New researches

Monday, October 17, 2022

Immigrants to Canada, Canadian Theater, Student Loan Forgiveness, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, October 17, 2022

Immigrants to Canada, Canadian Theater, Student Loan Forgiveness, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, October 17, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

University of Saskatchewan: Democratizing data: new interactive map empowers Canadians to access immigration data. “Let’s say you want to know how many asylum seekers came to Canada from Iran in 2020. Where do you go to find out? What if you want to apply for a grant to start an after school program in Lethbridge and you need to know how many 14-year-old refugee children live in the area? Now, you can click a mouse button and find the answers.”

Stir: CALTAC launches Canada’s first Latinx theatre-artist database . “The Canadian Latinx Theatre Artist Coalition (CALTAC), a Vancouver-based service organization dedicated to furthering the Canadian Latinx theatre experience, is set to launch the CALTAC Artist Database. The new public list collects the names of professional Latinx Theatre Artists who work across Canada.”

CBS News: Education Department launches beta site for student loan forgiveness applications. “The U.S. Department of Education on Friday launched a beta test of its student debt relief application website. About 95% of Americans with student debt are expected to qualify for loan forgiveness under the Biden administration’s plan. The beta site will be available ‘on and off’ until the full launch, which is expected at some point later this month, according to the Education Department.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bloomberg: NFT Bargain-Hunting Is In as Crypto Bust Craters Prices. “NFT sales plunged 67% sequentially in the third quarter as speculators and celebrities made an exodus, leaving the sector mostly to the dedicated long-term believers in the various potential use cases, and collectors betting that the plunge in prices will rekindle speculative demand.”

CNBC: Kanye West agrees to buy conservative social media platform Parler, company says. “Kanye West, the superstar rapper who has made several inflammatory and antisemitic comments in recent weeks, has agreed in principle to buy conservative social media platform Parler, the app’s parent company said in a statement Monday.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Smithsonian: Introducing the Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative. “Smithsonian Institution Archives, and now the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, have been working diligently for the past 7+ years to gather information, leverage existing resources, and demonstrate the need for holistic support for a new, pan-institutional initiative to care for and provide access to our audio, video, and film collections. I present to you now, the great unveiling of : The Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative (AVMPI)!”

Gizmodo Australia: Proton Drive vs Google Drive: How the Services Compare. “It’s worth saying right at the outset that we’re not expecting the just-out-of-beta Proton Drive to match up in every department to the 10-year-old Google Drive — but it might be useful, if you’re considering switching, to know about the various tools and features that are already available in the new challenger.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Jerusalem Post: TikTok bans Palestinian terror group Lions’ Den from platform. “Video-sharing platform TikTok has restricted the account of the new Palestinian terrorist group claiming responsibility for a host of recent attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians in the West Bank, the Lions’ Den. The group, which has yet to reveal its political affiliation to any Palestinian faction, has been using its social media platforms to share propaganda and increase support.”

NextGov: Malicious Emails Surged for Election Workers in 2 Battleground States Ahead of Primaries . “Research conducted by cybersecurity firm Trellix found that county election workers in Arizona and Pennsylvania saw an increase in phishing schemes ahead of their primary elections.”

Reuters: Exclusive-Scores of Google rivals want EU tech law used in antitrust case – letter. “More than 40 European rivals to Google’s shopping service urged EU antitrust regulators on Monday to use newly adopted tech rules to ensure the Alphabet unit complies with a 2017 EU order to allow more competition on its search page. The European Commission fined Google 2.4 billion euros ($2.33 billion) five years ago and told the firm to stop favouring its shopping service.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CogDogBlog: Open Your CC Image Search Eyes to Openverse. “The most surprising thing in responses was how few people, especially in education, even knew about Openverse. Here, just check out the ways different organizations provide guides to finding CC licensed images and how few of them mention Openverse (actually I did find some). It’s also something that bothers me that most resource guides become this laundry list of links, and do not provide as much guidance to search strategies… sometimes it seems like an overloaded list of options that would make most people new to this overwhelmed.”

Purdue University: As ransomware attacks increase, new algorithm may help prevent power blackouts. “No single power utility company has enough resources to protect the entire grid, but maybe all 3,000 of the grid’s utilities could fill in the most crucial security gaps if there were a map showing where to prioritize their security investments. Purdue University researchers have developed an algorithm to create that map.” Good morning, Internet…

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October 17, 2022 at 05:31PM
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Sunday, October 16, 2022

Thomas MacDonagh Museum, Ultimate Manhole Covers, Wolfram CloudConnector, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 16, 2022

Thomas MacDonagh Museum, Ultimate Manhole Covers, Wolfram CloudConnector, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 16, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Tipperary News: Tipperary museum digitises its collection and launches its new website. “The Thomas MacDonagh Museum in Cloughjordan will host a special event this Friday at 7.30pm to launch its Digital Memories Collection… The collection marks the conclusion of a significant six-month project undertaken by the museum directors to digitise 140 objects from the museum’s vast collection, and create a new website.”

New-to-me, from Israel 21c: The Tel Aviv man who’s documented 8,072 manhole covers. “Five years ago, [Eli] Zvuluny started a website, Ultimate Manhole Covers, that now contains images and details of 8,072 covers from 63 countries and 565 cities.”

USEFUL STUFF

Wolfram Blog: Wolfram CloudConnector: Excel’s Data Science Superpower. “Wolfram CloudConnector for Excel can transform Excel into a data science powerhouse by injecting Wolfram Language functions straight into your spreadsheets. It does this by providing a connection between Excel and Wolfram Language, extending the computational power of your spreadsheets.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

AZ Central: ‘A fuller picture of our history’: Spanish, cross-border Arizona newspapers to be online. “Spanish-language newspapers from the state’s border communities and newspapers published by and for Tucson’s Black community from the 1890s to the 1960s will be memorialized and accessible to residents across the state. Newspapers from the state’s mining and agricultural communities, including Bisbee’s Brewery Gulch Gazette, will also be included in the project.”

Jordan News Agency: $2.3M US-Funded Project Launched To Set Up Database For Jordan’s Moveable Cultural Artifacts . “The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and the American Center of Research (ACOR), on Thursday, launched a project to set up a database for Jordan’s first comprehensive and national inventory of moveable cultural artifacts with a value of about $2.3 million.”

WIRED: Dunkin’ Donuts Drama Is the Internet at Its Best. “In recent months, chains ranging from Subway to P. F. Chang’s have altered their loyalty programs. Amidst a recession when rising food costs are leading people to look for ways to save, the internet is a place for them to mobilize when their loyalty becomes less rewarded. It’s also no surprise that a lot of the chatter on the Dunkin’ subreddit involved people just trying to figure out how to get the most out of the new Rewards system.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

BBC: AI tools fail to reduce recruitment bias – study. “Artificially intelligent hiring tools do not reduce bias or improve diversity, researchers say in a study.”

Ars Technica: DeepMind breaks 50-year math record using AI; new record falls a week later. “Matrix multiplication is at the heart of many machine learning breakthroughs, and it just got faster—twice. Last week, DeepMind announced it discovered a more efficient way to perform matrix multiplication, conquering a 50-year-old record. This week, two Austrian researchers at Johannes Kepler University Linz claim they have bested that new record by one step.”

Arizona State University: ASU business professor says cyber adversaries will look to midterm elections to stir the pot with voters. “With the midterm elections just weeks away, the political vitriol and rhetoric are about to heat up. One Arizona State University professor thinks most of the hyperbolic chatter will come from malicious bots spreading racism and hate on social media and in the comments section on news sites.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Axios Tampa Bay: New tool identifies birds in your backyard. “After we wrote about migrating warblers back in August, the folks at Loggerhead Instruments in Sarasota sent us a new tool they’ve been perfecting that identifies the birds in your vicinity by their song — like Shazam for birds!” Good afternoon, Internet…

October 17, 2022 at 12:46AM
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Pancreatlas, Wiley eTextbooks, Firefox Relay, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, October 16, 2022

Pancreatlas, Wiley eTextbooks, Firefox Relay, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, October 16, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

EurekAlert: Pancreatic image bank expected to help advance diabetes research worldwide. “The University of Exeter and Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) teamed up to make high-resolution images of pancreatic tissue available in Pancreatlas, the world’s first on-line imaging database of human pancreatic tissue created and housed at VUMC.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Techdirt: Publisher Wiley Lets Libraries Offer eTextbooks Again… But Only For Nine Months. “Last week, we wrote about how publisher Wiley had removed 1,379 textbook titles from the list of books that academic libraries could lend out, thereby forcing students to have to buy the textbooks, rather than take them out of the library. As we noted, this was an example of how damaging copyright has been on the free flow of information…. Of course, after lots of people got mad about this removal, Wiley relented… but only for a little while. The statement is… kinda weak.”

Review Geek: Firefox Relay Now Offers Burner Phone Numbers to Curb Spam. “The Firefox Relay service, which allows you to mask your email address and curb spam, now offers virtual phone numbers. It’s a simple but effective idea; calls and texts made to your ‘fake’ phone number are screened for spam (using custom or automatic filters) before being forwarded to your phone.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Rolling Stone: ‘Fat Bear Week’ Hit By Voter-Fraud Attempt. “As far as the internet goes, Fat Bear Week is one of the most wholesome, innocent traditions on offer. It should be a trusted and transparent process, without nefarious manipulation. Which is why it came as such a blow to learn that during Sunday’s semifinal round between roly-poly bear 435 (nicknamed Holly) and airplane-sized bear 747, someone had attempted to game the results. Katmai National Park announced the attempted election fraud on Twitter.”

Translating Cuba: A Digital Archive in the Diaspora Will Preserve Cuban Cinema. “14ymedio, Havana, 11 October 2022 — Classics of Cuban exile cinema such as Conducta impropio [Improper Conduct] (1983), La ciudad perdida [The Lost City] (2005) and Plantados [Planted] (2021) will be collected on October 20 in the Archive of Cuban Diáspora Cinema, a project co-directed by academic Santiago Juan-Navarro and filmmaker Eliécer Jiménez-Almeida.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Toronto Star: Ottawa slams Google-backed survey criticizing Canada’s online news bill as an attempt to ‘avoid accountability’. “A national survey commissioned by Google painting Ottawa’s online news bill as flawed and a potential vehicle for misinformation has been slammed by the federal government as an attempt to ‘avoid accountability.'”

CBS News: Digital license plates are now legal in California. “The plates, which resemble tablets. connect to an app that offers registration renewal, vehicle location services and security features — such as reporting a vehicle stolen. They are the same shape and size as traditional license plates, and give users the option to change the plate’s background color by toggling between a light or dark mode. Motorists can also personalize a banner message on the plate.”

TechRadar: Google Translate is being hijacked by phishers to steal your data. “A new phishing campaign has been discovered impersonating Google Translate in order to trick victims. The campaign was spotted by cybersecurity researchers from Avanan, which found numerous phishing emails, some of which were written in Spanish.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Futurism: New AI Tool Turns Your Ugly Photos Into A Beautiful Selfie. “A new, AI-powered selfie generating tool… is making the rounds on social media, allowing users to create incredibly stylized, beautiful and handsome versions of their own faces by simply feeding the algorithm around five to ten previously taken selfies.”

Homeland Security Today: IARPA and U.S. Army Launch Research to Engineer Next Generation of Computers. “The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) — the research and development arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — and the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory announced the launch of a program to engineer innovative, new computer architecture designs that will help the Intelligence Community (IC) execute its increasingly critical data analysis missions.”

Newswise: New Algorithm Can Identify Images of Alcohol in Electronic Media; Potential Tool to Limit Online Exposure to Alcohol Marketing. “A new algorithm has been found to identify images of alcohol in electronic media with a high degree of accuracy. Possible applications for this algorithm include public health research to quantify exposure to images of alcohol and mobile or web applications to allow individuals to filter unwanted exposure to online alcohol advertising or alcohol-related content.” Good morning, Internet…

October 16, 2022 at 05:31PM
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Saturday, October 15, 2022

LGBTQ Washington DC, British Library Online Events, GMail, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 15, 2022

LGBTQ Washington DC, British Library Online Events, GMail, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 15, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

DCist: See A Trove Of Historic Documents From D.C.’s First Latino LGBTQ+ Advocacy Group. “As president of ENLACE, D.C.’s first known Latino LGBTQ advocacy group, in the 1980s, Letitia ‘Leti’ Gomez knew she was part of something historic. So she began saving all sorts of memorabilia: newspaper clippings, meeting agendas, fliers for dance parties — including a ‘Dance for the Dead’ — and a pricing sheet for a beach trip. Now, her collection, made up of nearly 500 primary source documents, is part of the Rainbow History Project at the DC History Center.”

EVENTS

British Library Digital Scholarship Blog: Open and Engaged 2022: Climate research in GLAM, digital infrastructure and skills to open collections. “As part of International Open Access Week, the British Library is delighted to host its annual Open and Engaged event online on 24 October, Monday from 13:00 to 16:30 BST. Since 2018 the British Library has organised the Open and Engaged Conference to coincide with International Open Access Week. In line with this year’s #OAWeek theme: Open for Climate Justice; Open and Engaged will address intersections between cultural heritage and climate research through use of collections, digital infrastructures and skills.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Google built a spam backdoor for Republicans — and they aren’t using it. “Google has launched a controversial program allowing campaign committees to effectively opt out of spam filters — a huge concession to mounting political pressure from Republicans. But Verge reporting shows the RNC has not taken advantage of the program and made few efforts to alter the core practices that might result in their emails being labeled as spam.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Salt Lake City Tribune: Did Weezer buy a billboard in Utah to thank a TikToker?. “There are now at least two stark, absurdist billboards related to the band Weezer in Utah, and we only know for sure how — and why — one of them exists.”

How-To Geek: What Happens if You Let a 4-Year-Old Use an AI Art Generator?. “That’s the amazing thing about the many AI image generators that are available now. Obviously, there are limits to what the AI can do, but you are basically free to enter anything and see what happens. It’s a playground for your imagination. I decided to let my 4-year-old have some fun in that playground.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: Gaming Is Booming. That’s Catnip for Cybercriminals.. “In recent months, cybersecurity firms have warned that cybercrime in gaming has increased substantially since the start of the pandemic, and that the vulnerabilities — for game studios as well as players — are far from being vanquished.”

Politico: Federal court records users could see $100 million in refunds. “The deal unveiled Tuesday calls for users who paid for federal court records between 2010 and 2018 to get up to $350 apiece, followed by additional payments if funds remain. The settlement is expected to be paid out of a Justice Department fund that covers such expenses in connection with suits against the U.S. Government.”

Euronews: Turkish MP smashes phone with hammer in furious speech over social media law. “Opposition politicians in Turkey expressed their fury at a law passed by Turkey’s parliament on Thursday which critics claim will further tighten press and social media freedoms in the country. In a surprising act of protest, opposition MP Burak Erbay smashed his mobile phone with a hammer during a speech to the National Assembly to denounce the bill which claims to combat fake news and ‘online disinformation’.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Associated Press: Poll: Most in US say misinformation spurs extremism, hate. “Overall, 91% of adults say the spread of misinformation is a problem, with 74% calling it a major problem. Only 8% say misinformation isn’t a problem at all.”

Bloomberg: Microsoft’s Army goggles left U.S. soldiers with nausea, headaches in test. “U.S. soldiers using Microsoft’s new goggles in their latest field test suffered ‘mission-affecting physical impairments’ including headaches, eyestrain and nausea, according to a summary of the exercise compiled by the Pentagon’s testing office.” Good afternoon, Internet…

October 16, 2022 at 12:24AM
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Opioid Industry Documents Archive, Google, WordPress, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, October 15, 2022

Opioid Industry Documents Archive, Google, WordPress, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, October 15, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

University of California San Francisco: New Industry Documents Highlight Role of Pharmacies in Driving Opioid Epidemic. “Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), have added new documents to the Opioid Industry Documents Archive that detail the role of retail pharmacies in the opioid overdose epidemic.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Blog: Helping you easily identify information sources in Search. “We’re adding site names to search results on mobile, so you can easily identify the website that’s associated with each result at a glance. We’re also updating the size and shape of the favicon (a website’s logo or icon) that appears in Search, to make it easier to see on the page.”

Search Engine Journal: WordPress 6.1 Is Jam-Packed With Performance Upgrades. “WordPress 6.1, arriving November 2022, is jam-packed with performance improvements, signaling that this may be the update that many have been waiting for.”

USEFUL STUFF

Boing Boing: This website uses AI to quickly generate summaries of YouTube video. “…a blissfully barebones website that takes a YouTube URL and, in seconds, spits out what appears to be a good summary of the content of the video.” I think it might have used up an API key or something because it’s throwing errors. Let me know if you get it to work.

How-To Geek: 13 Google Sheets Date and Time Functions You Need to Know. “When you use a spreadsheet for things where the timing is essential, you likely include dates and times. Google Sheets offers a collection of functions for formatting, converting, and calculating dates and times to help with your data entry.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Lifehacker: Redactle Is Like Wordle but for a Whole Wikipedia Page. “Wordle is tiny; Redactle is big. Where Wordle asks you to solve a single five-letter word, Redactle presents you with an entire blacked-out wikipedia page, and not a stub, either.”

Slashgear: Chrome’s Incognito Mode Is The Butt Of Jokes Among Google Employees, It Seems. “In a chat shared by Bloomberg, one Google engineer reportedly stated that the company needed to change both the spy guy icon and the incognito name because they were giving users the wrong impression.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: How a Microsoft blunder opened millions of PCs to potent malware attacks. “For almost two years, Microsoft officials botched a key Windows defense, an unexplained lapse that left customers open to a malware infection technique that has been especially effective in recent months.”

Sydney Morning Herald: Secret agents targeting drug cartels in Australia exposed in data hack. “A massive leak of classified documents from the Colombian government has exposed the identities and methods of secret agents working to stop international drug cartels from operating in Australia. More than five terabytes of data, including more than five million emails and tens of thousands of documents, were hacked and held in a password-protected database in August.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Harvard Business Review: The Challenges of Transforming Twitter. “[Elon] Musk’s specific goals for Twitter have been hard to pin down, but the problem of how to transform the strategy of a technology business is a familiar one. What Musk will need to overcome is not unlike the challenge faced by an outside executive joining a new company, a private equity firm on a new deal, or a general manager overseeing an acquired business unit on behalf of a conglomerate.”

CNET: You’ll Have to Pry the Thumbs-Up Emoji From My Cold, Dead, Ancient Hands. “Until this week, I viewed the thumbs-up emoji as, well, a simple thumbs-up emoji. Sometimes a thumbs-up emoji is just a thumbs-up emoji, Freud once said. Freud wasn’t on Slack.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Purdue University: Purdue team introduces advance in automatic forest mapping technology. “How lightning travels from the sky to the ground inspired the concept behind a new algorithmic approach to digitally separate individual trees from their forests in automatic forest mapping.” Good morning, Internet…

October 15, 2022 at 05:29PM
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Friday, October 14, 2022

Water Cycles, EJScreen, Twitter, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 14, 2022

Water Cycles, EJScreen, Twitter, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 14, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

USGS: New USGS diagram re-envisions how Earth’s most precious commodity cycles the planet. “Starting today, educators around the nation will have a more accurate and more comprehensive tool to explain the Earth’s water cycle with the unveiling of the new U.S. Geological Survey water cycle diagram.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

EPA: EPA Launches Updates to Environmental Justice Mapping Tool EJScreen. “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has updated and added new capabilities to EJScreen, the Agency’s public environmental justice (EJ) screening and mapping tool. EJScreen combines environmental and socioeconomic information to identify areas overburdened by pollution.”

Engadget: Twitter is testing a way for users to limit their mentions. “According to privacy researcher and engineer Jane Manchun Wong, the company is testing out the ability to block @ mentions entirely, or limit them to people who already follow you. (Literally, don’t @ me, bro.)”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

STV News: Controversial fracking site ‘renamed’ as ‘Liz Truss Career Memorial’. “A Blackpool fracking site was briefly renamed to take a jab at the Prime Minister earlier this week as it appeared as the ‘Liz Truss Career Memorial’ on Google Maps.”

Washington Post: How TikTok ate the internet. “More than just a hit, TikTok has blown up the model of what a social network can be. Silicon Valley taught the world a style of online connectivity built on hand-chosen interests and friendships. TikTok doesn’t care about those. Instead, it unravels for viewers an endless line of videos selected by its algorithm, then learns a viewer’s tastes with every second they watch, pause or scroll. You don’t tell TikTok what you want to see. It tells you. And the internet can’t get enough.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project: Elliptic: Over $4 Billion in Illicit Crypto Laundered via Cross-Chain Technologies. “Criminals have laundered at least US$4 billion-worth of illicit crypto proceeds using cross-chain technologies since 2020, new research by blockchain analysis firm Elliptic reveals.”

CNET: Mormon Church Data Breach Exposed Members’ Personal Information. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the target of a cyberattack earlier this year that exposed the personal information of some members and associates, the church said Thursday.”

Krebs on Security: Microsoft Patch Tuesday, October 2022 Edition. “Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 85 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related software, including a new zero-day vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows that is being actively exploited. However, noticeably absent from this month’s Patch Tuesday are any updates to address a pair of zero-day flaws being exploited this past month in Microsoft Exchange Server.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Penn State: AI language models show bias against people with disabilities, study finds . “The researchers found that all the algorithms and models they tested contained significant implicit bias against people with disabilities. Previous research on pretrained language models — which are trained on large amounts of data that may contain implicit biases — has found sociodemographic biases against genders and races, but until now similar biases against people with disabilities have not been widely explored.”

Yale School of Nursing: Ramos Explores How A Virtual Environment Can Produce Cardiovascular Health Gains IRL. “Using mixed methods, Dr. Ramos will conduct qualitative interviews and then test if the virtual environment is acceptable as prevention education. Using the American Heart Association’s Life Simple 7 Framework, Dr. [S. Raquel] Ramos is embedding information into the virtual environment to address issues, such as nutrition, physical activity, sleep, and nicotine exposure.” Good afternoon, Internet…

October 15, 2022 at 12:17AM
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Spider Silk, Resistant Bacteria, South Africa Languages, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, October 14, 2022

Spider Silk, Resistant Bacteria, South Africa Languages, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, October 14, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

UNSW Sydney: World wide web: global spider silk database a boon for biomaterials. “What’s stronger and tougher than steel, and more elastic than rubber, weight for weight? Spider silk is, and this incredibly versatile material could transform engineering, materials science and even medicine – if we could just work out how to produce it. Now a new global study that has catalogued web silk properties of almost 1100 spiders hopes to provide a launchpad for the design of future biomaterials that emulate this wonder of nature.”

EurekAlert: Researchers build a ‘Wikipedia’ for resistant bacteria. “In the future, even a small infection can become life-threatening for people if disease-causing bacteria become resistant to traditional treatment with antibiotics. Based on 214,000 microbiome samples, DTU researchers have created a freely accessible platform that shows where in the world different types of resistant bacteria are found and in what quantities.”

North-West University: Spelling checker tool for SA languages now available to download for free. “The Spelling Checkers for South African Languages, a spelling and hyphenation checker tool for ten of South Africa’s official languages, excluding English, is now available to download for free from the website of the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR).”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Journal: Goodbye Google Webmaster Guidelines, Hello Google Search Essentials. “Google is officially rebranding the Webmaster Guidelines as ‘Search Essentials,’ which comes with a simplified refresh consisting of only three sections. In addition to making the former Google Webmaster Guidelines easier to understand, Google’s motivation behind the refresh is to move away from the term ‘webmaster.'” Good. I’ve always hated that term and tried to use “Web wrangler”.

9to5 Google: Google Fiber launching 5 and 8 Gig service in early 2023 from $125/month. “Google Fiber will offer symmetrical upload and download speeds at 5 and 8 Gig. The 5 Gig plan will cost $125 per month, while it is $150/month for 8 Gig. It will come with a Wi-Fi 6 router (people can also use their own), up to two mesh extenders, and professional installation.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Smithsonian Magazine: The Smithsonian Returns a Trove of Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. “In a joint ceremony today, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art (NMAfA) collectively transferred ownership of 30 Benin bronzes, 29 of which come from the Smithsonian, to the people of Nigeria. Of the 29 items, 20 will be returned to Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) and nine will remain, loaned to the NMAfA for later display.”

Washington Post: With U.S. nudges, Google and others aim to help Iranian protesters. “… the White House has relaxed sanctions and made it clear to other tech companies that they want them to serve those in Iran that are not connected to the government.”

ABC News: China quashes social media about protest banners in Beijing. “China’s internet censors moved quickly to scrub social media posts Thursday after reports that banners criticizing the Communist leadership were hung from a busy intersection in the capital Beijing.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Sky News: Elon Musk being investigated by federal authorities, Twitter reveals in court filing. “Elon Musk is being investigated by federal authorities over his conduct in his $44bn (£39bn) takeover deal of Twitter, the social media company has said in a court filing.”

Reuters: Exclusive-Google Faces EU Antitrust Charges Over Its Adtech Business – Sources. “Alphabet unit Google could face EU antitrust charges next year over its digital advertising business, putting the company at risk of its fourth fine in the EU of more than a billion euros, people familiar with the matter said on Thursday.”

Houston Chronicle: St. Luke’s Health record system is still offline a week after ransomware attack at parent company. “A cyber attack against a major U.S. nonprofit health system has snarled patient services for more than a week at six St. Luke’s Health hospitals in Houston, where online records systems have been shut down and doctors have resorted to cumbersome backup options.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

NPR: Eyeballs and AI power the research into how falsehoods travel online. “What sorts of lies and falsehoods are circulating on the internet? Taylor Agajanian used her summer job to help answer this question, one post at a time. It often gets squishy.” Good morning, Internet…

October 14, 2022 at 05:26PM
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