New researches

Saturday, September 10, 2022

Our Bodies Ourselves Today, New York Overdose Prevention, Google, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 10, 2022

Our Bodies Ourselves Today, New York Overdose Prevention, Google, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 10, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Teen Vogue: Our Bodies Ourselves Today Launches Sex and Health Website For a New Generation. “Our Bodies Ourselves Today launched its new website on September 9, bringing a new look and more evidence-based information to women, girls, and gender-expansive people. The new organization, which worked with the blessing of the original 1970s group, aimed to make an inclusive and comprehensive place where people of all experiences can go to see themselves reflected, and to learn about their bodies and their health in a time when not everyone has that access.”

State of New York: NYS OASAS Announces Launch of New Website to Promote Overdose Prevention Education. “The New York State Office of Addiction Services and Supports today announced the launch of the new ‘Project COPE’ website, which promotes overdose prevention and harm reduction education in New York State. The goal of this initiative is to empower people to learn how to prevent overdoses and save lives in their community.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Land: Google helpful content update is now done rolling out. “Google has confirmed that the helpful content update is now finished rolling out. The update took 15 days to roll out, starting on August 25, 2022 and ending on September 9, 2022. Google has posted it completed today, September 9th. As a reminder, Google’s helpful content update is a sitewide signal. It targets websites that have a relatively high amount of unsatisfying or unhelpful content, where the content is written for search engines first.”

Axios: Exclusive: Yahoo buys The Factual to add news credibility ratings. “Yahoo has acquired The Factual, a company that uses algorithms to rate the credibility of news sources, Yahoo president and general manager Matt Sanchez told Axios.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Cairo Scene: The Digital Archive Preserving The Fading Art Of Egyptian Typography. “Exclusively focused on Arabic street typography in Egypt, the Egyptian Type Archive has amassed a loyal community on Instagram. They collectively document any text they stumble upon, from the quirky to the horrific to the beautiful, whether it’s an ancient sign on a vintage shop or an announcement sprayed on the walls of a local cafe.”

WIRED: Google and Amazon Want More Defense Contracts, Despite Worker Protests. “HUNDREDS OF GOOGLE workers and their supporters gathered near the company’s downtown San Francisco offices Thursday, raising signs that read ‘No Tech for Apartheid’ and filling the air with chants of ‘Tech from Amazon and Google! You can’t claim that you are neutral!’ Similar scenes unfolded outside Google and Amazon offices in New York and Seattle, and a Google office in Durham, North Carolina.

SECURITY & LEGAL

Engadget: The IRS says it accidentally exposed confidential information involving 120,000 taxpayers. “Around 120,000 taxpayers who filed a Form 990-T will be hearing from the IRS in the coming weeks, telling them that the agency inadvertently exposed their information on its website. Exempted organizations, including charities and religious groups, with unrelated business income are required to file Form 990-T. As The Wall Street Journal notes, though, people with individual retirement accounts invested in assets that generate income, such as real estate, are also required to file the form.”

Reuters: Google, Apple facing anti-competitive complaint in Mexico. “Apple (AAPL.O) and Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google are facing a probe over anti-competitive practices in Mexico after the country’s former telecommunications chief filed a complaint, he said in a statement on Twitter on Friday.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Alberta: AI researchers improve method for removing gender bias in natural language processing. “Researchers have found a better way to reduce gender bias in natural language processing models while preserving vital information about the meanings of words, according to a recent study that could be a key step toward addressing the issue of human biases creeping into artificial intelligence.”

New York Times: How Tree Rings Helped Identify a Rhode Island Whaler Lost at Sea. “New research, published last month in the scholarly journal Dendrochronologia, allowed researchers to identify the shipwreck to a high degree of certainty, said Ignacio Mundo, the lead author and an adjunct researcher with the Dendrochronology and Environmental History Laboratory at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Mendoza, Argentina. The finding was possible because of the analysis of a kind of fingerprint of the ship itself: The rings on its wooden planks and futtocks, or curved timber pieces.” Good afternoon, 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!

September 11, 2022 at 12:08AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/koPcS05

EU Assistance, Ukraine Reconstruction, Electronic Components, More: Ukraine Update, September 10, 2022

EU Assistance, Ukraine Reconstruction, Electronic Components, More: Ukraine Update, September 10, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

EU Neighbors East: EU launches new platform to inform Ukrainians about EU assistance during war. “The EU Delegation to Ukraine has launched a new website… which provides detailed information on the various EU activities in Ukraine and their results. The portal has been created to better inform Ukrainians about the benefits and opportunities of the EU-Ukraine partnership during and after the war. The EU Delegation in Ukraine hopes that the website will help build a full and objective picture of the EU-Ukraine cooperation among Ukrainians.”

EVENTS

Yale University: Symposium on the Reconstruction of Ukraine is announced. “The symposium aims to devote particular attention to cities, architecture, art, culture and psychological trauma – but the scope of the conversations it aims to start is broader. In due course, the discussions held during the symposium may coalesce into myriad projects, initiatives and experiments undertaken by government institutions, municipalities, educational and cultural bodies and other more interstitial actors.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Politico: The chips are down: Putin scrambles for high-tech parts as his arsenal goes up in smoke. “Kyiv is acutely aware that the outcome of the war is likely to hinge on whether Russia finds a way to regain access to high-tech chips, and is out to ensure it doesn’t get them. In order to flag the danger, Ukraine is sending out international warnings that the Kremlin has drawn up shopping lists of semiconductors, transformers, connectors, casings, transistors, insulators and other components, most made by companies in the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, the U.K., Taiwan and Japan, among others, which it needs to fuel its war effort.”

Reuters: Russia’s anti-monopoly service approves Yandex-VK internet deal. “Russia’s federal anti-monopoly service (FAS) on Tuesday granted approval to technology companies Yandex and VK to proceed with an asset-swap deal but with some terms aimed at preserving competition.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Rest of World: Doxxed, threatened, and arrested: Russia’s war on Wikipedia editors. “The organization that runs Wikipedia has also found itself targeted by Russia’s propaganda drive. In March, Russia passed a law that criminalized the publishing of any information about the military that the state considers to be false information. Under the new law, a Russian court fined the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, 5 million rubles ($88,000) for failing to remove what a Russian court claimed was disinformation about the war in Ukraine. The organization launched an appeal in June.”

Euromaidan Press: Meet the foreign journalists promoting Russia’s war propaganda. “Several foreign journalists in Ukraine are promoting Russian narratives on the war. Although portraying themselves as independent reporters in search of truth, scrutinizing their content and background reveals their own biases, fabulations, and in some cases, connections to the Russian state.”

AFP: Ukraine seeks UNESCO cultural protection for Odessa. “Ukraine’s government will ask the UN’s cultural watchdog to add the historic port of Odessa to its World Heritage List of protected sites as Russia’s invasion continues, the agency said Tuesday. Russian forces have advanced to within several dozen kilometres (miles) of the city, which blossomed after empress Catherine the Great decreed in the late 18th century that it would be Russia’s modern gateway to the Black Sea.”

WIRED: The Telegram-Powered News Outlet Waging Guerrilla War on Russia. “Created by exiled former Russian MP and dissident Ilya Ponomarev, February Morning was the first to report on a group claiming responsibility for [Darya] Dugina’s death. Ponomarev himself took to YouTube, where February Morning airs its shows, claiming that the perpetrators were a little-known Russian resistance group called the National Republican Army. According to Ponomarev, an all-out war against “Putinism” had just begun.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Russia upholds 21.7 bln rouble fine on Google over Ukraine content -Interfax. “A Russian court on Friday upheld a turnover-based fine of 21.7 billion roubles ($357 million) against Google’s Russian subsidiary for repeated failure to delete information related to what Moscow calls its ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported.”

Cybernews: Hackers created an enormous traffic jam in Moscow. “Dozens of drivers working for Yandex Taxi in Moscow likely had a frustrating day. Hackers breached the app, sending dozens of cars to the exact location, forming a traffic jam that lasted up to three hours. Reports on Twitter claim that cars were sent to the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, a major avenue in Moscow. One of the best-known objects in the area is the Stalinist-era building, the ‘Hotel Ukraina’ or Hotel Ukraine.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Print: 60-80% of Twitter accounts posting on Russia-Ukraine war bots, 90% ‘pro Ukraine’, finds new study . “Between 60 and 80 per cent of Twitter handles posting on the Russia-Ukraine war may be bot accounts, a research by scholars from the University of Adelaide, Australia has found. Among other influences, these bot accounts may have been pushing people to flee their homes during the conflict between these two countries, the researchers added.”

Modern War Institute at West Point: How Ukraine Seized The Initiative On The Digital Front Of The War With Russia. “President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has become a living example of how to provide digital leadership during modern warfare, buoying his country and inspiring resistance to the Russian military’s kinetic force. At the risk of adopting too obvious an analogy, in this contemporary story of David vs. Goliath, Ukraine’s sling-and-stone advantage has been its unexpected resolve, marshaled by the effective use of information.”

September 10, 2022 at 07:35PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/1DqcFxd

Climate Change Preparation, Chronicling America, US Place Names, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, September 10, 2022

Climate Change Preparation, Chronicling America, US Place Names, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, September 10, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Route Fifty: A New Tech Tool to Help Communities Confront Climate Risks . “The Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation portal is an online dashboard that provides real-time and location-specific information about extreme weather threats. It features an interactive map that offers hazard-specific information, such as how many personnel are responding to a particular wildfire or what kinds of flood alerts have been issued in a certain community.”

EVENTS

Library of Congress: Historical Newspapers for National History Day. “Explore the Frontier and learn to use Chronicling America, a freely-available collection of historic American newspapers at the Library of Congress for research in this year’s National History Day theme ‘Frontiers in History: People, Places, Ideas.'” Thursday, September 15. It will be archived for later viewing if you can’t make the live event.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Associated Press: U.S. Changes Names of Places with Racist Term for Native Women. “The U.S. government has joined a ski resort and others that have quit using a racist term for a Native American woman by renaming hundreds of peaks, lakes, streams and other geographical features on federal lands in the West and elsewhere.”

Axios: Trump’s Truth Social falls short on shareholder vote. “Digital World Acquisition Corp. on Thursday said it would adjourn its shareholder meeting until October 10, after failing to secure at least 65% shareholder approval for a one year extension to complete its merger with the parent company of Truth Social.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

ESPN: The rise of Gambling Twitter: Social media and the popularity of sports betting. “For years, bettors and bookmakers have relentlessly lobbed pot shots at each other, while anxiously awaiting the next tweet from a small-college beat writer or for a WNBA player to post a telling emoji. Meanwhile, con artists, promising inside information and guaranteed locks, lurk behind random anonymous accounts, ready to take advantage of the gullible, and trolls stand poised to attack anyone who doesn’t meet their standards. People absolutely love it. And, now, with widespread legal betting spreading rapidly, Gambling Twitter is on the rise.”

Manchester Evening News: ‘We have not changed our name’: Little Lever School contacts Google after search confusion. “A school in Bolton had to contact Google to correct a mistake which saw their name changed on the search engine. Little Lever School was appearing as New Hall Village School yesterday and had to reassure residents that was not true.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Washington Post: Thousands allegedly bilked U.S. for free internet — in one child’s name. “More than 1,000 households in Oklahoma used the identity of a single 4-year-old to obtain free or discounted internet service from the U.S. government, part of a broader wave of suspected fraud now raising new questions about Washington’s attempts to close the digital divide.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Mainichi: Latest AI ‘Buddhabot’ allows users to ‘chat’ with Buddha image about their worries . “A team of researchers in Japan has developed an artificial intelligence system for smartphones that can automatically answer users’ questions about their worries from a Buddhist perspective, while displaying an image of Buddha on the screen. The AI system is fed with two types of Buddhist scriptures including the world’s oldest ‘Sutta Nipata,’ and is capable of coming up with 1,000 kinds of answers depending on the content of users’ consultations.”

Science Daily: Replacing social media use with physical activity. “If you spend 30 minutes less on social media every day and engage in physical activity instead, you do a lot to improve your mental health, according to a new study. Participants who followed this advice for two weeks felt happier, more satisfied, less stressed by the COVID-19 pandemic and less depressed than a control group. These effects lasted even six months after the study had ended.”

PsyPost: Psychology experts urge social media giants to increase transparency around algorithms to protect users’ mental health. “In a new article published in the journal Body Image, a team of psychology researchers outline a mountain of evidence linking social media use to body image issues. The researchers describe how algorithms may be intensifying this link and urge social media corporations to take action.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

The New Stack: A New Tool for Unreal Engine Developers to Export to the Web. “A Canadian startup called Wonder Interactive is creating a platform to turn Unreal Engine apps into HTML5 apps, which it claims will have ‘near-native performance and lightning-fast load times.'” When I think about the concept of a metaverse, an experience as rich as that of an Unreal Engine game — only as natively-available and fast as an HTML5 app — is what makes sense. Not floating around looking like one of those Wii peg people. Good morning, Internet…

September 10, 2022 at 05:29PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/uv8DjZQ

Friday, September 9, 2022

Aretha Franklin, Hawaii Poly-Forestry, New Jersey Law Enforcement, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 9, 2022

Aretha Franklin, Hawaii Poly-Forestry, New Jersey Law Enforcement, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 9, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Guardian: FBI tracked Aretha Franklin’s civil rights activism, declassified file shows. “The FBI has declassified its file on Aretha Franklin, the late ‘Queen of Soul’ who died in 2018 at age 76. The 270-page document, which includes reports from over a dozen states, shows the bureau extensively tracked the singer’s civil rights activism and her friendships with Martin Luther King Jr and Angela Davis.”

University of Hawaii: Valuable data tool designed for Hawaiʻi Island farmers. “A new climate dashboard will display weather, climate predictions and environmental conditions relevant to Hawaiʻi Island farmers. The pilot project will co-produce a poly-forestry climate dashboard in partnership with the Keaukaha Panaʻewa Farmers Association on Hawaiʻi Island.”

New Jersey Attorney General: Acting AG Platkin Launches New Dashboard Detailing Information on Police Internal Affairs Investigations Statewide. “Acting Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin today made a wealth of information about police agencies’ internal affairs investigations available online, in a searchable dashboard capable of filtering data by law enforcement agency, the types of allegations involved, and what, if any, disciplinary action was taken. It is believed to be the most comprehensive compilation of statewide internal affairs information to be made accessible to the public by any state in the U.S.”

PR Newswire: Near Space Labs Launches Imagery Grant Program to Unlock Free Access to its Ultra-High Resolution Imagery for Nonprofits, Researchers and Universities (PRESS RELEASE). “Near Space Labs, the cutting-edge geospatial data and Earth imagery company, today announced the launch of its Community Resilience & Innovation Earth Imagery Grant program that will make its 10 cm ultra-high resolution imagery available for free to nonprofits, researchers, and universities, among others.”

EVENTS

Argonne National Laboratory: Mapping Tools to Identify Underserved Communities. “For those planning projects with an energy and environmental justice (EEJ) component, identifying disadvantaged communities and working with them on the intended project’s outcomes is critical. With so many mapping tools available, deciding which to use for what purpose can be confusing. Some mapping tools simply identify which areas are disadvantaged according to certain datasets, while others have more features, such as the ability to identify underserved communities with particular characteristics or run project suitability analyses.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Veteran’s Administration: Got a VA question? Use the new virtual chatbot 24/7. “Got a question about your VA benefits, health care, eligibility? You might want to check VA’s website, where you can access a new interactive chatbot to ask questions—24 hours a day, seven days a week. Veterans, caregivers and families can still browse the website or search it for information, but in addition you can now ask specific questions to the chatbot.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ProPublica: The Navy Is Withholding Court Records in a High-Profile Ship Fire Case. “Despite a 2016 law requiring more transparency of court-martials, the U.S. Navy is refusing to release nearly all court documents in a high-profile case in which a sailor faces life in prison. Seaman Recruit Ryan Mays, 21, has been charged with aggravated arson and hazarding a vessel in the 2020 fire that destroyed the USS Bonhomme Richard. Mays has maintained his innocence.”

Hartford Courant: Legislation to force Big Tech to pay publisher for online news ‘blown up’ by censorship amendment . “Proposed legislation that would force Big Tech to pay publishers for aggregating news content online stalled in the Judiciary Committee Thursday after an amendment introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz to prohibit censorship ‘collusion’ narrowly passed, sharply dividing the bipartisan sponsors of the bill.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Duke Health: Duke Awarded $12M Research Grant to Use Artificial Intelligence to Detect Autism. “The Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development has been awarded a $12 million federal grant to develop artificial intelligence tools for detecting autism during infancy and identifying brain-based biomarkers of autism.”

Rensselaer: Rensselaer Researcher To Follow the Trail of Misinformation. “Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Boleslaw Szymanski, Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, is part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers examining the flow of (mis)information in social media…. The team will answer several questions by examining vast amounts of newly accessible data. How is content, whether true or false, disseminated? How does it gain popularity? How is it ultimately accepted as truth by large numbers of people?” Good afternoon, Internet…

September 10, 2022 at 12:39AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/EsMvthr

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…

September 9, 2022 at 05:28PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/x7umijI

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
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/579hn2R

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