Tuesday, September 20, 2022

LGBTQ Eastern Europe, Global Registry of Fossil Fuels, Jazz Backstory, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, September 20, 2022

LGBTQ Eastern Europe, Global Registry of Fossil Fuels, Jazz Backstory, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, September 20, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation: IPLC Launches the LGBTQ+ Communities of the Former Soviet Union & Eastern Europe Web Archive. “The collection archives a broad range of websites maintained by and for the benefit of LGBTQ+ communities in the independent countries of the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. These websites document news, events, and issues within these diverse communities, and often provide helpful information about where to seek health, legal, and other assistance in their countries of origin.”

ABC News: First public global database of fossil fuels launches. “A first-of-its-kind database for tracking the world’s fossil fuel production, reserves and emissions launches on Monday to coincide with climate talks taking place at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The Global Registry of Fossil Fuels includes data from over 50,000 oil, gas and coal fields in 89 countries. That covers 75% of global reserves, production and emissions, and is available for public use, a first for a collection of this size.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Oneida Daily Dispatch: Hamilton College releases new ‘Jazz Backstory’ podcast. “Hamilton College Jazz Archive Director Monk Rowe has helped collect over 400 video and audio recordings of jazz greats, their band members, critics, writers, and composers who tell their personal histories in the world of jazz for the Hamilton College Jazz Archive. Rowe, who conducted the majority of these original interviews, combed through the interviews to focus on topics inherent to the creative life – inspiration, improvisation, training, back-stage dramas and touring challenges. The result was his creation of a new podcast series.”

Rolling Stone: Trump’s Social Media Company Is Trying to Hide Its Struggles From the Public. “Like Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms, Truth Social used to allow users to endlessly scroll through an account’s followers and the accounts who amplified or engaged with its posts. That data is helpful in assessing the site’s overall health and legitimate growth rate. But now, Truth Social is guarding access to that information more closely.”

USEFUL STUFF

Boing Boing: Scream your grievances into the void, online. “Simply type out what you need to get off your chest and click the ‘scream’ button. Repeat as many times as necessary. You’ll hear someone let out a blood-curdling scream as your text disappears into the void.”

WIRED: How to Create an Augmented Reality Filter for TikTok. “From Paris to Dubai, I spoke with designers around the world about the process of creating AR effects for social media.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

TechCrunch: Google cancels half the projects at its internal R&D group Area 120. “Google CEO Sundar Pichai, speaking at the Code Conference last week, suggested the tech company needed to become 20% more efficient — a comment some in the industry took to mean headcount reductions could soon be on the table. Now, it seems that prediction may be coming true. TechCrunch has learned, and Google confirmed, the company is slashing projects at its in-house R&D division known as Area 120.”

The Straits Times: NLB to launch new website for submission of heritage material in digital formats . “The National Library Board (NLB) will be expanding its Citizen Archivist project next year with the launch of a new website that will allow people to submit materials about Singapore in digital formats such as images and videos.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: At eBay, Lurid Crimes and the Search for Punishment. “‘If you are ever going to take her down .. now is the time.’ Devin Wenig, the chief executive of the e-commerce company eBay, texted those words to a deputy one summer afternoon three years ago. He was upset about a story he had just read. Within days, the writer who was the subject of Mr. Wenig’s wrath and her husband were inundated with offensive material, including live cockroaches and spiders, a funeral wreath, a Halloween mask of a bloody pig face and a manual on surviving the death of a spouse.”

Android Police: Microsoft Teams deemed unsafe to use by security researchers. “Microsoft’s workplace-oriented messaging app, Teams, has gone through a number of controversies that you wouldn’t expect other chat apps to deal with, including last year when the Android app was considered responsible for breaking the ability to place 911 calls on devices last year. Well, the Teams app — not the Android one this time, at least — is in the news again and it’s not for the right reasons.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Stanford Medicine: Training physicians and algorithms in dermatology diversity. “There’s a long-standing challenge in dermatology: Textbooks, databases, journals and lectures are largely bereft of images that feature darker skin. Their absence can cause gaps in clinical expertise and in diagnosis, as symptoms of a disease don’t necessarily appear the same on all skin tones. Physicians trained to identify signs of illness on lighter shades can overlook them in people with a darker complexion, and algorithms trained on a sea of beige pictures may miss signs of disease when evaluating images from a patient with brown skin.”

The Conversation: From curry nights to ‘coal kills’ dresses: how social media drives politicians to behave like influencers. “Why do politicians often post content that seems awkward, outrageous or strange? The answer could be an appeal to authenticity – something that has become a valuable currency in the world of politicians, influencers and social media.” Good morning, Internet…

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September 20, 2022 at 05:28PM
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Monday, September 19, 2022

Black Wealth Data Center, Zymology Datasets, Snapchat, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 19, 2022

Black Wealth Data Center, Zymology Datasets, Snapchat, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 19, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Route Fifty: New Data Resource Focuses on Racial Wealth Gap. “A tool launched by Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Greenwood Initiative Thursday aims to provide better access to data about racial wealth inequities in the United States. With interactive maps and graphs, the Black Wealth Data Center, or BWDC, allows users to compare data across race, sex, education and location and explore topics including employment, homeownership, assets and debt.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Wolfram Blog: Cheers! A Computational Exploration of Alcoholic Beverages with the Wolfram Language . “The science of fermentation—known as zymology (or zymurgy)—is a fascinating blend of chemistry, biology, history and geography. The Wolfram Language now brings a new dimension to the study of alcoholic beverages through an extensive dataset ready to be explored and analyzed.”

Engadget: Snapchat for Web is now available for everyone. “Snapchat’s messaging and video chat features first made their way to browsers back in July, but only in select markets and for Snapchat+ subscribers. Now, Snapchat for Web is finally available for all the messaging app’s users worldwide. It could be the better choice for users who have a lot of typing to do and messages to send, since they’ll be looking at a bigger screen and have access to a real keyboard.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: How LinkedIn Became a Place to Overshare. “Since the start of the pandemic, as office workers missed in-person interactions with colleagues, many people turned to LinkedIn to help make up for what they had lost. They started talking about more than just work. The boundaries between office and home lives became blurrier than ever. As personal circumstances bled into workdays, people felt emboldened to share with their professional peers — and found interested audiences both in and beyond their networks.”

New Yorker: The Search for Dirt on the Twitter Whistle-Blower. “The dozens of e-mails and LinkedIn messages received by people in Zatko’s professional orbit appeared to be mostly from research-and-advisory companies, part of a burgeoning industry whose clients include investment firms and individuals jockeying for financial advantage through information.”

CNN: Extreme California heat knocks key Twitter data center offline. “Extreme heat in California has left Twitter without one of its key data centers, and a company executive warned in an internal memo obtained by CNN that another outage elsewhere could result in the service going dark for some of its users.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NBC News: Satanic panic is making a comeback, fueled by QAnon believers and GOP influencers. “While the current obsession with Satan was boosted in part by the QAnon community, partisan media and conservative politicians have been instrumental in spreading newfound fears over the so-called ritualistic abuse of children that the devil supposedly inspires, sometimes weaving the allegations together with other culture war issues such as LGBTQ rights. Those fears are powering fresh accusations of ritual abuse online, which are amplified on social media and by partisan media, and can mobilize mobs to seek vigilante justice.”

Tubefilter: YouTube’s Chief Product Officer testified before Congress. Then he announced a new approach to extremist content.. “Neal Mohan has had a busy week. On Wednesday, YouTube‘s Chief Product Officer was one of the tech execs who was called to testify before Congress. A day later, after attending a White House summit, he took to Twitter to announce an updated content moderation policy that aims to curb violent extremist content — even when that content is not affiliated with a known terrorist organization.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Mike Shouts: Metaphysic Pulled Off Deepfake Elvis Performance At America’s Got Talent. “I am sure most of us are familiar with what deepfake is by now but what some of us may not know is that deepfaking has gone real-time. At the season finale of the seventeenth season of America’s Got Talent, Metaphysic, a tech company that uses AI to create hyperreal content, pulled an incredible ‘real-time deepfake’ onstage.”

York University: Study: Even smartest AI models don’t match human visual processing. “Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) don’t see objects the way humans do – using configural shape perception – and that could be dangerous in real-world AI applications, says Professor James Elder, co-author of a York University study published today.” 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 20, 2022 at 12:30AM
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Facebook Roundup, September 19, 2022

Facebook Roundup, September 19, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ars Technica: Facebook reverses permanent ban on Holocaust movie after outcry. “Facebook moderators told Newton that his film was banned because the company’s ad policy restricts content that ‘includes direct or indirect assertions or implications about a person’s race.’ Because Newton’s movie in the US is titled Beautiful Blue Eyes, Facebook moderators banned its promotion in Facebook ads, seemingly reading the title as hinting at race.” Sometimes in the course of doing ResearchBuzz I end up yelling at the monitor. This is one of those times.

Wall Street Journal: Instagram Stumbles in Push to Mimic TikTok, Internal Documents Show. “The document, titled ‘Creators x Reels State of the Union 2022,’ was published internally in August. It said that Reels engagement had been falling—down 13.6% over the previous four weeks—and that ‘most Reels users have no engagement whatsoever.’ One reason is that Instagram has struggled to recruit people to make content. Roughly 11 million creators are on the platform in the U.S., but only about 2.3 million of them, or 20.7%, post on that platform each month, the document said.”

CNET: Facebook Shutters Its Community-Connecting Nextdoor Clone. “Meta is winding down its Nextdoor-like Facebook expansion Neighborhoods, which sought to connect users who lived near each other, but never exited the testing phase.”

NBC News: FBI responds to Mark Zuckerberg claims in Joe Rogan show . “The day after Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook limited a polarizing story ahead of the 2020 election because of an FBI warning, the federal agency said it can only alert a private entity of a potential threat, not require it to take action.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Axios: Scoop: Meta merging content moderation teams for ads and user posts. “Meta is merging its business integrity unit, the team that moderates ad content, with its central integrity team, which moderates users’ posts, according to an internal memo obtained by Axios.”

ProPublica: Real Money, Fake Musicians: Inside a Million-Dollar Instagram Verification Scheme. “A jeweler. A plastic surgeon. An OnlyFans Model. They and others received a blue check in likely the biggest Instagram verification scheme revealed to date. After ProPublica started asking questions, Meta removed badges from over 300 accounts.”

TechCrunch: Meta just erased a Proud Boys network stealthily organizing on Facebook and Instagram. “Meta disclosed Thursday that it recently removed a network of activity affiliated with the violent extremist group after it detected members making inroads back onto Facebook and Instagram. The company says it removed around 480 Proud Boys accounts, pages, groups and events through a strategy it calls ‘strategic network disruption’ — basically neutralizing a network of activity linked to a banned group in a targeted, simultaneous sweep.”

CNET: Facebook Parent Meta Shares Details About Newsworthy Posts It Leaves Up . “Facebook parent company Meta said that from June 2021 to June 2022 it made 68 ‘newsworthiness allowances’ for pieces of content that might violate its rules. It’s the first time Meta has revealed how many times it’s applied an exemption under which it leaves up newsworthy content that could break its rules.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

International Business Times: Irish Data Watchdog Fines Instagram 405 Mn Euros Over Children. “Ireland’s Data Protection Commission on Monday said it had fined Instagram a record 405 million euros ($402 million) for breaching regulations on the handling of children’s data…. The DPC launched an investigation in late 2020 into concerns about how the image-sharing social media platform handles children’s personal data.”

Washington Post: Washington state judge rules Facebook violated campaign finance rules. “A Washington state judge ruled Friday that Facebook repeatedly violated campaign finance rules requiring platforms to release information about political advertisers on their sites.”

CNET: Facebook Parent Meta to Settle Cambridge Analytica Lawsuit. “Facebook parent company Meta has agreed to settle a privacy lawsuit tied to 2018’s headline-grabbing Cambridge Analytica scandal, according to court papers filed Friday. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, ex-Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and current COO Javier Olivan had been scheduled to provide testimony in the case sometime during the next month.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Schneier on Security: Facebook Has No Idea What Data It Has. “Facebook’s stonewalling has been revealing on its own, providing variations on the same theme: It has amassed so much data on so many billions of people and organized it so confusingly that full transparency is impossible on a technical level.”

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 19, 2022 at 10:00PM
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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.”

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 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…

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 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…

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September 19, 2022 at 12:54AM
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