audiences. That’s why the Law & Justice Journalism Project is launching: to provide journalists with tools, skills, and resources to improve their coverage of crime, public safety, and the United States legal system.”

NewsWise: New, enhanced AdObservatory.org provides transparency & insights on digital political spending. “This public, free dashboard provides journalists and researchers with the ability to search digital political ad spending across Meta (formerly Facebook) properties, see visualizations of spending patterns, and search researched topics such as abortion, guns, and immigration. C4D unveiled the new site today in conjunction with the NABJ/NAHJ annual convention in Las Vegas.”

UConn Today: Finding Comfort at Home: New Website Logs Solutions to Everyday Problems for Disabled People and Their Caregivers. “The many uses of that traditionally blue roll are just some of the little life hacks on Mauldin’s new website, Disability at Home, which, even though an offshoot of larger research, is nonetheless just as much a passion project. [Laura] Mauldin, an associate professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the human development and family sciences department, says she’s also struck by the uses for rubberized shelf liner on things like trays and by the uses for zip ties to fix things like a brake on a wheelchair.” Lots of useful stuff here. Wish this had been around when I was taking care of Granny in her home.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

How-To Geek: What’s New in Microsoft Edge 104, Available Now. “Following the release of Chrome 104, Microsoft is now rolling out the same update for its Edge browser. Edge 104 includes an important security change, a new import option for Chrome, and more.”

Search Engine Journal: LinkedIn Tests New Human Curated Discover Feed. “LinkedIn is testing a different take on a Discover feed — a new mobile app section with content curated by humans rather than algorithms. Similar to other discovery-based feeds, a dedicated tab in the LinkedIn app will house content published by accounts outside your network.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

British Library Endangered Archives Blog: West African Manuscripts Crowdsourcing Project Fellowship: Call now open. “We are delighted to be partnering with Chevening to offer a professional development fellowship. The Chevening Fellow will develop a community crowdsourcing project to improve the discoverability of approximately 10,000 digitised West African manuscripts within the EAP collections. We are keen to ensure these manuscripts are assigned titles in Arabic script, making them more accessible to local researchers.”

The Verge: These ‘CSS Crimes’ Turn Social Media Posts Into Games. “While major social media giants cling to uniformity and standardized posts, cohost throws all of this corporate banality out the window. My first encounter with this nascent platform was like stumbling across a bygone era of computing — one where websites were unchecked reflections of personal expression and delightfully weird, often awkward vibes. Most importantly, cohost has cultivated a thriving demoscene full of artists, designers, creative coders, and ambitious shitposters ready to push the envelope of computer art.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Brookings Institution: EU Code of Practice on Disinformation. “As platform signatories continue to grow their products and services, and disinformation continues to evolve, the larger question is whether cooperation between the private sector and the European Commission will make a meaningful difference against the spread of disinformation online. Ultimately, the EC will have to assess whether companies are significantly improving under self-regulatory codes, or if stricter legislative frameworks like the DSA are needed in the future.”

CNET: Google Sues Sonos Over Voice Control Technology. “Google is suing speaker-maker Sonos over alleged patent infringement. In two lawsuits filed in California federal court on Monday, Google alleges that Sonos’ latest voice-assistant technology violates seven different patents that relate it’s technology for Google Assistant.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CogDogBlog: Getting Beyond the AI Exuberance of Promptism. “I have to admit doing some bit of tossing phrases into one of the DALL-E Mini generators to gawk/shrug/tweet about what emerged. There is a bit of natural curiosity to either get a result that is a stunning graphic but what seems more common in my attempts… crap.”

Europeana Pro: New project at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin explores crowdsourcing for the Anthropocene . “In 2021, Europeana’s Research Grants Programme awarded funding for innovative projects exploring crowdsourcing and research. What did the winners achieve? We hear from Ulrike Sturm, Scientific Officer Innovation for Nature and Society at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, who spoke on behalf of the project team.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Johns Hopkins University: Citizen Scientists In Bloom. “Recent PhD graduate Ikbal Choudhury’s nonprofit Open Field Collective uses low-cost, low-resource tools to teach children about environmental science. The collective’s flagship algal bloom monitoring program is now tracking ecosystem health in the U.S., India, and Bangladesh.” Good morning, Internet…

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August 9, 2022 at 05:26PM
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NOAA Sea to Sky, Iowa Renewable Energy, Portable Apps, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 8, 2022

NOAA Sea to Sky, Iowa Renewable Energy, Portable Apps, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 8, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, from NOAA: Back to school: Find NOAA resources with our new online database . “With a new school year just around the corner, teachers and educators are gearing up to create lesson plans and find engaging activities for their students. We have a tool to make it easier than ever to include NOAA resources in your classroom: NOAA Sea to Sky, a new education resource database that houses over 1,200 educational resources created by NOAA and our partners.”

Public News Service: New Tool Emerges in Helping IA Communities Map Out Wind, Solar . “Iowa is seen as a leader in renewable energy for sources like wind power, but tension is building in how to site such projects. The rapid growth of wind and solar has led to policy debates at the state level on whether to add regulations, as some landowners and farm groups fight certain plans. A new guide aims to give local officials a better grasp of proposals coming their way.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 16 Free Portable Apps for Students They Can Carry Everywhere. “Whether you need your preferred writing program or rely on desktop management apps to stay productive, portable apps for Windows are some of the most useful out there. Here is a collection of portable apps that students can’t pass up.” Blender Portable?

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

BBC: Horniman Museum to return 72 artefacts to Nigeria. “A London museum says it has agreed to return to Nigeria artefacts looted in the 19th Century from the Kingdom of Benin. The Horniman Museum said ownership of 72 objects would be transferred to the Nigerian government. Items include 12 brass plaques, known as Benin Bronzes, a brass cockerel and a key to the king’s palace.”

Search Engine Journal: Google Algorithms & Updates Focused On User Experience: A Timeline. “In this article, I examine a combination of some (not all) Google updates and technological advancements that significantly reflect the search engine’s focus on the human user and their experiences online – from Panda in 2011 through to Page and Product Experience in 2021 and 2022.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Indie devs outraged by unlicensed game sales on GameStop’s NFT market [Updated]. “In the first week of GameStop’s recently launched NFT marketplace, the NiFTy Arcade collection stood out from the pack. Instead of offering basic JPEGs, the collection provided ‘interactive NFTs’ linked to HTML5 games that were fully playable from an owner’s crypto wallet (or from the GameStop Marketplace page itself). There was only one problem: Many of those NFT games were being minted and sold without their creators’ permission, much less any arrangement for the creators to share in any crypto profits.”

Mother Jones: A Crypto Giant Froze Their Accounts. Now Customers Are Begging a Judge for Their Money Back.. “According to a presentation filed in court, Celsius now hopes to offer its customers a choice: accept a cash payment worth just a fraction of their investments, or opt to ‘remain “long” crypto’—that is, continue to hold their digital currency on Celsius’ books in the hopes of eventually being able to recover their money.”

Wall Street Journal: Phones Know Who Went to an Abortion Clinic. Whom Will They Tell? . “In May, shortly after the draft of the Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade became public, location-data specialist Tapestri Inc. received unusual requests from two companies. Each wanted to purchase mobile-device data that would reveal users who had visited abortion clinics along the Illinois-Missouri border, said Tapestri Chief Executive Walter Harrison.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Laptop: Google results for ‘Eragon’ author showed borderline porn — I’m officially fed up with the search engine . “…over the course of the last two weeks, my trust in Google has waned. It’s not uncommon to find issues with the company’s services every once in a while, but with the way these inconveniences have been stacking up recently, I’m baffled by how awful Google has been for me lately. This piece will highlight the issues I’ve had with Google’s search engine, which has frequently offered borderline offensive search results when looking up otherwise innocuous queries.”

New York Daily News: Editorial: Open the NYC 9/11 files: The city must release its archives on air quality during the rescue and recovery efforts. “Lawyers for the City of New York are sitting on a hidden library of documents about the environmental and health hazards from Ground Zero dating back to 2001 that must be published. Survivors and responders want to know what the city knew, and Reps. Jerry Nadler and Carolyn Maloney have been pressing for years for City Hall to release the archive.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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August 9, 2022 at 12:07AM
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Learning Hieroglyphics, Indian Virtual Herbarium, Appalachia Black History, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, August 8, 2022

Learning Hieroglyphics, Indian Virtual Herbarium, Appalachia Black History, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, August 8, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Scoop Empire: Reconnecting With The Past: Bibliotheca Alexandria Launches New Website To Teach Hieroglyphics. “The word hieroglyph literally translates to ‘sacred carvings’. The Egyptians first used hieroglyphs exclusively for inscriptions carved or painted on temple walls. This form of pictorial writing was also used on tombs, sheets of papyrus, wooden boards, potsherds, and fragments of limestone. It is an essential part of Egyptian history. Now, new initiatives are arising to teach hieroglyphics and one of them is by the Bibliotheca of Alexandria.” The article’s link takes you to the Arabic version of the Web site. Look for the English switch on the upper left part of the landing page.

New-to-me, from The Hindu: Indian Virtual Herbarium, biggest database of country’s flora, is a global hit. “Each record in the digital herbarium includes an image of the preserved plant specimen, scientific name, collection locality, and collection date, collector name, and barcode number. The digital herbarium also includes features to extract the data State-wise and users can search plants of their own States which will help them to identify regional plants and in building regional checklists.”

The Rogersville Review: ETSU’s Archives of Appalachia digitizes Black history collection. “Given to the university more than 20 years ago, the Langston Heritage Group Collection includes a wealth of historical information about Black churches, schools, civic clubs and organizations throughout Washington County from the end of the Civil War to the present. Thanks to archivists at East Tennessee State University, the collection has been digitized and made available online to anyone interested in this history.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Indonesia restores access to PayPal, Yahoo and Valve services. “Indonesia has unblocked PayPal, Steam owner Valve and Yahoo (Engadget’s parent company), allowing them to resume operations. The country prevented residents from accessing services of several companies that missed a July 29th deadline to register with a government database.”

The Boston Pilot / Archdiocese of Boston: Online Collections Catalog Launches Aug. 1. “Because of the time and effort required to enter each collection, presently included are the most frequently used collections: bishops’ papers, the manuscript collection, reference books, school records, sacramental records, and the first several hundred of nearly 5,000 historic photographs. Adding new and updating existing records will be part of our daily workflow moving forward.”

CNN: Elon Musk’s legal team has publicly filed its official response to Twitter’s lawsuit. “Elon Musk’s legal team on Friday made public its official response to Twitter’s lawsuit attempting to force him to complete their $44 billion acquisition deal. In the answer to Twitter’s complaint, which includes counter-claims against the company, Musk’s team attempts to refute the company’s allegations that the Tesla CEO is unjustly trying to exit the deal.”

USEFUL STUFF

PC World: Best free PDF editors: Our top picks. “While nothing beats a full-featured PDF editor like Adobe’s Acrobat Pro DC, sometimes you don’t need all the bells and whistles. When you just have to edit a few lines of text, add or reposition an image, or make some review notes, a free PDF editor may be the way to go.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Bloomberg: Twitch’s Gambling Boom Is Luring Gamers Into Crypto Casinos. “These days, ‘slots’ is the seventh most popular content category on Twitch, ahead of the video game Fortnite. Many streamers are paid handsomely to take part in the activity. One popular streamer said he makes “much more” than $1 million a month as part of his sponsorship with Stake to crypto gamble in front of live audiences on Twitch.”

Techdirt: Google Fiber’s 2016 Expansion Freeze May Be Coming To An End. “In late 2016, a new era of Alphabet execs began getting cold feet about the high costs and slow returns of the project, and effectively mothballed the entire thing — without admitting that’s what they were doing. The company blew through several CEOs in just a few months, laid off hundreds of employees, froze any real expansion, and cancelled countless installations for users who had been waiting years…. But there are some faint indications that the Google Fiber freeze might be thawing somewhat. ”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CyberScoop: Federal courts left Americans’ data exposed, senator tells Supreme Court chief justice. “A top Democratic lawmaker is urging U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to address the federal court system’s decades-long failure to secure Americans’ most sensitive personal information in court filings.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

NASA: How to Follow Webb’s Next Steps. “Now that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s first images and data are out, you might be wondering: What comes next? The observatory has a packed schedule of science programs looking at all kinds of cosmic phenomena, like planets, stars, galaxies, black holes, and more. Webb will revolutionize our understanding of the universe — but first, researchers need time to analyze data and make sure that they understand what they’re seeing.”

NewScientist: How the secrets of ancient cuneiform texts are being revealed by AI. “Much of the world’s first writing, carved into clay tablets, remains undeciphered. Now AI is helping us piece together this ancient Mesopotamian script, revealing the incredible stories of men, women and children at the dawn of history.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!

August 8, 2022 at 05:31PM
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Math-Learning Tools, US Capitol Visitor Center, Jazz on The Ed Sullivan Show, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 7, 2022

Math-Learning Tools, US Capitol Visitor Center, Jazz on The Ed Sullivan Show, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 7, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

UChicago News: New startup offers students free online tools to learn math. “Through the startup’s free, ad-supported web-based tool, students can learn concepts, solve problems, check their work, and collaborate with teachers and classmates—all digitally.”

PRWeb: Envision Innovative Solutions Announces Release of Augmented Reality App for U.S. Capitol Visitor Center (PRESS RELEASE). “Envision Innovative Solutions, an extended reality technology developer, announced the release of ‘Who Are the People,’ a free augmented reality (AR) app the company developed for the U.S. Architect of the Capitol. Users can interact with statues displayed in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center by using their camera phone to virtually place statues in any location and experience interactive content paired with audio from museum curators.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Jazz Journal: The wealth of jazz on the Ed Sullivan Show. “The Ed Sullivan Show, which ran on CBS TV in the US every Sunday night from 1948-1971, is well known for appearances by The Beatles and other pop bands, but it also hosted many jazz performers, thus inadvertently forming a valuable historical archive of performances by leading jazz artists. Performances by several of these artists are now available on the official YouTube channel of The Ed Sullivan Show.”

9to5Google: ‘New Google.com’ adds weather, news, and other cards, enters wider testing [U]. “The Google homepage has historically been known for providing a clean interface that primarily offers a Search field. Google Search is now testing a row of cards on desktop web for an experience that’s similar to Discover.” Or, if you’re old like I am, similar to the Excite portal back in 1999-2000.

USEFUL STUFF

Firefox Add-Ons Blog: Translate The Web Easily With A Browser Extension. “Online translation services provide a hugely valuable function, but for those of us who do a lot of translating on the web, the process is time-consuming and cumbersome. With the right browser extension, however, web translations become a whole lot easier and faster. Here are some fantastic translation extensions for folks with differing needs.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Guardian: From celebrity jets to Pelosi’s Taiwan trip, flight trackers are the sleeper hit of the summer. “Want to watch a top-secret government flight live? Track a drug kingpin’s movements in real time? Or know how much Taylor Swift’s jets are polluting the air? They’re all streaming live on the sleeper hit of the summer: online flight trackers.”

News18 (India): Army Undertakes Projects to Archive War Histories, Plans to Complete Them by April Next Year. “As per sources in the government, the projects have been initiated by the Army’s Training Command (ARTRAC). The Mhow-based Army War College will be the nodal authority for the projects and Delhi-based think tank United Services Institution of India (USI) will support the research work on the military history content as an expert body.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Twitter confirms zero-day used to expose data of 5.4 million accounts. “Twitter has confirmed a recent data breach was caused by a now-patched zero-day vulnerability used to link email addresses and phone numbers to users’ accounts, allowing a threat actor to compile a list of 5.4 million user account profiles.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Dezeen: Gluon “using 3D data to save” the Nakagin Capsule Tower. “Japanese digital consultancy Gluon is combining data from laser scanning with 20,000 photographs to create an augmented reality model of the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, which is currently being demolished. Named the 3D Digital Archive Project, the team aims to use digital technology to create an extremely accurate virtual model of the metabolist residential block designed by Kisho Kurokawa.”

TechCrunch: Google’s ‘quantum supremacy’ usurped by researchers using ordinary supercomputer. “To be clear, no one is saying Google lied or misrepresented its work — the painstaking and groundbreaking research that led to the quantum supremacy announcement in 2019 is still hugely important. But if this new paper is correct, the classical versus quantum computing competition is still anybody’s game. You can read the full story of how Google took quantum from theory to reality in the original article, but here’s the very short version. Quantum computers like Sycamore are not better than classical computers at anything yet, with the possible exception of one task: simulating a quantum computer.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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August 8, 2022 at 12:51AM
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