New researches

Friday, September 9, 2022

Scotland Bagpiping History, Steve Jobs, Tarnanthi Art Fair, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, September 9, 2022

Scotland Bagpiping History, Steve Jobs, Tarnanthi Art Fair, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, September 9, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Sound Cafe: New Digital Archive Protecting Legacy Of Piping In Scotland Goes Live. “The Archives from The National Piping Centre holds digitised copies of five influential piping periodicals dating back to 1948 – Piping Times, Piping Today, The International Piper, Piper and Dancer and Notes from the Piping Centre – as well as photograph galleries of piping through the years. It also incorporates The Centre’s Noting the Tradition oral history archive, which holds recorded interviews with people involved in piping at all levels and all over Scotland over the past 50 years.”

CNET: Steve Jobs Archive Unveiled to Honor Apple Co-Founder, as iPhone 14 Arrives. “On Wednesday, Recode’s Kara Swisher led Apple current Apple CEO Tim Cook, former lead product designer Jony Ive and Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs in a warm discussion of his lasting impact that now includes a website devoted to the tech legend called the Steve Jobs Archive.”

EVENTS

Australian Arts Review: Tarnanthi Art Fair goes online in 2022 with thousands of works from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. “The Art Gallery of South Australia’s popular Tarnanthi Art Fair will return as an online event from Friday 14 to Monday 17 October 2022. Bigger than ever before, the 2022 Tarnanthi Art Fair will also offer a series of public programs including creative workshops both online and in person, language tutorials in Kaurna, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, and an online discussion about buying art ethically.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Washington Post: Trump’s Truth Social steps closer to a financial cliff. “A Trump-allied investment company, Digital World Acquisition Corp., asked shareholders this week to approve a one-year extension for its merger with Trump’s company while it fends off multiple federal investigations. But at a special meeting Tuesday, the company’s leader, Patrick Orlando, abruptly postponed the announcement of the vote until Thursday, saying he wanted to give shareholders more time to respond. Reuters first reported Tuesday that the company didn’t have the votes.”

CNBC: Delaware court denies Musk request to delay Twitter trial but approves request to add whistleblower claims. “A Delaware court denied Elon Musk’s request to delay the trial over his attempt to abandon a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, according to a new filing released Wednesday. But the billionaire Tesla CEO will be allowed to add claims from a Twitter whistleblower to his countersuit, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick ruled.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

TIME: Tech Boot Camps Dangled Well-Paid Jobs. They Didn’t Deliver. “Unaccredited schools have long flourished in the U.S., but this new wave of schools does something different: attracting students by offering a relatively new funding model called an income share agreement (ISA). They pitch these ISAs as a way to access education without taking out a loan, but students like [Aaryn] Johnson soon find out that these agreements can leave them owing a lot of money without the good career prospects they were promised. Nor are these students eligible for any of the Biden Administration’s planned federal loan forgiveness programs, because ISAs are offered not by the U.S. government but by private companies.”

Axios: First look: Ben Smith’s new book dishes on clickbait culture. “Ben Smith, former editor of BuzzFeed News, will be out May 2 with ‘Traffic,’ a history of clickbait culture, and its consequences for democracy — the ‘origin story of the Age of Disinformation.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

KXAN: Audit: TX gang database flawed, thousands of records miss validation. “The State Auditor’s Office conducted the probe and released its findings in August. The audit identified more than 5,000 records that were uploaded without the required information and over 1,000 that weren’t validated within the last five years – a federal requirement. The audit pulls the curtain back on flaws in a database that law enforcement officials consider critical to tackling gang violence – an issue state leaders have devoted millions of dollars to address.”

New York Times: Investors Sue Treasury Department for Blacklisting Crypto Platform. “A group of cryptocurrency investors sued the Treasury Department on Thursday to block government sanctions that bar Americans from Tornado Cash, a popular crypto platform that criminals have used to launder virtual currencies.”

Wall Street Journal: U.S. Recovers Over $30 Million in Cryptocurrency Stolen by North Korean Hackers . “U.S. authorities have seized more than $30 million in cryptocurrency plundered from an online game this year by hackers linked to North Korea, one of the largest successes clawing back digital revenue from Pyongyang, investigators said. While only a fraction of the hundreds of millions in cryptocurrency purloined, the sum recovered is far higher than previously known.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Next Web: Do your social media posts impact your employability? Here’s what Jobbio has to say. “We’ve all heard the horror stories. An HR manager found pictures from your second cousin’s stag weekend and rescinded the company’s job offer. Or a potential boss stumbled across your neighbour’s tagged pictures on Instagram and decided that you weren’t ‘quite the right fit for their brand.’ In the past, we were told to scrub our social media accounts clean or risk missing out on opportunities. But is this really still necessary? Unfortunately, it might be.”

NPR: Social media can inflame your emotions — and it’s a byproduct of its design. “If you feel like checking social media leaves you feeling angrier and more outraged, that’s not your imagination. Max Fisher has covered the impact of social media around the world for The New York Times, from genocide in Myanmar to COVID misinformation in the U.S. And in his new book, ‘The Chaos Machine,’ he describes how the polarizing effect of social media is speeding up.” Good morning, Internet…

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September 9, 2022 at 05:28PM
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Thursday, September 8, 2022

Puʻu Waʻawaʻa Virtual Tour, Microsoft PowerToys, Google Play, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 8, 2022

Puʻu Waʻawaʻa Virtual Tour, Microsoft PowerToys, Google Play, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 8, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources: Puʻu Waʻawaʻa Virtual Tour Offers New Ways To Explore. “Hawaiʻi residents have a wealth of natural resources to explore, but in some cases these places can be difficult to visit in person. The newest tour, in a growing collection of virtual tours, takes users to Puʻu Waʻawaʻa and the Nāpuʻu region of Hawaiʻi Island. As the name suggests, the area is home to a number of puʻu (hills or cinder cones) that host rare dry forest habitats and some of the world’s most endangered plants.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ghacks: PowerToys 0.62: three new toys to play with (Text Extractor, Quick Accent, Screen Ruler). “Microsoft published a new stable version of its PowerToys tools collection for Windows today. The new version of PowerToys introduces three new utilities to the application that users may start using right away.”

Android Developers Blog: Google Play announces the winners of the Indie Games Festival and the Accelerator class of 2022 . “Today, at the finals of our Indie Games Festival, thousands of people came together to celebrate the passion, creativity and innovation of small games studios. Players, jury members, and industry experts attended the event – hosted in a custom virtual world – where they discovered the finalist games and met the people who made them.”

USEFUL STUFF

Hongkiat: 5 Best Web Scraping Tools to Extract Online Data. “These software look for new data manually or automatically, fetching the new or updated data and storing them for easy access. For example, one may collect info about products and their prices from Amazon using a scraping tool. In this post, we’re listing the use cases of web scraping tools and the top 5 web scraping tools to collect information with zero codings.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Philly Voice: Philly art museum workers vote to authorize strike amid ongoing contract negotiations. “Unionized workers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art voted overwhelmingly Tuesday night to authorize a strike, urging the institution’s leadership to meet their demands for better pay and benefits to avert a possible work stoppage.”

WIRED: ‘Date Me’ Google Docs and the Hyper-Optimized Quest for Love. “What do we talk about when we talk about Date Me docs, a kind of wiki to the human soul? On the one hand, none of this is new. The desire to find a mate, or just fornicate, has launched a thousand apps over the past two decades. Both Facebook and YouTube started out as versions of ‘Hot or Not.’ But Date Me docs are uniquely paradoxical. For one, they’re not apps.”

TVB Europe: Canal Plus to turn 11,000 hours of tape archive into streaming content. “Canal Plus is working with Iron Mountain Entertainment Services (IMES) to digitise 11,000 hours of archive content for use on its streaming platforms. The broadcaster’s tape archive, totalling approximately 500,000 tapes, has been in the care of IMES since 2002.” Canal Plus is a French television channel.

SECURITY & LEGAL

Pew (PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW!): Librarians and Lawmakers Push for Greater Access to E-Books. “Librarians and their legislative allies are pushing publishers of electronic books to lower their prices and relax licensing terms, an effort that could make it easier for millions of library users to borrow the increasingly popular digital versions of books.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Alabama: Low-cost Solution Viable for Self-Driving Cars to Spot Hacked GPS. “A lot of hurdles remain before the emerging technology of self-driving personal and commercial vehicles is common, but transportation researchers at The University of Alabama developed a promising, inexpensive system to overcome one challenge: GPS hacking that can send a self-driving vehicle to the wrong destination.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Washington State Universities: Martian rock-metal composite shows potential of 3D printing on Mars. “A little Martian dust appears to go a long way. A small amount of simulated crushed Martian rock mixed with a titanium alloy made a stronger, high-performance material in a 3D‑printing process that one day could be used on Mars to make tools or rocket parts.” Good afternoon, Internet…

September 9, 2022 at 12:22AM
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California Wildfires, Google Smartphones, Google Maps, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, September 8, 2022

California Wildfires, Google Smartphones, Google Maps, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, September 8, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

KCBX: Mapping company develops web app to provide context, resources during local wildfires. “A new web service by a California-based mapping company shows detailed information on wildfires in real time. It shows information like nearby population size, climate and drought conditions to try to give people context on wildfires around them.”

EVENTS

The Verge: Google announces October 6th event to launch the Pixel Watch, Pixel 7, and new Nest devices. “Google has started sending out invites for its fall hardware event, which is set to take place on Thursday, October 6th, at 10AM ET. The event will launch the upcoming Pixel 7 phones, as well as the Pixel Watch — the company showed off both devices at its I/O event earlier this year, announcing they’re coming in the fall.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Google Maps is expanding its eco-friendly navigation feature to Europe. “Google announced today it is expanding its options for eco-friendly routing on Google Maps to 40 more countries across Europe. Eco-friendly routes, first introduced to U.S-based users last year, offer to show more fuel-efficient routes instead of the fastest ones. Users can see the eco-friendly route marked with a leaf label.”

Search Engine Journal: Google Will Reject Ads Leading To Pages With Intrusive Advertising. “Google Ads is implementing a new policy requiring landing pages to meet the ‘better ads standards,’ as the Coalition For Better Ads laid out. A change to Google’s destination requirements policy states if an ad leads to a page that doesn’t comply with the better ad standards, Google will disapprove the ad.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CNBC: Google CEO says he hopes to make company ’20% more’ efficient, hints at potential cuts. “Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai gave more details about how he is thinking of making Google run ‘on fewer resources’ as it faces a slew of challenges to its businesses.”

CNET: How Amtrak’s Viral One-Word Tweet Inspired a Huge Twitter Trend. “Someone on Amtrak’s social media team could be on the fast track to a promotion. An inspired one-word tweet from the train company’s Twitter account took off faster than a super speedy Shinkansen, inspiring a Twitter trend toward extreme brevity.”

Penn Today: The story the bowls tell. “In an ambitious new project, historian Simcha Gross and Harvard’s Rivka Elitzur-Leiman are studying hundreds of ancient incantation bowls housed at the Penn Museum. They hope to better understand the objects and eventually, build a database of all these bowls worldwide.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Lifehacker: Update Google Chrome ASAP to Patch This Security Flaw. “If it seems like you just updated Chrome, that’s because you did. Google refreshed its web browser to version 105 on Wednesday, introducing new features and security patches. However, only days later, Google has provided yet another update. The company doesn’t usually issue surprise updates without a good reason, and they’ve got one: Chrome 105 includes a zero-day security flaw.”

Bleeping Computer: Hackers hide malware in James Webb telescope images. “The malware is written in Golang, a programming language that is gaining popularity among cybercriminals because it is cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac) and offers increased resistance to reverse engineering and analysis. In the recent campaign discovered by researchers at Securonix, the threat actor drops payloads that are currently not marked as malicious by antivirus engines on the VirusTotal scanning platform.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: How dark is ‘dark advertising’? We audited Facebook, Google and other platforms to find out. “In a new study conducted for the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education (FARE), we audited the advertising transparency of seven major digital platforms. The results were grim: none of the platforms are transparent enough for the public to understand what advertising they publish, and how it is targeted.”

Cornell Chronicle: New technique boosts online medical search results. “A Cornell-led group of researchers has developed a search method that employs natural language processing and network analysis to identify terms that are semantically similar to those for cancer screening tests, but in colloquial language.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

University College London: X-rays, AI and 3D printing bring a lost Van Gogh artwork to life. “Using X-rays, artificial intelligence and 3D printing, two UCL researchers reproduced a ‘lost’ work of art by renowned Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, 135 years after he painted over it.” Good morning, Internet…

September 8, 2022 at 05:27PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/8RwybGq

Wednesday, September 7, 2022

1950s China, Social Media Mergers, Ultrashort Video, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 7, 2022

1950s China, Social Media Mergers, Ultrashort Video, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 7, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

George Mason University: Mason students build digital archive for victims of China’s Anti-‘Rightist’ Campaign. “Predating China’s Cultural Revolution, the Anti-‘Rightist’ Campaign was launched by Chairman Mao Zedong to purge ‘Rightists’ from the Chinese Communist Party and the entire country. Beginning in 1957 and lasting for about two years, the campaign may have affected between 500,000 and 2 million individuals. Targeted individuals were reeducated, humiliated, relocated, or executed. The main focus was on ‘intellectuals,’ which tended to mean professors, artists teachers, writers and doctors.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNBC: Deal partner for Trump’s Truth Social fails to get backing for SPAC extension: Reuters, citing sources. “The blank-check acquisition firm that agreed to merge with Donald Trump’s social media company failed to secure enough shareholder support for a one-year extension to complete the deal, people familiar with the matter said on Monday.”

USEFUL STUFF

Social Media Examiner: How to Easily Batch Videos for Reels, Shorts, and TikTok. “Do you want to use more short-form video in your marketing? Looking for an efficient cross-channel workflow? In this article, you’ll discover an easy method to turn a single short-form video into something you can use across all of the major social platforms.”

Duke University Libraries: Election Data. “You’re probably aware that voting in the United States is managed in a very decentralized manner compared to most other countries. There are limited sources that comprehensively compile local-level results or geographic data showing local voting precincts. We’ll discuss several selected projects have come about to try to pull all this data together to provide one-stop repositories, as well as state and local sources for election data. Some of these are free resources, and some are licensed by us for the use of Duke affiliates.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: Encrypted app Signal just hired one of Big Tech’s sharpest critics. “Signal has hired Meredith Whittaker, a former Google manager who has been outspoken about the harms of Big Tech, as its first president, adding to the roster of tech critics leading the encrypted messaging app.”

Federal News Network: NARA looks to double down on email records approach with texts, other messages. “The National Archives and Records Administration is looking to expand a successful approach for managing email records to text messages and other digital communications as part of a bid to help agencies with an ever increasing deluge of electronic records.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Chrome extensions with 1.4M installs covertly track visits and inject code. “Google has removed browser extensions with more than 1.4 million downloads from the Chrome Web Store after third-party researchers reported they were surreptitiously tracking users’ browsing history and inserting tracking code into specific ecommerce sites they visited.”

Associated Press: Tech tool offers police ‘mass surveillance on a budget’. “Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using an obscure cellphone tracking tool, at times without search warrants, that gives them the power to follow people’s movements months back in time, according to public records and internal emails obtained by The Associated Press.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

News-Medical: ParAqua develops an interactive database to fill the gap in knowledge about zoosporic parasites. “ParAqua COST Action, which gathers researchers, innovators, and producers of microalgae across Europe and beyond, have started the development of an interactive database on zoosporic algae parasites. In addition to the interactive database, the network is currently preparing a booklet that will serve as a guideline for methods of early detection and monitoring of zoosporic parasites.”

Creative Commons: Press Release: New Four-Year, $4 Million Open Climate Campaign Will Open Knowledge to Solve Challenges in Climate and Biodiversity. “Creative Commons, SPARC and EIFL today announce a new 4-year, $4-million (USD) grant from Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, to fund the Open Climate Campaign. This grant, which builds on $450,000 (USD) in planning funds from the Open Society Foundations, will fund a four-year campaign to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity by promoting open access to research.” Good afternoon, Internet…

September 8, 2022 at 01:02AM
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RB Search Gizmos: Find and Explore the TwitterSpace of Higher Ed Institutions with Pam’s University Pin

RB Search Gizmos: Find and Explore the TwitterSpace of Higher Ed Institutions with Pam’s University Pin
By researchbuzz2

One of my favorite games lately is creating JavaScript programs where physical space intersects with social media space. It lets me carve out little portholes and see how the physical space is represented in the social media space.

That and experimenting with domain name searches were the driving forces behind Pam’s University Pin, available at https://researchbuzz.github.io/Pam-s-University-Pin/ . You’ll need a Data.gov API key to use this gizmo; you can get one for free at https://api.data.gov/signup/ .

Pam’s University Pin (we’ll refer to it as PUP) is sort of a combination of Pam’s Pin, which lets you enter a street address and get a Twitter radius search for that address, and Super Edu Search, which lets you filter .edu Web space by various university characteristics (location, ownership type, etc.).

PUP takes a zip code, a radius, and a set of university characteristics, and does two things:

Finds all higher education institutions matching those characteristics in the radius
Builds the following Twitter queries:
1. A search for all tweets within a 2km radius of the university location
2. A search for all verified account tweets within a 2km radius of the university location
3. A search for tweets which include the university’s domain name (any location)
4. A search for tweets from Twitter accounts which include the university’s domain name.

All those links are presented to you in neat lists under the Search Edu Space button.

I find that looking at the verified tweets finds a lot of news personalities, but also athletes, musicians, and politicians.

The link to find domain names in tweets does just what it says on the tin. This search tends to turn up university news, information from affiliated groups, and occasional links to research or faculty information, as you can see here:

The final link is a little wonky. It’s supposed to find the institution’s domain name in the bios of Twitter account. Sometimes it just finds the word from and the institution’s domain name in a tweet. Many times, though, it finds social media accounts of affiliated groups/institutions.

With the ubiquitous use of social media and the actual profession of performative living (as practiced by bloggers, vloggers, livestreamers, vtubers, etc), I’m surprised that there aren’t more places to explore the intersection between online spaces and our physical space.

Just imagine: as AR develops, we’ll get all kinds of apps to annotate and decorate and destroy and inform a layer of information overlaid on a physical space. Objects based on but removed from that space (like pictures) will inevitably develop some connection to the AR metadata.

Famous places like Times Square will have (metaphorically) thick layers of date-based AR details (assuming anybody bothers to archive it) that will send digital archaeologists into raptures a hundred years from now. Wondering what the general mood was in front of Bubba Gump’s Seafood Co on April 10th, 2037? Break out your text analyzer and get working – there might be a thesis in it!

September 7, 2022 at 07:26PM
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Mid-Illinois Television, Endangered Jewish Sites, Bangkok Illustration Fair, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, September 7, 2022

Mid-Illinois Television, Endangered Jewish Sites, Bangkok Illustration Fair, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, September 7, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, from Commercial-News: Quick receives broadcast pioneer award. “Doug Quick, retired TV weathercaster/news anchor, broadcaster, author and museum curator has been named Illinois Broadcasters Association’s 2022 W. Russell Withers Jr. Downstate Broadcast Pioneer…. Quick’s resume includes a 40-year career as commercial and industrial video voiceover talent, an author (Pictures on the Prairie: The First Ten Years of Mid-Illinois Television History) and created an online museum, Central Illinois’ On-Line Broadcast Museum …”

Brandeis University: Saving the World’s Synagogues from Destruction . “The [ Foundation for Jewish Heritage], which started in 2015 with [Michael] Mail as chief executive, has created an inventory of over 3,300 historic Jewish sites, many in urgent need of restoration.”

Bangkok Post: Illustration fair returns for another edition. “After its successful debut last year, the Bangkok Illustration Fair returns to please illustrators and art lovers with a myriad of creative works, from Thursday to Sunday daily from 10am to 8pm. It will take place on the 1st floor, 3rd floor and at the Main Hall on the 9th floor of Bangkok Art Cultural Centre, Pathumwan intersection. An online archive is also available…” The site is in Thai but Google Translate has no problems with it. I enjoyed the art a lot; the only downside is that this site is a bit of a slow load from America.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNBC: Apple is gaining on Facebook and Google in online ads after iOS privacy change, report shows. “The Google-Facebook online ad duopoly may be breaking up. According to a study published Tuesday by Appsumer, Apple is gaining momentum in digital ads, while Google and Facebook appear to be losing steam.”

Search Engine Roundtable: Poll: Only 20% Noticed Ranking Changes After Google’s Helpful Content Update. “As we have reported, so far, the Google helpful content update seems pretty minor in terms of what SEOs and tools are picking up, despite what we all thought would happen. Keep in mind, that the update is not done and we do expect more from it. A recent poll by Aleyda Solis confirmed that, showing that only 20% of SEOs noticed ranking changes, either positive or negative, since the update.”

Manchester Evening News: Council U-turns on removal of meetings video archive from public view after backlash. “Town hall chiefs have U-turned on a decision to remove a video archive of council meetings from public view which came under fire from residents and opposition councillors. Harry Catherall, the chief executive of Oldham council, has today confirmed that after a ‘review’ of the authority’s policies around public meetings, all previous recordings have been reinstated.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Tom’s Guide: Google Maps vs. Waze: Which navigation app is better? . “Determining which one is best isn’t an easy task, and what you pick will probably depend on your needs and preferences. But, if you throw both apps into the ring for an all-out brawl of Google Maps vs Waze, which one is going to come out on top?”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: TikTok denies security breach after hackers leak user data, source code. “TikTok denies recent claims it was breached, and source code and user data were stolen, telling BleepingComputer that data posted to a hacking forum is ‘completely unrelated’ to the company. On Friday, a hacking group known as ‘AgainstTheWest’ created a topic on a hacking forum claiming to have breached both TikTok and WeChat.”

The Verge: The security flaws that make Twitter’s insider threat so scary. “Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko’s whistleblower disclosure contained a lot of alarming claims about Twitter — from confusing bot measurements to executive misconduct — but one of the most alarming claims was that the company was actively infiltrated by agents of the Indian government. For a platform that has always presented itself as a haven for journalists and activists, it’s a troubling claim and one that the company has not directly confronted in responses given to US media. But the allegations are less outlandish than it seems — and part of a much larger issue for international tech platforms.”

Wall Street Journal: Islamic State Turns to NFTs to Spread Terror Message. “A simple digital card praising Islamist militants for an attack on a Taliban position in Afghanistan last month is the first known nonfungible token created and disseminated by a terrorist sympathizer, according to former senior U.S. intelligence officials. It is a sign that Islamic State and other terror groups may be preparing to use the emerging financial technology to sidestep Western efforts to eradicate their online fundraising and messaging, they said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Maine: Artificial intelligence can be used to better monitor Maine’s forests, UMaine study finds. “Monitoring and measuring forest ecosystems is a complex challenge because of an existing combination of softwares, collection systems and computing environments that require increasing amounts of energy to power. The University of Maine’s Wireless Sensor Networks (WiSe-Net) laboratory has developed a novel method of using artificial intelligence and machine learning to make monitoring soil moisture more energy and cost efficient — one that could be used to make measuring more efficient across the broad forest ecosystems of Maine and beyond.”

PR Newswire: Americans Feel Some Relief From Robotexts As Summer Comes To An End, According To RoboKiller Insights (PRESS RELEASE). “Robotexts have far outpaced robocalls since the beginning of 2022. However, for the first time since April 2022, they declined month-over-month. While it appears scammers pumped the brakes in August, Americans can expect robotexts to ramp back up in the coming months as scammers get back to work on delivery and bank-related scams.” Good morning, Internet…

September 7, 2022 at 05:31PM
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Tuesday, September 6, 2022

Library of Congress, DMCA Takedown Notices, Google Cafeteria Workers, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 6, 2022

Library of Congress, DMCA Takedown Notices, Google Cafeteria Workers, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 6, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Library of Congress: What’s new online at the Library of Congress – Summer 2022. “The Manuscript Division has recently released the Shippen Family Papers, a collection of 6,500 items (15,666 images) digitized from 15 reels of previously produced microfilm, which document this wealthy and powerful group of Philadelphians connected by blood and marriage who reached the height of their influence in the mid-eighteenth century…. The Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve collection consists of interviews and photographs by Mary Hufford and Tom Tankersley in December 1985 for the American Folklife Center…”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TorrentFreak: Google Received DMCA Takedown Notices For 4 Million Unique Domains. “Google has reached a new milestone. Over the past several years, copyright holders have asked the search engine to remove URLs from four million unique domains. These include some egregious pirate sites but The White House, the FBI, and the Vatican have also been flagged as infringers.”

Washington Post: 4,000 Google cafeteria workers quietly unionized during the pandemic. “Unite Here, a 300,000-member union hotel and food service workers, has been steadily working to unionize Silicon Valley cafeteria workers since 2018, experiencing the most success at Google. Employed by the contract companies Compass and Guckenheimer, those unionized now make up about 90 percent of total food services workers at Google, according to the union. Workers have unionized at 23 Google offices nationwide, including in Seattle and San Jose. Now, the union is tackling new territory: the South.”

USEFUL STUFF

Amateur Photographer: How To Connect Your Camera To Your Smartphone. “If you’ve got a camera with built-in Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth, then you’ll be able to take advantage of this to quickly and easily send your images to your smartphone or tablet. From there you can edit the photos and quickly share on social media. In this guide we’ll show you what you need to connect your camera to your smartphone.”

MakeUseOf: How to Blur Parts of an Image for Free Online: 5 Tools. “If you ever share screenshots or photos online, knowing how to blur parts of your image is a handy skill to have. Whether you need to send a screenshot with confidential information to a colleague or just want to draw focus to a certain part of your image, we’ll show you how to blur the parts that you want to hide.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

NiemanLab: Medium’s new CEO on the company’s journalism mistakes, bundle economics, and life after Ev Williams . “The fate of a blogging platform may have somewhat lower stakes than some of the subjects we usually discuss around here. But a key question at the intersection of tech and democracy is what sort of publishing models the internet will support. How many journalists and other writers will be able to make a living? How will their work find an audience? And will the platforms they operate on ever find long-term stability?”

Marine Corps Times: Military, veterans learn to fight disinformation campaigns. “While much of the conversation about social media and the military recently has focused on the specific concern around extremist radicalization, more garden-variety disinformation is also a growing issue. Disinformation can undermine critical thinking, sow confusion and suspicion, and threaten unit cohesion and force readiness. But the scope and unusual nature of the problem means it is difficult to protect troops.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

News@Northeastern: Now Banned By Tiktok And Others, Andrew Tate Rode Wave Of Online Misogyny, Says Northeastern Expert. “Tate, a British-American social media influencer, is well known for making misogynistic comments in his videos, which have been removed from TikTok but at one point had billions of views. In the videos, Tate referred to women as property, described how he would attack a woman who accused him of cheating, and said he doesn’t believe that depression is real (Tate says his comments were taken out of context). Following a public outcry, last week he was banned from YouTube, TikTok and Facebook. But experts say that Tate is not acting in a silo; in fact, online misogyny has been on the rise for years, and social media platforms are not built to handle it.”

Caltech: Caltech to Study How the Brain Responds to Virtual Environments. “The rise of social media has meant that social and professional interactions are increasingly carried out online. This trend is expected to continue in the coming decades, as the digital world becomes more immersive and realistic. To understand how the human brain might be affected by this shift, Dean Mobbs, professor of cognitive neuroscience, is leading a new project that will use social psychology and neuroscience to explore the relationship between social media use and mental health.”

Artnet: Two Years Ago, Museums Across the U.S. Promised to Address Diversity and Equity. Here’s Exactly What They Have Done So Far. “Museums across the U.S. publicly stated their commitments to work towards dismantling systemic racism, frequently citing intentions to listen to communities, improve hiring practices, support BIPOC staff, re-evaluate workplace culture, offer anti-racism training, and acquire and exhibit work from a more diverse range of artists. Two years on from these calls for action, are museums feeling the same urgency? Or were these promises just platitudes?” Good afternoon, Internet…

September 7, 2022 at 12:43AM
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