New researches

Friday, September 16, 2022

Race in America, Lobbying Data, Canva, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, September 16, 2022

Race in America, Lobbying Data, Canva, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, September 16, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Brown University: Brown Library publishes five new volumes in the “Race & … in America” digital book series . “Open access publication expands series delving into comparative perspectives on the roots and effects of racism in the U.S…. As an open access publication, the digital series provides enduring, barrier-free access to knowledge, and has been developed with universal design principles for equitable use by all persons, including those with disabilities.”

EIN: LobbyingData.com Announces the Launch of the First-Ever Publicly Available Real-Time View of American Lobbying (PRESS RELEASE). “LobbyingData sources all of the thousands of lobbying exchanges everyday and distills the information into an easy to understand, tabular dashboard – providing transparency to the public into the notoriously opaque and powerful industry of lobbying. The dashboard is accessible on web and mobile.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Canva moves beyond graphic design to launch a visual worksuite. “Canva is further establishing itself as more than just a user-friendly graphic design tool. The Australian company announced at its Canva Create event that it will unveil a suite of new products to round out its product offerings: Canva Docs, Canva Websites, Canva Whiteboards and Data Visualization, which comes from its acquisition of Flourish.”

Engadget: Period tracker app Flo launches ‘Anonymous Mode’ for iOS devices. “Flo’s anonymous mode has arrived. The period tracker promised to launch the new mode shortly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, in an effort to assuage privacy-related fears.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Astana Times: Women of Kazakhstan Virtual Museum Celebrates Overlooked Kazakh Women in Arts and Culture. “The Women of Kazakhstan project is the first virtual museum exploring the history and accomplishments of Kazakh women undertaken as part of an effort to broaden the picture of women’s important, yet historically overlooked roles in driving the cultural and historical changes in Kazakhstan.”

Waxy: Online Art Communities Begin Banning AI-Generated Images. “As AI-generated art platforms like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion explode in popularity, online communities devoted to sharing human-generated art are forced to make a decision: should AI art be allowed?”

TV News Check: WRAL Moves To Digitally Save Its Identity. “This Thursday, WRAL will announce a partnership with Eon Media, a Toronto-based tech company focused on artificial-intelligence video streaming solutions, that will generate boundless access to the station’s archives. The vast cache of now metadata-encoded video — amounting to half a million hours’ worth of content, according to Accarrino — will soon be made easily available to not only the WRAL newsroom, but also the general public.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNN: House Oversight Committee asks Archives if Trump still possesses presidential records. “The House Oversight Committee is asking the National Archives for an assessment of whether there are presidential records still unaccounted for and in Donald Trump’s possession, according to a new letter obtained by CNN.”

CNN: Albania blames Iran for second cyberattack since July. “Albania blamed the Iranian government Saturday for a cyberattack against computer systems used by Albanian state police — just days after the White House condemned Tehran for a hack that disrupted Albanian government services in July.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Ars Technica: Five years of data show that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs over the long haul. “Based on data collected since the company began using SSDs as boot drives in late 2018, Backblaze cloud storage evangelist Andy Klein published a report yesterday showing that the company’s SSDs are failing at a much lower rate than its HDDs as the drives age.”

CNET: The Cowboy Is Deeply Misunderstood, Says Adobe Emoji Report. “His warm smile beams out from beneath the rim of his 10-gallon Stetson, bringing farm-to-text delight into every conversation he joins. Summoned by only the most brazen texters, his rambunctious presence offers a sudden jolt of rodeo-howling glee when he rides into a thread. The message he sends? A mysterious riddle. His delivery? Wild and untamable. No one, it seems, truly knows the secrets of the chaotically alluring cowboy emoji.”

Futurism: Google And Oxford Scientists Publish Paper Claiming AI Will “Likely” Annihilate Humankind. “In a recent paper published in the journal AI Magazine, the team — comprised of DeepMind senior scientist Marcus Hutter and Oxford researchers Michael Cohen and Michael Osborne — argues that machines will eventually become incentivized to break the rules their creators set to compete for limited resources or energy.” Good morning, Internet…

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September 16, 2022 at 05:30PM
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Thursday, September 15, 2022

Spanish-Language Radio, Google Photos, Patreon, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 15, 2022

Spanish-Language Radio, Google Photos, Patreon, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 15, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

RadioWorld: AAPB Releases Resources to Honor Hispanic Heritage. “To honor Hispanic Heritage Month, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) is releasing a selection of documentaries, interviews and other archival material for stations to air. The resources highlight the AAPB’s archive of Latinx, Hispanic and Spanish-language programs created by public radio broadcasters for radio and television. The material includes more than 8,000 newly added broadcasts from Linea Abierta, the only nationally-aired, Spanish-language, public radio call-in show.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

PC Magazine: Google Photos Rolls Out Its Biggest Ever Feature Update for Memories. “Google Photos is harnessing our collective need to share nostalgia with its biggest-ever update to Memories, which surfaces snapshots from recent years. The redesign, according to product manager Yael Marzan, will feature more videos—including ‘the best snippets’ from longer videos automatically trimmed ‘so you can relive the most meaningful moments.'”

TechCrunch: Patreon lays off 17% of staff, affecting 80 employees. “CEO Jack Conte wrote in a letter to staff — cross-posted to Patreon’s blog — that 17% of the staff will be laid off. This affects the Go-to-Market, Operations, Finance and People teams. Patreon will also close its Berlin office, which worked on sales and marketing.”

USEFUL STUFF

Smashing Magazine: Making Sense Of WAI-ARIA: A Comprehensive Guide. “The Web Accessibility Initiative — Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) is a technical specification that provides direction on how to improve the accessibility of web applications. Where the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) focus more on static web content, WAI-ARIA focuses on making interactions more accessible.” This article is sponsored. Normally I hate sponsored articles and I will not link to them. This one is so information-rich that I’m breaking my own rule.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Snapper (Millersville University): Content creator inspires discussion through nostalgic memes. “Humorous phenomena taking the form of pictures, videos, and sounds, known as ‘memes,’ have been taking the world by storm for as long as most of us can remember. They spark joy, help us to cope or distract us from life’s troubles, and even inspire discussion about the world around us…. Living a Hannah Montana-esque double life, Lydia navigates work and life as any young woman in her 20s would, but when she wants to escape or express herself, she takes to the internet as her own online persona – Klit Klittredge.”

Globe and Mail: Sidewalk Labs project gained support from Trudeau in 2017 call ahead of bid process. “Google parent Alphabet Inc. gained support from Justin Trudeau for its plan to build a technology-driven community in Toronto after a private, undisclosed call between the Prime Minister and the company’s chairman before the project was ever made public.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Microsoft September 2022 Patch Tuesday fixes zero-day used in attacks, 63 flaws. “Today is Microsoft’s September 2022 Patch Tuesday, and with it comes fixes for an actively exploited Windows vulnerability and a total of 63 flaws. Five of the 63 vulnerabilities fixed in today’s update are classified as ‘Critical’ as they allow remote code execution, one of the most severe types of vulnerabilities.”

Associated Press: South Korea fines Google, Meta over privacy violations. ” South Korea’s privacy watchdog has fined Google and Meta a combined 100 billion won ($72 million) for tracking consumers’ online behavior without their consent and using their data for targeted advertisements.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

USA Today: Livestreamed violence compounds America’s horror and inspires copycats, experts say. When will it stop?. “The violence across Tennessee’s second-largest city that left four dead and three injured is the latest example of why advocates have been pushing tech companies since the 2019 mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, to draft policies against livestreamed attacks and quickly scrub the videos from their platforms.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Washington Post: They’re locked up in D.C. — and learning how to code from MIT. “The last time Rochell Crowder held an office job, he said, it was 1983 and computers were not yet central to everyday life. But on Thursday, after almost four decades of odd jobs and crimes that landed him in and out of jail, the 57-year-old completed a computer science course taught by PhD candidates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” Good afternoon, Internet…

September 16, 2022 at 01:01AM
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RB Search Gizmos: Exploring Nearby Goings-On With Local Community Finder

RB Search Gizmos: Exploring Nearby Goings-On With Local Community Finder
By ResearchBuzz

I think I’ve mentioned before that I don’t watch a lot of regular network TV (or cable TV for that matter), but I do spend a couple of hours a night watching YouTube. One of the channels I watch is called Beau of the Fifth Column. Beau, the host, talks about politics, current events, and community organizing, among other things.

A few months ago while I was watching, Beau was talking about a message he had gotten asking about how to find like-minded people in one’s community. In response, Beau said something about going online and searching Twitter, and then my husband laughed because I involuntarily blurted out “Oh, honey, no.”

Beau’s not entirely wrong. Twitter is a good place to find community and like-minded people. However, if you’re looking for people in your local area it’s unreliable. You can use location names to narrow down search results a little, but if you want to find people in your area you need to do a location search.

Twitter’s location searching is neither intuitive nor easy to use, and I’ve been picking at the problem for a couple of months after making a Twitter-only solution that I wasn’t satisfied with. Then yesterday I found an API that offered geocoding without requiring an API key, and that’s all I needed to finish up the Local Community Finder, available at https://researchbuzz.github.io/Local-Community-Finder/ .

When I have tried to do local event search before I always ran into the problem of getting lots of outdated pages in the search results. This time I started by generating the date and making sure the month and year appear in the search results. It looks weird and I kept second-guessing myself when I was testing search patterns, but it works.

The LCF also uses an API to get a city, state, and lat/long pair for the zip code you specify. It uses the city and state name in the generated Google queries and the lat/long to generate Twitter searches for your vicinity.

Let’s try using this tool like a Beau of the Fifth Column viewer. The zip code is for St. Louis, Missouri, and I’ll leave that alone. But instead of the word Fair I’m going to use the word voters. I’m going to leave the local option at local, which searches the entire city, instead of VERY local, which tries to restrict a search to a zip code area.

After you click the Find Your Local Community button, you’ll get a list of URLs for a Google search and a few Twitter searches.

The first link will open a page of Google results in a new tab. Different queries bring different results, of course, but I was impressed with how information-rich the results could get:

Underneath the Google link are two sets of Twitter links. In the first set you can search the Twitter space in your area with and without your search query. In the second, you’re searching the same space only your results are restricted to those users who have been verified by Twitter. Let’s take a look at the are verified user search without your topic query:

Without your query you’ll generally get things like reporters, news institutions, sports teams, and other prominent local people. When your query is added in you may find your results change a lot (especially if you’re searching for something like a sports team) or only a little. In this case we find two news institutions and a cotton expert in our search:

The Twitter query searches a very generous 10 km around the zip code’s lat/long. If you’re in a big city and find that radius brings you too many results, look in Twitter’s search box for the part of the query that reads 10km and change the 10 to whatever you like (when searching in the zip code area only, it defaults to 2km.)

I could make that radius adjustable. I could add more sources of information. I could do lots of things! What do you think? When you try the LCF does it find you anything cool?

September 15, 2022 at 07:51PM
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Electric Vehicles, Society of Biblical Literature, Autism Research, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, September 15, 2022

Electric Vehicles, Society of Biblical Literature, Autism Research, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, September 15, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Verge: The Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits are confusing, so the White House launched a website to help. “The Biden administration launched a new website… aimed at helping Americans navigate the new green energy tax credits contained in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA). That could especially be useful for people looking to buy a new electric vehicle but finding themselves confused by the litany of new requirements about assembly and battery materials.”

Religion Prof: Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers Digitized!. “Great news from the Society of Biblical Literature! I suspect that every New Testament scholar is aware of and has benefited from things that were published in the SBL Seminar Papers – and that I am not the only one who has at times wished that some of the volumes were more readily available or accessible. Well, now they’ve been digitized!”

Autism Science Foundation: ASF Launches Novel ‘Participate in Research’ Website Directory. “The Autism Science Foundation (ASF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding innovative autism research and supporting families facing autism, today announced the launch of the ‘Participate in Research’ directory on the ASF website. The new searchable directory is intended to increase participation in autism research by making it easier for families to find and enroll in studies. Families who use this new directory can search by age, topic of interest or geographical location.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: What we learned when Twitter whistleblower Mudge testified to Congress. “A ticking bomb of security vulnerabilities. Covering up security failures. Duping regulators and misleading lawmakers. These are just some of the allegations when Twitter’s ex-security lead turned whistleblower, Peiter Zatko, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, less than a month after the release of his explosive whistleblower complaint filed with federal regulators…. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.”

Ars Technica: Twitter shareholders approve the $44B merger Musk is trying to get out of. “Twitter shareholders voted to approve Elon Musk’s purchase of the company, weeks ahead of a trial over Musk’s attempt to exit the merger deal. Though a specific vote tally wasn’t available today, multiple news reports said investors backed the Twitter board’s recommendation to approve the $44 billion deal that Musk agreed to in April before changing his mind.”

How-To Geek: Winamp 5.9 Is the First Stable Update in Four Years. “Winamp was a popular media player application in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and it has received infrequent updates in recent years to address compatibility issues. Winamp 5.9 has now been released, marking the first major update since 2018.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Tech Edvocate: Product Review Of Teachingbooks.net. “TeachingBooks.net is an online book database, assisting educators, parents, and librarians with finding multimedia resources, lesson plans, and links to extend curriculum in the classroom around books. The database features a huge number of fiction and nonfiction books and associated resources, with a heavy focus on materials useful for author studies and introductory lessons as well as supporting the diversification of what books and authors are taught.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: Google Must Face Most of Texas’ Antitrust Lawsuit on Ads. “Google will have to face the bulk of a multistate antitrust lawsuit that accuses the tech giant of reaching an illegal deal with online ad rival Facebook.”

Engadget: Google fails to overturn EU Android antitrust ruling but reduces its fine by 5 percent. “Google has failed to convince Europe’s General Court to overturn the Commission’s ruling on its Android antitrust case and its decision to slap the company with a €4.3/US$4.3 billion fine.”

CoinDesk: S. Korean Court Issues Arrest Warrant Against Terra Co-Founder Do Kwon. “A South Korean court has issued an arrest warrant against Do Kwon, the co-founder of the now defunct stablecoin issuer Terraform Labs, according to the Financial Crimes Unit of the Supreme Prosecutors Office. The warrant included five additional persons, Bloomberg News reported, citing a text message from the prosecutor’s office.” I don’t want to get too deep into cryptocurrency in RB, but I feel it’s a very sketchy tech integrated into a lot of current Web stuff, and I want to keep an eye on it.

RESEARCH & OPINION

News Medical: Social media use puts teens at risk of developing drug and alcohol issues . “New research has found adolescents who are active on social media are being exposed to content that could put them at risk of developing drug and alcohol issues. The study, led by University of Queensland PhD student Brienna Rutherford from UQ’s National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research, examined how drug and alcohol use content was portrayed across social media.”

Bloomberg: Climate Change is making people angrier online. “Climate change is making us angrier online. A lot angrier. Hateful comments spike on social media when temperatures rise above 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit), researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research have found.” Good morning, Internet…

September 15, 2022 at 05:28PM
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Wednesday, September 14, 2022

Ohio Red Tape, AI Image Generators, YouTube Shorts, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 14, 2022

Ohio Red Tape, AI Image Generators, YouTube Shorts, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 14, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Center Square: New Ohio website gives public voice in business regulations. “In the works since 2018, the Joint Committee on Agency Rule Review’s Cut Red Tape Ohio website – which launched Monday – gives the public opportunities to flag business regulations that might be cumbersome or outdated and provides a review that could eliminate or change those rules.”

USEFUL STUFF

PetaPixel: The Best AI Image Generators in 2022. “At the start of 2022, there were hardly any AI text-to-image generators available to the public, but with DALL-E finally becoming available in beta in July and Stable Diffusion being released a month later, there are now suddenly an array of AI image generators vying to be the best software on the market. So if you’re feeling confused about which AI Image generator you should use in 2022, this is a complete guide to the best options out there.”

Social Media Examiner: How to Easily Make YouTube Shorts With Your Longer Videos. “Want to do more with YouTube Shorts? Looking for an easy way to turn your YouTube videos into shorts? In this article, you’ll discover how to create YouTube shorts using your long-form videos.”

How-To Geek: How to Comment on PDFs (or Any Other File) in Google Drive. “You might already know that when sharing documents using Google’s own office apps you can leave comments to make collaboration easy. But did you know Google Drive offers the same comment feature for virtually any file, not just Google documents?”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle: A Twitter ‘Repentance Bot’ teaches people how to apologize for real. “‘Repentance Bot’ allows users to tag the account when they see an apology that they believe falls short. The bot then replies to the apology with encouragement to do better and a comic strip laying out five steps to take to do so.”

Brown University Library News: John Hay Library Receives Grants to Digitize Materials of Dissenting U.S. Politics. “Through its Divided America project, the John Hay Library will digitize and make available material representing extremes of political thought from 1946 through the 1990s in the United States.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: U-Haul discloses data breach exposing customer driver licenses. “Moving and storage giant U-Haul International (U-Haul) disclosed a data breach after a customer contract search tool was hacked to access customers’ names and driver’s license information. Following an incident investigation started on July 12 after discovering the breach, the company found on August 1 that attackers accessed some customers’ rental contracts between November 5, 2021, and April 5, 2022.”

Krebs on Security: Transacting in Person with Strangers from the Internet. “Communities like Craigslist, OfferUp, Facebook Marketplace and others are great for finding low- or no-cost stuff that one can pick up directly from a nearby seller, and for getting rid of useful things that don’t deserve to end up in a landfill. But when dealing with strangers from the Internet, there is always a risk that the person you’ve agreed to meet has other intentions.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Cornell Chronicle: Report shows near-total erasure of Armenian heritage sites. “A new report from the Cornell-led Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW) has compiled decades of high-resolution satellite imagery to document the complete destruction of Armenian cultural heritage in the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan beginning in the late 1990s. Moreover, the latest finding of CHW’s heritage monitoring project suggests that the same policy of cultural erasure now threatens Armenian monuments in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Columbia Climate School: Scientists Are Mapping New York City Wildlife. And We Don’t Mean Rats, Squirrels or Pigeons.. “There are possums, raccoons, deer, coyotes (one turned up last year in Central Park), foxes, rabbits, groundhogs and skunks. In the waters, river otters and beavers (after a nearly 200-year absence, one was recently seen running along a promenade near the Williamsburg Bridge). In the air, peregrine falcons, red-tailed hawks, bats and rare native bees.” Good afternoon, Internet…

September 15, 2022 at 12:20AM
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Tracking Ballot Measures, Disability Voting Index, Creative Commons, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, September 14, 2022

Tracking Ballot Measures, Disability Voting Index, Creative Commons, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, September 14, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

OpenSecrets: OpenSecrets launches new tool to track ballot measures across the country . “OpenSecrets has launched a new tool to track ballot measures across the country as part of a continuing effort to integrate state level data following the merger with the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in Politics.”

Microsoft Blog: Because every vote counts: making elections more accessible. “Today, the Microsoft Accessibility and Democracy Forward teams also celebrate the launch of the Center for Civic Designs’ Disability Voting Index. This new tool offers a single, centralized location that makes it easy to quickly search and understand accessibility options in all 50 states so that more people with disabilities can participate in the electoral process.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Creative Commons: New FAQ on NFTs and CC0. “To help clarify how NFTs are already leveraging CC legal tools, we have added a new section to our FAQ on using CC licenses and the CC0 public domain dedication with NFTs. This FAQ is intended to provide basic guidance for those who are already using NFTs and want to know how to use CC licenses and legal tools with NFT projects. We will continue to update our FAQ as our understanding and interpretation develops.”

Search Engine Journal: Google Announces September 2022 Core Algorithm Update. “Google announced a Core Algorithm Update on September 12, 2022. The official Google list of announced updates stated that it will take up to two weeks to finish rolling out. The initial response from the search community was generally positive although some affiliate marketing Facebook groups were noticeably muted.”

USEFUL STUFF

Hackaday: Organise Your Hacks With Treesheets: An Open Source Hierarchical Spreadsheet. “TreeSheets is described as a hierarchical spreadsheet, which is intended as a replacement for several distinct tools; think spreadsheets, mindmaps and text editors and similar.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

University of Toronto: Student project creates accessible database of Canada’s first newspapers. “Led by Sébastien Drouin, an associate professor in the department of language studies at U of T Scarborough, the bilingual project, ‘Early Modern Canadian Newspapers Online’ is a collection of newspapers from the second half of the eighteenth century – from 1752 to 1810 – printed in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Québec and Ontario.”

Loop T&T News: Wedding nothing: Google Maps loses Penal couple in forest. “The duo hoped to attend a wedding in Guayaguayare Village on Saturday. They wanted to get there in the shortest possible time so they used Google Maps. However, the route they followed wasn’t quite what they expected as they were taken through approximately 19 kilometres of abandoned oilfield road, called the Guayaguayare Road.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Guardian: Google faces €25bn lawsuit in UK and EU over digital advertising. “Google faces a €25bn (£21.6bn) lawsuit in the UK and EU that accuses the tech firm of anticompetitive conduct in the digital advertising market. The company, which is a key player in the online ad market as well as being a dominant force in search, is accused of abusing its power in the ad tech market, which coordinates the sale of online advertising space between publishers and advertisers.”

Reuters: EU regulators widen Google adtech probe to include Portuguese case. “EU antitrust regulators have broadened the scope of their investigation into Alphabet unit Google’s digital advertising business by taking over the Portuguese competition watchdog’s probe into the same issue.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CNBC: Google spins out secret hi-speed telecom project called Aalyria, and keeps stake in startup. “Inside Google, a team of techies has been working behind the scenes on software for high-speed communications networks that extend from land to space. Codenamed ‘Minkowski’ within Google, the secret project is being unveiled to the public on Monday as a new spinout called Aalyria.”

CNET: The Bizarre Way Kids Use Memes Is Melting My Brain. “Much like the olden days, where urban legends spread from older sibling to savvy younger brother and beyond, children are constantly proliferating preexisting memes utterly divorced from the context of their origins. They’re consumed by osmosis, via a family member or YouTube streamer, then rapidly co-opted. Quickly they become part of a bizarre shared language. Nonsensical words that are simply shouted on the playground yet make no literal sense.”

Harvard Gazette: New research alliance brings quantum internet closer to reality. “Harvard University and Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday launched a strategic alliance to advance fundamental research and innovation in quantum networking. This effort provides significant funding for faculty-led research at Harvard and will build capacity for student recruitment, training, outreach, and workforce development in this key emerging technology field.” Good morning, Internet…

September 14, 2022 at 05:30PM
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Tuesday, September 13, 2022

Invasive and Vector Mosquitoes, IRS Accessibility, Women’s Self-Care, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 13, 2022

Invasive and Vector Mosquitoes, IRS Accessibility, Women’s Self-Care, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 13, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

National Science Foundation: Researchers develop dashboard to track invasive and vector mosquitoes. “Researchers at the University of South Florida, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, created the Global Mosquito Observations Dashboard to surveil mosquito-borne diseases with automated mosquito identification. The dashboard makes use of data from other apps that use citizen scientists to capture photos of mosquitoes. The approach offers international data on a scale otherwise prohibitive due to expense and logistics.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

National Taxpayer Advocate Blog: NTA Blog: Improving Services to Taxpayers With Visual Disabilities. “Millions of U.S. taxpayers are visually impaired and unable to read print material in a standard font size. As a result of a settlement agreement between the IRS and the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) on July 10, 2020, the IRS agreed to develop a process for taxpayers to request post-filing tax notices in a variety of acceptable formats, including Braille and large print.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 8 Emotional Support and Self-Care Apps and Resources for Women. “There is an ever-increasing collection of apps to provide self-care and emotional support to help cope with the stresses and strains of modern living. Some of these are designed especially for women. Here are some of the best apps and online resources providing women with aid and support to help with all stages of life.” I thought this was going to be a cheesy list where everything was pink and all worries could be fixed with a glass of wine in a hot bath. It’s much better than that.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

NOLA: Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, historian renowned for research into Louisiana slavery, dies at 93. “Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, a New Orleans-born historian who revolutionized teaching about slavery in Louisiana by applying computer technology to information she unearthed in musty archives and courthouse records throughout the state, died Monday at her home in Guanajuato, Mexico. She was 93.”

Michigan Daily: Social media presence brings positive reviews for UMich president-elect. “From replying to direct messages to reposting community content, University president-elect Santa Ono is social media savvy, and the student body is here for it. Since he was announced as the next president in July, Ono’s Twitter and Instagram have been filled with content about University events and student stories, making his passion for the community relatable.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Politico: Digital great game: The West’s standoff against China and Russia. “The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) — a 150-year-old body that sets rules for how much of the global telecom and tech infrastructure works — will gather at end of September in Bucharest for a three-week conference. The more than 190 member countries will elect a new secretary-general and other top brass, as well as set the policy goals for the U.N. agency for the next four years. The two candidates for the top job, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, an American, and Rashid Ismailov, a Russian, have crisscrossed the globe to rally support from telecom policymakers and regulators.”

CoinDesk: Celsius Resembled Ponzi Scheme at Times, Vermont Regulator Says. “Crypto lender Celsius Network misled investors about its financial health, using its CEL token to bolster its balance sheet and at times using new investor funds to repay old investors, the Vermont Department of Financial Regulation alleged in a new filing Wednesday.”

LA Taco: A New Twitter Bot Will Tell You An Officer’s Name, Rank, And Race By Putting In Their Serial Number. “WhosThatCop is a Twitter bot created by user @NN35007 that allows users to enter the serial number of an officer they’ve encountered, which then reveals the name of the officer, their job, gender, and race.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Ars Technica: Runway teases AI-powered text-to-video editing using written prompts. “In a tweet posted this morning, artificial intelligence company Runway teased a new feature of its AI-powered web-based video editor that can edit video from written descriptions, often called ‘prompts.'”

Boing Boing: Creating an AI-generated comic book in Midjourney. “I really enjoyed watching filmmaker Elvis Deane talk about his experience in creating a comic book using the Midjourney AI art program. I love some of the analogies he uses—that working with a current AI is kind of like trying to communicate with your dog, or like having an infinite number of monkey artists who aren’t giving you exactly what you want, but sort of.” Good afternoon, Internet…

September 14, 2022 at 12:34AM
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