New researches

Monday, September 19, 2022

Give RSS Feeds Expiration Dates with JOOC Box

Give RSS Feeds Expiration Dates with JOOC Box
By ResearchBuzz

Do you ever suffer from Temporary Curiosity?

I have a terrible time with it. I’ll hear about something that happened, or an event that’s coming up, and I’ll want to know how it proceeds. Periodically I’ll wonder what’s going on with it.

Of course I can just remember to search on it. If I do remember. I certainly don’t want to put a searching followup in my calendar; I don’t care THAT much.

I could also set up a keyword-based RSS feed for the object of my curiosity so I get updates when I’m doing my regular feed reviewing. The problem with that is I have to remember to remove the feed again — and I have a LOT of RSS feeds. If I added just one every time I was curious about something, I’d be overwhelmed with feeds in no time.

So I made JOOC Box, which generates RSS feeds with expiration dates in the title. It also bundles the feeds into an OPML file so you can easily import them into your favorite RSS feed reader. It’s available at https://researchbuzz.github.io/JOOC-Box/ .

(If you’re wondering what JOOC means, it’s Internet slang for “Just Out Of Curiosity”. I thought it was pronounced “juke”, which would make the name of this app sound like “Juke Box,” but I see on the Urban Dictionary it’s pronounced “joos,” making the app “Juice Box.” Either way the pun works.)

JOOC Box asks for a query you want to monitor and how many days you want to monitor for.

When you click the Whip Up Some Feeds button, the following things happen:

1) JOOC box makes keyword-based feeds featuring your query for Bing, Bing News, Google News, WordPress, and Reddit. Each feed has a title containing your specified “expiration date”.

2) The feeds are bundled into an OPML file with a title that features your query and expiration date:
JOOC Box_OPML_File_For_’pumpkin%2520spice’_expiring_9_20_2022.opml

3) That file is automatically downloaded to wherever you save downloads on your computer. It’s plain text; you can easily open it with a text editor if you want to see what it looks like (mostly like an overfed RSS feed.)

If you’re not familiar with OPML files and how they work, Lifewire has a good overview article with plenty of links to tools.

So what good does this do? I have some keyword-based RSS feeds, but I won’t I lose track of them in my feed reader? Nope, because they have dates in the title! I am using these RSS feeds with Feedly . Feedly has a feed management section where I can search for feeds by title. Every time I start using Feedly I’ll simply search for the current date to see if there are any feeds I need to throw away. Here’s what that search looks like.

… to be honest I feel a little weird about sharing JOOC Box because I might have made something only I would use. When I told my husband about it he thought it was a bit silly. But what can I say? Temporary curiosity is my affliction.

Besides, I will use it!

September 19, 2022 at 07:23PM
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Justice Initiative Fund, Telehelp Ukraine, Ukraine’s Tech Industry, More: Ukraine Update, September 19, 2022

Justice Initiative Fund, Telehelp Ukraine, Ukraine’s Tech Industry, More: Ukraine Update, September 19, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Wall Street Journal: Ukrainians Try Crowdsourcing to Catch Russian War Criminals. “The Justice Initiative Fund focuses its efforts only on war-crimes suspects officially ‘wanted’ by Ukrainian or foreign authorities. It states that it is ‘against vigilantism’ and doesn’t order assassinations of suspects. Instead, it seeks information it can verify and pass along to law enforcement to facilitate an arrest, as well as ‘previously unknown evidence of the crimes of the wanted person.'”

Stanford Medicine: Delivering free (tele)health care to Ukrainians. “In the days immediately following the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Annalicia Pickering, MD, a pediatric hospitalist with Stanford Medicine; Solomiia Savchuk, a student at the Stanford School of Medicine; and Zoe von Gerlach, a Stanford engineering graduate student, set a bold intention: Find a way to provide meaningful medical support to people in Ukraine. Just months later, the confluence of their efforts has led to the launch of a telehealth program, called Telehelp Ukraine, that serves Ukrainians who need medical assistance — those who remain in their home country as well as those who have sought refuge in Poland.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Yahoo News: Ukraine’s tech scene finds creative ways to do business amid a full-scale war. “As the war’s gone on for more than six months, Ukrainian tech has pivoted. Today, a once-thriving ecosystem of tech companies, VCs, startups, and workers has gone from growing to surviving. Pre-war, Ukraine’s buzzy tech sector had been expanding rapidly. In 2021, the IT space in Ukraine grew by nearly 36% year-over-year, hitting $6.8 billion in exports, according to a report by IT Ukraine Association.”

New York Times: As Russians Retreat, Putin Is Criticized by Hawks Who Trumpeted His War. “Russian bloggers reporting from the front line provide a uniquely less-censored view of the war. But as Russia’s military flails, these once vocal supporters are exposing its flaws, lies and all.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

WIRED: Ukraine’s Cyberwar Chief Sounds Like He’s Winning. “YURII SHCHYHOL DOESN’T have a lot of time to spare. The head of the Derzhspetszviazok, Ukraine’s version of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, can be forgiven for working speedily. His country is under attack—and with it, the world order.”

Deutsche Welle: Pro-Ukraine cyberwarriors fight Russian propaganda. “Information warfare has played a significant role in the war in Ukraine. While armies of Russian trolls once seemed to have the upper hand on social media, they are now meeting their match in a pro-Ukrainian meme army that calls itself NAFO.” 1:48 video, but I didn’t see captions. Maybe I missed them?

The Guardian: Ukraine’s publicised southern offensive was ‘disinformation campaign’. “The much-publicised Ukrainian southern offensive was a disinformation campaign to distract Russia from the real one being prepared in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine’s special forces have said. Ukrainian forces are continuing to make unexpected, rapid advances in the north-east of the country, retaking more than a third of the occupied Kharkiv region in three days. Much of Ukraine’s territorial gains were confirmed by Russia’s defence ministry on Saturday.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Man embroiled in Russia and Ukraine’s propaganda war over nuclear plant. “A former deputy spokesman for Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant who helped tell the world that Russian troops occupied the strategic site is now in exile, no longer in his job and his former According to a document from the employer, it is suspected by Ukrainian intelligence to cooperate with Russia.”

Reuters: Moscow court accepts Google’s Russian unit’s bankruptcy application -agencies. “A Moscow court on Monday accepted a bankruptcy application by Google’s Russian subsidiary and started initial bankruptcy proceedings, placing the company under supervision, Russian news agencies reported.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Center for European Policy Analysis: The Bewilderment of Kremlin Propagandists. “The Ukrainian advances of recent days have liberated thousands of kilometers of territory, freed innumerable citizens from bondage and terror, and brought fresh hope to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his people. In Russia, it first caused a shocked silence, occasionally broken by a stammering explanation. Kremlin propagandists were left in complete disarray by the news. The normally well-oiled propaganda machine was a shambles, as state-run media scrambled to explain huge losses and a collapsing military.”

International Press Institute: MFRR monitoring report documents attacks on media in Ukraine. “As the war drags on and with no end to hostilities in sight, Ukrainian media continue to adapt to a challenging new economic reality while also navigating the multiple challenges posed by information warfare. MFFR began monitoring Ukraine when the invasion began in February 2022. During the reporting period Ukraine became a candidate country in June 2022. During the first six months of 2022, the platform documented 94 attacks and violations of media freedom involving 142 targets.”

Lieber Institute West Point: Ukraine Symposium – Data-rich Battlefields And The Future LOAC. “Russia continues to deploy its formidable ‘information war machine’ to ‘confuse and disable’ while Ukraine and non-State actors such as news organizations, think tanks, and NGOs counter these tactics through the use of ubiquitous, open-source battlefield data. In effect, we are watching the future of warfare—data-rich battlefields in which information is a critical component of military operations—emerge in real time.”

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September 19, 2022 at 06:44PM
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World Bird Migration, VR Theater Recreations, Chronicling America, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, September 19, 2022

World Bird Migration, VR Theater Recreations, Chronicling America, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, September 19, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Associated Press: New tool to track the migration of birds across the world. “The Bird Migration Explorer mapping tool, available free to the public, is an ongoing collaboration between 11 groups that collect and analyze data on bird movements.”

Flinders University: New tech brings our ‘lost’ theatres back to life. “The authors and their research teams have pioneered a new research technique for Visualising Lost Theatres, using archival and archaeological records to reconstruct lost theatres in accurate virtual reality. These VR models provide the visual and immersive feel of a venue, as well as revealing performance logistics for actors and audience alike, enabling the researchers to explore both social histories and theatre practices in which the venues themselves were significant players.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Library of Congress: Chronicling America Reaches 50 States. “NEH recently awarded its first grant award to a National Digital Newspaper Program partner for the state of New Hampshire, ensuring access to significant newspapers from the entire United States. Dartmouth College will serve as the New Hampshire state hub, partnering with the New Hampshire State Library, the New Hampshire Historical Society, and the University of New Hampshire Library to identify historical newspapers that reflect the state’s political, economic, and cultural history for inclusion in Chronicling America.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Compress Large Audio Files: 5 Easy and Effective Ways. “Whether you’re a podcast producer, a musician, or a DJ who creates music mixes, you need to know how to compress audio files to reduce their size. It can also be helpful to know how to compress audio files when you just want them to take up less space on your device. Here are a handful of easy and effective ways to reduce large audio files down to a more manageable size.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: How Russian Trolls Helped Keep the Women’s March Out of Lock Step. “For more than a century, Russia and the Soviet Union sought to weaken their adversaries in the West by inflaming racial and ethnic tensions….Social media now provided an easy way to feed ideas into American discourse, something that, for half a century, the K.G.B. had struggled to do. And the Russian government secretly funneled more than $300 million to political parties in more than two dozen countries in an effort to sway their policies in Moscow’s favor since 2014, according to a U.S. intelligence review made public last week.”

Protocol: Two former Googlers launched an app to keep you on foodtok forever. “Former Google engineer François Chu and Alejandro Oropeza, YouTube’s former global head of creator marketing, launched Flavrs earlier this week with the hopes that users will use the app as a dedicated platform for finding recipes, learning how to cook them and buying the necessary ingredients. The platform has raised $7 million in seed funding from support from Andreessen Horowitz, Wellington Access Ventures and celebrity chefs including Eric Ripert.”

Slashgear: This YouTube Channel Is Tracking The Stunning Miles-Long Queue To See Queen Elizabeth II’s Coffin. “Officials are allowing the line to reach a maximum length of 10 miles. It was around two and a half miles long on Wednesday (September 14) and is currently just under 5 miles long with an estimated waiting time of nine hours.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NBC News: Disinformation via text message is a problem with few answers. “The biggest election disinformation event of the 2022 midterm primaries was not an elaborate Russian troll scheme that played out on Twitter or Facebook. It was some text messages. The night before Kansans were set to vote on a historic statewide referendum last month, voters saw a lie about how to vote pop up on their phone. A blast of old-fashioned text messages falsely told them that a ‘yes’ vote protected abortion access in their state, when the opposite was true — a yes vote would cut abortion protections from the state’s constitution.”

University of Alabama at Birmingham: Staying cyber-aware: New social media scams to watch out for. “Every day, Americans come across scams, whether through email, text or social media. According to the Federal Trade Commission, nearly 2.8 million consumers reported a fraud in 2021, marking it the highest number of reports dating back to 2001. University of Alabama at Birmingham expert Ragib Hasan, Ph.D., associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Computer Science, warns that cybercriminals and scammers are using new techniques that can be very convincing.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WJZY: Pre-teens lose full night of sleep a week to social media, new study. “A study out of Leicester, England with De Montfort University monitored 10- and 11-year-olds participating in social media. Researchers found the subjects were only getting about 8.7 hours of sleep each night. The recommended amount for the age group is nine to 11 hours. Young people cite increased social media usage as a fear of missing out, commonly known as FOMO. They said they didn’t want to miss a post or message from their friends.”

NewScientist: Stop calling it social media – these firms don’t care what we want. “ANOTHER month, another algorithm change on a social media platform that has everybody peeved online. This time it is Instagram, the photo-sharing service owned by Facebook. Instead of showing us the cat photos and wedding pictures we want, the app is clogging up our friend feeds with tons of ‘reels’: autoplaying mini-movies. The problem? Nobody asked for this.”

Ars Technica: Artists begin selling AI-generated artwork on stock photography websites. “Seeking ways to ‘monetize’ AI-generated art, some artists have already begun submitting their AI-generated pieces to stock photography websites like Shutterstock. Searches for ‘AI generated’ or ‘Midjourney’ (a popular image synthesis service) produce thousands of results on the site.” Good morning, Internet…

September 19, 2022 at 05:28PM
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Sunday, September 18, 2022

Hotel Searches, Search Engines Advertising, YouTube, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 18, 2022

Hotel Searches, Search Engines Advertising, YouTube, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 18, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Google Adds Hotel Sustainability Info to Search Results. “Googling your next potential hotel stay? The search giant will now serve up information on a hotel’s sustainability and health and safety programs right there in the search results.”

New York Times: Celsius Network Plots a Comeback After a Crypto Crash. “At a meeting with employees on Sept. 8, Alex Mashinsky, the chief executive of Celsius, outlined an audacious plan to revive the firm, according to a recording of the event shared with The New York Times. He and Oren Blonstein, another Celsius executive, said they hoped to rebuild the company with a focus on custody — storing people’s cryptocurrencies for them, and then charging fees on certain types of transactions. They said the project was code-named Kelvin, after the unit of temperature.” Just wow.

USEFUL STUFF

Washington Post: Scams are showing up at the top of online searches. “Add one more to the list of online places bad guys are hiding: the very top of search results. Nasty scams and malware are preying on your trust by hiding behind the ads that sit on top of search pages. Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing are being paid to put them in front of us, and they haven’t figured out how to stop it.” The link I’ve put in this item is a gift article, so you’ll be able to read it even if you’re not a WP subscriber.

How-To Geek: 10 YouTube Features You Should Be Using. “YouTube has been around since 2005, and it’s one of the most visited websites in the world. Tons of features have been added to the YouTube website and apps over the years. We’ll share some you may not know about.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Slate: What if a Peasant From the Middle Ages Got a Fancy Influencer Account? I Have Good News for You.. “What would it be like if, in the Middle Ages, there was a peasant who made influencer-style videos about feast days, Lent, the bones of saints, and his coping mechanism for surviving the plague (buying hats)? Well, he exists on TikTok as @greedypeasant, the quarantine creation of costume designer Tyler Gunther, and he is delightful.”

Variety: YouTube Paid Over $6 Billion to Music Industry in Past 12 Months. “YouTube, the world’s largest streaming platform for music, announced that it has paid more than $6 billion to the music industry in the 12 months between July 2021 and June 2022 — some $2 billion more than it said it paid in the previous 12 months.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Twitter pranksters derail GPT-3 bot with newly discovered ‘prompt injection’ hack. “On Thursday, a few Twitter users discovered how to hijack an automated tweet bot, dedicated to remote jobs, running on the GPT-3 language model by OpenAI. Using a newly discovered technique called a ‘prompt injection attack,’ they redirected the bot to repeat embarrassing and ridiculous phrases.”

Washington Post: Trump team claimed boxes at Mar-a-Lago were only news clippings. “Months before National Archives officials retrieved hundreds of classified documents in 15 boxes from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, they were told that none of the material was sensitive or classified and that Trump had only 12 boxes of ‘news clippings,’ according to people familiar with the conversations between Trump’s team and the Archives.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

ZDNet: Google partners with the US government to supply chips and spur innovation. “Chips used to develop new nanotechnology and semiconductor devices oftentimes have a large price tag, posing a big obstacle for innovation. To solve this issue, the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has signed a cooperative research and development agreement with Google to develop and produce these chips.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Hackaday: Inexpensive Reading Glasses Become Stereoscope. “It’s an unfortunate consequence of growing older, that no longer are you able to read the print on a SOT-23 package or solder a QFN without magnification. Your eyes inexorably start to fail, and to have any hope of continuing a set of reading glasses is required. We have this in common with [Niklas Roy], who noticed while shopping for cheap reading glasses that their lenses were of surprisingly good quality. The result of this observation was a stereoscope made from card and a few euros worth of eyewear.” Good afternoon, Internet…

September 19, 2022 at 12:54AM
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A.I.R. Gallery, Idaho Folklife, Arizona Memory Project, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, September 18, 2022

A.I.R. Gallery, Idaho Folklife, Arizona Memory Project, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, September 18, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Artnet: A.I.R. Gallery Broke Barriers by Showing Women and Nonbinary Artists. Now the Collective’s Story Is Finally Being Told. “Today marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of Artists in Residence, Inc. (A.I.R. Gallery), the first nonprofit artist-run cooperative gallery for women artists in the United States. In recognition of that milestone, the organization is launching a new digital archive and exhibition that covers the first half of its history.”

Boise State University: New partnership preserves Idaho folklife. “Special Collections and Archives at Boise State University’s Albertsons Library has partnered with the Folk and Traditional Arts program at the Idaho Commission on the Arts to create The Idaho Folklife Collection…. The first collection to be digitized, organized and made publicly-accessible contains fieldwork associated with Rosalie Sorrels. This collection includes work for the book Way Out in Idaho (Idaho Commission on the Arts, 1990). Materials include sound recordings, photographs, notes, and other ephemera related to her time spent roaming Idaho, documenting folklife practitioners and songs related to the state.”

Arizona Secretary of State: New platform for the Arizona Memory Project launches September 29, 2022. “The new website provides users with a modern look at the Arizona Memory Project and comes with many enhancements. Users will find the new website easier to search, with thousands of additional documents, newspapers, and other items fully text searchable. Additional enhancements include linked information across collections and items, improved search capabilities, and improved storytelling that highlight Arizona’s people, places, and events.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Flickr Blog: Discover Virtual Photography on Flickr. “Flickr is home to EVERY kind of photography, and that covers a vast range of subjects, styles, and categories. Today we’re excited to introduce a new kind of content category for the bulk uploading, group adminning, and search filtering needs of one of Flickr’s most active communities: Meet virtual photography!… Virtual photography is an emerging art form specializing in photos taken inside a video game or virtual environment.”

Engadget: Patreon lays off 17 percent of its employees . “Patreon, a platform that helps creators to generate more income from their work, has laid off 80 employees, or around 17 percent of its total headcount, amid the global economic slowdown and fears of a recession.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Mexico News Daily: Doña Ángela: a Michoacán abuelita with over 4 million YouTube subscribers. “Doña Ángela lives in the town of Pablo Cuin in the Ario de Rosales municipality of Michoacán and she has become a viral hit by presenting homestyle Mexican recipes from her state’s regional cuisine and beyond. Her first video of how to make enchiladas verdes has had over 11 million views since it was published in 2019. Without a big production team, a fancy demonstration kitchen, and bevy of assistants behind the scenes, Doña Ángela’s kids film her on their cellphones as she cooks in front of her a large flat comal stove in a rural, wood-paneled kitchen.”

Review Geek: Adobe to Acquire Figma, Its Greatest Rival in Web and App Design. “In a shocking announcement, Adobe says it will acquire Figma. The $20 billion deal is controversial, but it’s also quite interesting. Figma is the first design tool that’s truly adapted to remote work, an area that Adobe struggles to understand.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Death of Queen Elizabeth II exploited to steal Microsoft credentials. “Threat actors are exploiting the death of Queen Elizabeth II in phishing attacks to lure their targets to sites that steal their Microsoft account credentials. Besides Microsoft account details, the attackers also attempt to steal their victims’ multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes to take over their accounts.”

Reuters: US appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech. “A US appeals court on Friday upheld a Texas law that bars large social media companies from banning or censoring users based on “viewpoint,” a setback for technology industry groups that say the measure would turn platforms into bastions of dangerous content.”

Ars Technica: Musk filing claims “conspiracy among Twitter executives” to deceive public. “Elon Musk filed an amended countersuit against Twitter, claiming the allegations by Twitter’s former security chief, Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko, give Musk new legal grounds to kill the merger deal.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EurekAlert: From analog to digital. “There was once a time, not so long ago, when scientists like Casey Holliday needed scalpels, scissors and even their own hands to conduct anatomical research. But now, with recent advances in technology, Holliday and his colleagues at the University of Missouri are using artificial intelligence (AI) to see inside an animal or a person — down to a single muscle fiber — without ever making a cut.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

NOLA: Nobody knows as much about New Orleans’ street tiles as this guy. And he’s worried.. “For more than a century, street corners in the older sections of the Crescent City have been marked with names made from embedded alphabet tiles. The Wordle of street names lends a certain genteel, old-fashioned charm to any stroll. Like beignets and Mardi Gras beads, they are among New Orleans’ iconic images, a signature of the City That Care Forgot. But these days, the tiles may be in trouble. With widespread street repairs unfolding around them, tile-lovers are concerned that when the dust settles and the cement trucks finally retreat, many of the tiles will permanently disappear with them.” Good morning, Internet…

September 18, 2022 at 05:27PM
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Saturday, September 17, 2022

Portuguese WWI Military Veterans, TikTok, Regular Expressions, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 17, 2022

Portuguese WWI Military Veterans, TikTok, Regular Expressions, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 17, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Institute of Contemporary History (Portugal): Digital Archive On The History Of The Portuguese Maimed By War. “This week saw the launch of the digital archive ‘Os Mutilados da Guerra (1914-1918): reavivar uma memória’ [The War Maimed (1914-1918): Reviving a Memory], which aims to ‘work as a starting point for the study and dissemination of the history of the Portuguese maimed in the First World War’.” The site is in Portuguese but Google Translate worked fine. As you might expect some of these images are very disturbing; I didn’t go past the thumbnails.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Business Insider: Business Insider
TikTok copies Instagram’s move to copy buzzy app BeReal. “TikTok is launching a new tool that people quickly noticed is incredibly similar to another popular app: BeReal. The social media platform announced on Thursday TikTok Now, a tool where users receive a daily prompt to film a 10-second video or take a photo to share what they’re doing in the moment from the front and back cameras on their phone.”

USEFUL STUFF

Red Hat Developer: Regex how-to: Quantifiers, pattern collections, and word boundaries. “Filtering and searching text with regular expressions is an important skill for every developer. Regular expressions can be tricky to master. To work with them effectively, you need a detailed understanding of their symbols and syntax. Fortunately, learning to work with regular expressions can be incremental. You don’t need to learn everything all at once to do useful work. Rather, you can start with the basics and then move into more complex topics while developing your understanding and using what you know as you go along.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Independent: ‘GrieveWatch’ Twitter account goes viral for showcasing how brands are mourning the Queen. “One such image it shared was from an unnamed laser hair removal company. In a screenshot of what looks like an email, the company writes: ‘To celebrate and remember our Queen, we are offering the most amazing deals until the 19 September 2022.’ Another shows a shopfront with ‘RIP Queen Elizabeth’ carved into the side of a watermelon, which the account dubbed ‘Mourn Melon’.”

New York Times: For Gen Z, TikTok Is the New Search Engine. “Need to find a restaurant or figure out how to do something? Young people are turning to TikTok to search for answers. Google has noticed.”

Front Office Sports: ESPN’s Newest Attempt To Target Younger Audiences. “ESPN is making a play for Gen Z by putting its social media might behind a new network of content creators, the network told Front Office Sports. The Worldwide Leader is launching ESPN Creator Network, a program that will provide up-close access to ESPN’s sports properties — as well as the company’s considerable resources — to up-and-coming content creators.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: Uber Investigating Computer System Breach. “Uber’s computer network was breached on Thursday, leading the ride-hailing giant to take several internal communications and engineering systems offline as it investigated the hack, The New York Times reported.”

ProPublica: Human Trafficking’s Newest Abuse: Forcing Victims Into Cyberscamming. “Tens of thousands of people from across Asia have been coerced into defrauding people in America and around the world out of millions of dollars. Those who resist face beatings, food deprivation or worse.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

BusinessWire: American Library Association Releases Preliminary Data on 2022 Book Bans (PRESS RELEASE). “Between January 1 and August 31, 2022, ALA documented 681 attempts to ban or restrict library resources, and 1,651 unique titles were targeted. In 2021, ALA reported 729 attempts to censor library resources, targeting 1,597 books, which represented the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling these lists more than 20 years ago.”

IANS: NASA, Google to help track air pollution at local level. “NASA and Google will develop advanced machine learning-based algorithms that link space data with Google Earth Engine data streams to generate high-resolution air quality maps in near real-time.” Good afternoon, Internet…

September 18, 2022 at 12:05AM
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Video Game Maps, Houston Air Quality, Banned Books Week, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, September 17, 2022

Video Game Maps, Houston Air Quality, Banned Books Week, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, September 17, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, from Lifehacker: Use This Site to Get a Deeper Look at Your Favorite Video Game Maps. “Part of what makes video games so darn fun is the pure exploration. Us 90s gamers remember how huge Ocarina of Time’s Hyrule Field felt for the first time, or how realistic Grand Theft Auto III’s Liberty City seemed. While these games are still just as fun to explore today, modern tech makes it possible to take that exploration a major step forward, by allowing you to fly through the entire map on your own time.”

KSAT: Website aims to make pollution permit information more accessible in Houston. “The new website, called AirMail and launched Tuesday, automatically assembles data from across [Texas Commission on Environmental Quality]’s labyrinthine website so that ordinary people and community groups can easily see where polluting projects are planned, file official comments and request public hearings.”

EVENTS

BusinessWire: American Library Association Highlights Increasing Censorship Attempts During Banned Books Week Programming (PRESS RELEASE). “Libraries nationwide will join the American Library Association to highlight increased censorship of books during this year’s Banned Books Week, taking place September 18-24, 2022. The American Library Association (ALA), Unite Against Banned Books (UABB) and the Banned Books Week Coalition are planning extensive programming during the week, bringing together authors, librarians and scholars to share perspectives on censorship.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ars Technica: Discord’s new feature looks a bit like Internet forums—with a dash of Reddit. “Discord announced a new feature on Wednesday called ‘Forum Channels’ to allow for more organized and asynchronous discussions within servers. The intent with Forum Channels seems to be to make it easier for specific conversations to continue for extended periods without the worry that a topic change or another simultaneous conversation will bury a subject in the annals of chat log history.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to See Deleted Reddit Posts. “When you’re browsing Reddit, finding a deleted post with tons of upvotes is annoying. A brief look at the thread title and your curiosity takes control, leading you into wondering how great it would be if you could just time travel to the past and see what the deleted thread was all about. Well, that’s not possible—only the time travel part. We’ll show you five different ways to view old, deleted Reddit posts and comments so you can satisfy your curious mind.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

WIRED: What Modern Humans Can Learn From Ancient Software. “Emulation reminds me to ask myself whether the computing experience is always getting better. I’m writing this in Google Docs so my editor’s little round avatar head can peek in and make sure I don’t miss my deadline for once, but I’d prefer to write it in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, which was the greatest word processor ever—a blank screen illuminated with only letters and numbers, offering just enough bold and italics to keep things interesting. I remember WP51 the way a non-nerd might remember a vintage Mustang. You could just take that thing out and go, man.”

UCLA: UCLA Library to expand global preservation work thanks to largest grant in its history. “UCLA Library has received the largest grant in its 139-year history: $13 million over eight years to digitize and make at-risk cultural heritage materials from the 20th and 21st centuries available online to the public.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: Tech Companies Ramp Up Efforts to Combat Online Extremism. “Several major tech companies on Thursday announced new policies and tools to combat online extremism on their sites as part of a White House effort focused on fighting hate-fueled violence.”

Florida State University: FSU Department of Computer Science receives $4.2M to boost nation’s cybersecurity workforce. “To help meet the growing demand for cybersecurity experts, the National Science Foundation’s CyberCorps Scholarship for Service program has awarded Florida State University a $4.2 million grant to support students pursuing careers in cybersecurity. This is the second round of funding the Department of Computer Science has received to operate this program.”

University of Maryland: UMD Researchers Create Unremovable Watermark to Secure Intellectual Property in Age of AI. “Watermarks of the future will be a way for organizations to claim authorship of digital models and systems they create, akin to a painter signing their name in the corner of a painting. Current methods, however, are vulnerable to savvy adversaries who know how to tweak the network parameters in a way that would go unnoticed, allowing them to claim a model as their own. That’s changing with the new watermark developed by the UMD team, which presented it at the International Conference on Machine Learning in July.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Nature: It takes a laboratory to avoid data loss. “Academia heaps most of the burden of documentation and data storage onto individuals, instead of the lab as a whole. At the same time, little, if any, instruction is provided to teach individuals how to properly document and store their data. But labs can mitigate data loss by implementing three simple suggestions.”

University of Chicago: Is a book hidden inside a decades-old piece of concrete? Scientists seek answers to art mystery. “The piece in question is called Betonbuch, or Concrete Book, and is the work of German-born artist Wolf Vostell. He was part of Fluxus, an international community of experimental creators that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, and was a pioneer of using concrete as a material for art, not just construction. In 1971, Vostell wrote a short book called Betonierungen, or Concretifications, and as evidence of his commitment to the material, he purportedly encased 100 copies of that book in numbered slabs of concrete.” Good morning, Internet…

September 17, 2022 at 05:25PM
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