Cryptocurrency, Telegram, Optimizing GIFs, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, December 2, 2022

Cryptocurrency, Telegram, Optimizing GIFs, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, December 2, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Yahoo Finance: Kraken laying off 30% of workforce as FTX fallout continues to rock crypto industry. “Crypto exchange Kraken, the second largest in the U.S., is laying off 1,100 employees, or 30 percent of its workforce, its co-founder Jesse Powell said in a statement on Wednesday.”

CoinDesk: Telegram CEO Durov Plans to Build Crypto Wallets, Decentralized Exchange. “Bolstered by Fragment’s strong sales, [Pavel] Durov is setting Telegram on a course for deeper crypto buildouts. He said the company will build a decentralized exchange and non-custodial wallets that could reach millions of users. Telegram is already a go-to messaging app for many crypto traders, giving it a captive audience from the start.”

USEFUL STUFF

Hongkiat: 9 Best Tools to Optimize Animated GIFs. “Animated GIFs are interesting and all, but the time taken to load the are not. Because they consist of frames of animations, they are usually big in terms of file size. This means it is a pain to load web pages, especially if you have many of them. But the good news is, Animated GIFs can be optimized. In other words, their file size can be shrunk without compromising the image quality.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Ars Technica: Musk won’t relaunch Twitter Blue until he finds a way to avoid Apple fees. “Twitter CEO Elon Musk was planning to bring back Twitter Blue this week, but then he got frustrated with Apple, and now nobody knows when the subscription service will relaunch. But it seems Musk has decided that when Twitter Blue—initially exclusively offered to iPhone and iPad users—comes back, the service will likely not be available for purchase in the Apple App Store.”

New York Times: A Lasting Legacy of Covid: Far-Right Platforms Spreading Health Myths. “Not long after Randy Watt died of Covid-19, his daughter Danielle sat down at her computer, searching for clues as to why the smart and thoughtful man she knew had refused to get vaccinated. She pulled up Google, typed in a screen name he had used in the past and discovered a secret that stunned her.”

CNET: Interactive Google Doodle Game Celebrates Video Game Pioneer Jerry Lawson . “Known as the ‘father of the video game cartridge,’ Lawson led the team that would create a system that paved the way for several popular video game consoles.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NPR: Twitter’s chaos could make political violence worse outside of the U.S.. “Under the chaotic changes unleashed by Elon Musk, Twitter users in the U.S. are confronting problems that have long plagued the social network in other parts of the world – and which are at risk of getting even worse under its new billionaire owner, according to human rights and freedom of expression advocates.”

New Yorker: A Hacked Newsroom Brings a Spyware Maker to U.S. Court. “[Roman] Gressier is one of at least thirty-five journalists and civil-society members hacked with Pegasus in El Salvador between July, 2020, and November, 2021, according to the analysis by Citizen Lab, which was verified by Amnesty International. The hacking campaign comprised at least two hundred and sixty Pegasus attacks.”

City A.M.: Google sued by 130,000 firms over ad dominance. “Google has been sued in a claim by 130,000 firms that argue its advertising strategy has cost them billions of pounds in lost revenues. The competition claim valued at up to £13.6bn at the Competition Appeal Tribunal accuses Google and its parent firm Alphabet of abusing its dominant position in online advertising and ‘earning super-profits for itself at the expense of the tens of thousands of publishers of websites and mobiles apps in the UK’.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Gizmodo: Disney Made a Movie Quality AI Tool That Automatically Makes Actors Look Younger (or Older). “Further demonstrating the power of artificial intelligence when it comes to photorealistically altering footage, researchers from Disney have revealed a new aging/de-aging tool that can make an actor look convincingly older or younger, without the need for weeks of complex and expensive visual effects work.”

Harvard Gazette: How demagogues wield social media. “One of the many factors contributing to increased polarization and the global weakening of democracies over the past decade is how effective populist demagogues are at using social media, according to a cognitive scientist who studies online misinformation.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Boing Boing: Import your old Sim Cities into Minecraft. “Got some old Sim City 2000 cities lying around? Import them to Minecraft with Mine City 2000, an astonishingly precise converter made by jgosar.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 2, 2022 at 06:28PM
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1921 Scottish Census, LGBTQ+ STEM Professionals, Tails 5.7, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 1, 2022

1921 Scottish Census, LGBTQ+ STEM Professionals, Tails 5.7, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 1, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The National (Scotland): 1921 Scottish Census: Who will you find in the archive?. “THE 1921 census has officially been released by National Records of Scotland – and will provide a glimpse into the home and working lives of Scotland’s people 100 years ago. Family-history website ScotlandsPeople has been updated to include over 9000 volumes of enumeration district books, comprising more than 200,000 images of 4.8 million individual records.”

PR Newswire: The It Gets Better Project Premieres New Web-Series Highlighting LGBTQ+ Professionals In Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Industries (PRESS RELEASE). “Today, the It Gets Better Project premiered a new original web-series called Industry, which takes a closer look at LGBTQ+ STEM professionals and the experiences that led them to careers within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

9to5 Linux: Debian-Based Tails 5.7 Anonymous OS Adds New Metadata Cleaner Tool, Latest Tor Updates. “Privacy-focused and Debian-based Tails 5.7 amnesic live system is now available for download with various enhancements, new tools, updated components, and bug fixes.”

Honolulu Civil Beat: Chad Blair: The Hawaii Legislature’s New And (Mostly) Improved Website. “I took the revamped site, which was updated Nov. 14, for a test spin this week. My general evaluation is that it will be a very user-friendly experience for most — once they get used to the new layout, and once legislative coders complete their work. It’s sort of like an upgrade to your smart phone: a little irritating at first but then you settle in.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Indy Week: Volunteers Search for Racism Written into Durham Land Deeds. “‘[T]he lot hereby conveyed shall not be sold, transferred, conveyed, leased, or rented to persons of negro blood.’ That’s language taken from a 1932 deed for land in Duke Forest. Here’s another, from a plot off of Cole Mill Road: ‘No person of any race other than the white race shall use or occupy any building on above lot.’ These are racial covenants—racist restrictions written into legally binding land deeds.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNN: China to punish internet users for ‘liking’ posts in crackdown after zero-Covid protests. “Internet users in China will soon be held liable for liking posts deemed illegal or harmful, sparking fears that the world’s second largest economy plans to control social media like never before.”

El País: Cybercriminals take advantage of Twitter chaos to step up phishing campaigns. “According to the US cybersecurity company Proofpoint, its researchers have observed a considerable increase in phishing campaigns. Specifically, the company said, cybercriminals are using account verification and the new Twitter Blue product as lures to steal Twitter credentials.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CNET: Internet Outages Could Spread as Temperatures Rise. Here’s What Big Tech Is Doing. “Early in September, when temperatures spiked to 116 degrees Fahrenheit and broke a 100-year record in Sacramento, California, the government told people to stay indoors as much as possible and to stay cool. That’s when people turning to Twitter to vent their grievances, but it turns out that their social media access could have melted down along with everything else. The extreme heat led to a shutdown of Twitter’s entire data center region, CNN reported.”

WIRED: Effective Altruism Is Pushing a Dangerous Brand of ‘AI Safety’. “THROUGHOUT MY TWO decades in Silicon Valley, I have seen effective altruism (EA)—a movement consisting of an overwhelmingly white male group based largely out of Oxford University and Silicon Valley—gain alarming levels of influence. EA is currently being scrutinized due to its association with Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto scandal, but less has been written about how the ideology is now driving the research agenda in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), creating a race to proliferate harmful systems, ironically in the name of ‘AI safety.'” I don’t remember hearing about EA until the FTX collapse. It’s horrifying. Good afternoon, Internet…

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December 2, 2022 at 01:13AM
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Washington Climate Change, Afro-Canadian Dance History, Twitter, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, December 1, 2022

Washington Climate Change, Afro-Canadian Dance History, Twitter, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, December 1, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Washington State Department of Health: DOH unveils free teacher resources to bring public health and climate change data into the classroom. “In an effort to engage students with local health and climate data, DOH is unveiling a free professional development course for teachers that uses DOH tools and data to explore the connections between asthma and wildfires, which are one of the most obvious impacts of climate change on Washington state.”

University of Toronto: Researcher’s archival exhibition spotlights 70 years of Black performance history in Canada . “An exhibit curated by Seika Boye, a researcher at the University of Toronto, is preserving seven decades-worth of Black dance performance history in Canada. ‘It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900-1970 and Now’ is an archival exhibition that highlights the undocumented history of Black dance performance in Canada from the time period.”

PR Newswire: New MIT Sloan research measures exposure to misinformation from political elites on Twitter (PRESS RELEASE). “Those tools, which [David] Rand and [Mohsen] Mosleh have made public via a web app that allows people to check the misinformation exposure rating and ideological bias of any Twitter user and an API for researchers, show that users who follow political elites with high falsity scores are more likely to share misinformation. They also reveal a clear partisan difference in exposure to politicians who make false claims.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNN: Twitter is no longer enforcing its Covid misinformation policy. “Twitter said it will no longer enforce its longstanding Covid misinformation policy, yet another sign of how Elon Musk plans to transform the social media company he bought a month ago.”

How-To Geek: What’s New in Chrome 108, Available Now. “The end of another month means it’s time for a new Chrome release. Google Chrome 108 was released on November 29, 2022. This version includes an Energy Saver mode, better support for high-res emoji, and adjustments to how webpages look under virtual keyboards.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Colorize Black and White Photos: 5 Free Tools. “Colorizing photos used to require highly specialized Photoshop skills, but nowadays, you can easily do it with a click of a button. There are plenty of free tools for adding color to black and white photos and thanks to the help of AI, the results are stunning. So get your cherished family photos ready and have fun bringing history to life!”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

L’officiel: Art Memes: How the Message Satirizes the Medium. “Whether it’s an image macro, a video clip, or turn of phrase, the meme plays by no one’s rules—and certainly not the establishment’s. There’s plenty of marketing department TikTok propaganda, of course, but the good stuff is organically formed: funny and subversive, often contextually inappropriate and anti-aesthetic simply by nature.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Musk faces fines if Twitter’s gutted child safety team becomes overwhelmed . “Three people familiar with Twitter’s current staffing told Bloomberg that when 2022 started, Twitter had 20 team members responsible for reviewing and escalating reports of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM). Today, after layoffs and resignations, there are fewer than 10 specialists forming what Bloomberg described as ‘an overwhelmed skeleton crew.'”

WIRED: A Peek Inside the FBI’s Unprecedented January 6 Geofence Dragnet. “THE FBI’S BIGGEST-EVER investigation included the biggest-ever haul of phones from controversial geofence warrants, court records show. A filing in the case of one of the January 6 suspects, David Rhine, shows that Google initially identified 5,723 devices as being in or near the US Capitol during the riot. Only around 900 people have so far been charged with offenses relating to the siege.”

Road and Track: New Florida Law Turns Social Media Into Evidence Against Street Racers and Takeovers. “A new Florida law that went into effect on October 1 now allows the arrest of street racers and sideshow and takeover participants based on social media posts. Post a TikTok of yourself doing donuts in your Charger in Tampa and the cops can now come nab you for the offense.

RESEARCH & OPINION

Montclair State University: Study: Use of ‘Groomer’ Hate Speech Increased on Twitter After Colorado Springs Nightclub Shooting . “A new study by the Joetta Di Bella and Fred C. Sautter III Center for Strategic Communication in the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University points to what hate speech on Twitter could look like following Elon Musk’s offer of ‘general amnesty’ to suspended accounts on the platform. Specifically, the study showed a dramatic spike in the use of the term ‘grooming’ (a slur used against the LGBTQ+ community) on Twitter in the period after the shooting at an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on November 19-20.”

CoinTelegraph: Crypto fund investment still dominated by the United States: Database. “82.4% of all crypto funds come from ten countries, led by the United States with 419 funds. A distant second is the United Kingdom with 51 funds, followed by China at 46.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 1, 2022 at 06:29PM
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NYC Street Design Manual, Predicting Material Properties, Word of The Year, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, November 30, 2022

NYC Street Design Manual, Predicting Material Properties, Word of The Year, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, November 30, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

New York City: DOT and Fordham University to Open Exhibition Celebrating NYC’s Street Design Manual. “… the SDM has helped reimagine New York City’s street network from one designed primarily for automobiles into one that supports a greater diversity of safe and convenient travel modes and activities – including with an increased focus on pedestrians and cyclists. First published in 2009, the third edition of the SDM is for the first time available entirely online.”

UC San Diego: Nanoengineers Develop a Predictive Database for Materials. “Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering have developed an AI algorithm that predicts the structure and dynamic properties of any material—whether existing or new—almost instantaneously. Known as M3GNet, the algorithm was used to develop… a database of more than 31 million yet-to-be-synthesized materials with properties predicted by machine learning algorithms.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year Is as Grim as You’d Expect. “Lookups for gaslighting increased by 1,740% for 2022, with ‘high interest’ throughout the year, according to Merriam-Webster. In this age of conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls and deepfakes, it isn’t surprising gaslighting topped the list.”

USEFUL STUFF

The Distant Librarian: Clipchamp – a VERY cool screencasting option!. “The other day, Lifehacker posted that Windows Has a New Tool for Simultaneously Recording Your Screen and Webcam. That tool is Clipchamp, and I am impressed! Oh, and it’s free.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The New Stack: Lighting a Bonfire Under Social Media: Devs and ActivityPub. “As developers begin to shift away from post-Musk Twitter and contemplate building apps on federated social media protocols, many are asking themselves: what can I do with ActivityPub, the key open protocol of the fediverse?” This raised my understanding of ActivityPub from “nonexistent” to “abysmal” which is a great step up, because with abysmal I know enough vocabulary for research.

Screen Rant: Tumblr Users Made Up Fake Scorsese Movie Goncharov & It’s Almost Convincing. “Tumblr users have concocted a fake movie by Martin Scorsese, called Goncharov, and it’s remarkably, eerily convincing. Scorsese is the maestro of crime thrillers like Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and The Irishman. His next project is the eagerly anticipated Killers of the Flower Moon, which stars frequent Scorsese collaborators Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: New ransomware encrypts files, then steals your Discord account. “The new ‘AXLocker’ ransomware family is not only encrypting victims’ files and demanding a ransom payment but also stealing the Discord accounts of infected users.”

Global Voices: In Turkey, social media platforms become complicit in censoring media and freedom of speech . “Twitter unveiled a tool that allows it to censor content on a country basis in 2010. At the time, the platform may not have completely envisaged how its tool could be abused by a number of increasingly authoritarian countries where social media platforms have been targeted by the authorities in the face of growing crackdowns and censorship. In fact, one of the Turkish government’s tactics to silence users on the internet and deny them their right to access information, is submitting requests to Twitter and other platforms to withhold content deemed in violation of its local laws.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Phys .org: Social media can be a lifesaver for new international ventures. “The use of social media can be beneficial to international new ventures and help them to survive. A new study from the University of Vaasa, Finland, shows that newly established international firms and start-ups with limited resources can effectively use social media to learn about their new foreign markets and customers in a fast and inexpensive way.”

Techdirt: ‘Publication Laundering’: How Publishers Happily Accept Fake And Nonsense Conference Papers In The Pursuit Of Profits. “Profit margins are extremely high for top publishers — typically 30-40%. And yet academics are routinely forbidden from sharing their own papers, because they are pressured to assign copyright in them to the publisher, which uses the control that affords to block wider access to knowledge. An eye-opening post by James Heathers on Medium reveals that the greed and rot in the world of academic publishing goes even deeper.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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December 1, 2022 at 02:01AM
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Harriet Tubman House, New Metric Prefixes, Twitter, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, November 30, 2022

Harriet Tubman House, New Metric Prefixes, Twitter, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, November 30, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

News@Northeastern: The Harriet Tubman House May Be Gone, But Its Legacy Is Preserved Forever Thanks To Northeastern’s Library. “The house was a fixture of Boston’s Black community, but its century-spanning history–the kind that doesn’t get told in museums or textbooks–was in danger of getting lost with the demolition too. Fortunately, the building’s history and the community’s memories were saved through the hard work of residents who banded together under the I Am Harriet coalition, USES itself and the resources and ingenuity of the Boston Research Center.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Gizmodo: Quecto, Ronna: Meet the Newest Metric Prefixes. “Four new metric prefixes got the official stamp of approval last week at the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures held at Versailles, the extravagant palace outside of Paris…. The new prefixes ronna and quetta refer to the largest numbers, while ronto and quecto apply to the smallest. Ronna is a 1 followed by 27 zeroes, and quetta is a 1 followed by 30 zeroes. Ronto is 10^-27, and quecto equates to 10^-30.”

Ars Technica: Twitter is now having trouble paying some employees on time. “Twitter staff in the UK received an email just before 1 pm London time on November 25 telling them their pay date would be November 28. Alongside the email, sent from the EMEA Payroll Team, staff received their usual monthly payslips. However, staff in the UK and Germany appear not to have been paid on time.”

NARA: National Archives Begins Work on 1960 Census Records Release. “Though genealogists and other researchers are still busy researching the 1950 U.S. Federal Census, which the National Archives released entirely online April 1, the agency is already preparing for the next launch: the 1960 population census. Almost as soon as the 1950 Census schedules went live, work began on digitizing approximately 41,000 rolls of the microfilmed 1960 Census, a notable increase from the 6,373 rolls of the 1950 Census. The 1960 Census records are scheduled to be released in April 2032.”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: Avoiding Twitter? Try These Interest-Based Discord Servers. “ARE YOU LOOKING for an alternative to Twitter since Elon Musk acquired it? Some social media users switched over to Mastodon, a decentralized option with similar structures. For anyone who’s retiring those Twitter fingers and feels open to trying something different, Discord is another great choice.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

NiemanLab: Post, the latest Twitter alternative, is betting big on micropayments for news. “The ‘social platform for real people, real news, and civil conversations,’ was founded by former Waze CEO Noam Bardin. It counts Kara Swisher as an advisor and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz as one of its two investors. The other investor is Scott Galloway, an NYU professor and cocohost of the Pivot podcast with Swisher.”

Variety: Musk Tweets Fake CNN Headline About Musk Threatening Free Speech on Twitter. “Musk — without any indication that it was a joke — posted an image that said, ‘CNN: Elon Musk could threaten free speech on Twitter by literally allowing people to speak freely.’ The post includes a photo of Lemon appearing to speak about Musk on air, with the made-up chyron below Lemon featuring the same text as the headline”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: Google Settles FTC Charges About ‘Deceptive’ Pixel 4 Endorsements. “Google and iHeartMedia, a radio and podcasting company, on Monday agreed to pay $9.4 million to settle charges from the Federal Trade Commission and seven states that they were behind deceptive Pixel 4 ads.”

NJ .com: N.J. may soon set standards for students to learn how to separate fact from fiction on social media . “Though Garden State schools already have some requirements to teach the topic, the state Legislature has overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan bill (S588) that would mandate a state Department of Education committee to develop specific statewide guidelines for lessons on information literacy across digital, visual, and technological media.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Clemson News: Clemson Media Forensics Hub receives $3.8 million grant to study, fight online disinformation. “The fight against online disinformation is getting a boost thanks to a $3.8 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to support Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub at the Watt Family Innovation Center. Researchers with the Hub study disinformation and inauthenticity online and create tools to educate people and stop the spread of disinformation. Clemson University is matching the grant, making the total investment in the Hub $7.6 million over the next four years.”

Cornell Chronicle: Programming tool turns handwriting into computer code. “The pen-based interface, called Notate, lets users of computational, digital notebooks – such as Jupyter notebooks, which are web-based and interactive – to open drawing canvases and handwrite diagrams within lines of traditional, digitized computer code.”

Brigham Young University: Social media conversations are driven by those on the margins, says new BYU research . “The study found that most people – moderate Democrats and Republicans – are self-censoring their comments on social media to not create contention, lose friends online, or be perceived a certain way. Those on the margins, however, don’t fear backlash or retaliation from offering isolating opinions and are voicing viewpoints that go largely unchecked, fueling online dialogue that is becoming increasingly polarized.” Good morning, Internet…

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November 30, 2022 at 06:27PM
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Nintendo Power Magazine, UMSL Research, International Student Scholarships, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, November 29, 2022

Nintendo Power Magazine, UMSL Research, International Student Scholarships, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, November 29, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Kotaku: You Can Now Read All 285 Issues Of Nintendo Power Online. “Uploaded to Archive.org today by Gumball, all 285 issues of Nintendo Power are now unofficially available in .cbr format. At just over 40 gigabytes for the whole shebang, the vast majority of the collection comes courtesy of Retromags, a community-run project dedicated to archiving classic video game magazines.” Nintendo had a similar collection taken down in 2016, so if you’re interested in this don’t wait.

University of Missouri – St. Louis: New platform improves access to UMSL innovative works. “The University of Missouri–St. Louis has launched a new online platform that will make it simple for anyone to quickly and easily obtain a nonexclusive license of select intellectual property from the university. Managed by the Office of IP Management and Commercialization under its director, Tamara Wilgers, the UMSL Innovations online marketplace will help advance the office’s central mission to get UMSL ideas out into the world and achieve a wider reach and distribution of the university’s IP.”

The PIE News: IDP launches scholarship search feature. “IDP has launched a new search feature to easily connect international students with over 5,200 opportunities for scholarships. Available on the IDP website and the IDP Live app, the function gives prospective students the ability to view the criteria and value of scholarships from institutions throughout Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and the US.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Sun Journal: Unity-based farmers, gardeners group improves database. “The Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association Certification Services has updated its online searchable database to make it easier for people to find MOFGA-certified organic foods and products…. With 529 MOFGA-certified organic producers throughout Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, there are many options to find products within reach, and with enhanced keyword searches and an improved user interface, the database can make finding those producers easy.”

USEFUL STUFF

Smashing Magazine: A Guide To Keyboard Accessibility: HTML And CSS (Part 1). “This article is the first of two parts about a guide to making websites accessible to keyboard users. Here Cristian Diaz covers a good set of practices and recommendations on how to use HTML and CSS to create a great experience for keyboard users.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

WIRED: This App Gives Your Screenshots Superpowers. That’s Just the Beginning. “What if screenshots were linkable, or portals to the playlist, the mapped location, the shopping page you wanted to share? That’s the reality Alex Mahedy has been trying to create for the past few years. The twentysomething New York City–based entrepreneur has even convinced some noteworthy venture capitalists to fund the idea. He just launched a new app for sharing link-enabled screenshots, called Pager.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: 5.4 million Twitter users’ stolen data leaked online — more shared privately. “Over 5.4 million Twitter user records containing non-public information stolen using an API vulnerability fixed in January have been shared for free on a hacker forum. Another massive, potentially more significant, data dump of millions of Twitter records has also been disclosed by a security researcher, demonstrating how widely abused this bug was by threat actors.”

Financial Times: Lex in-depth: the cost of America’s ban on Chinese chips. “Washington wants to thwart China in its aim of producing advanced semiconductors, bearing the shorthand definition of 3-14 nanometre (nm) process technology. Cheaper, simpler chips carry the designation of anything above 14nm. These might sound like the kind of fine distinctions only professional technologists care about. But the stakes are huge.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

MIT Technology Review: A bot that watched 70,000 hours of Minecraft could unlock AI’s next big thing. “OpenAI has built the best Minecraft-playing bot yet by making it watch 70,000 hours of video of people playing the popular computer game. It showcases a powerful new technique that could be used to train machines to carry out a wide range of tasks by binging on sites like YouTube, a vast and untapped source of training data.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

New York Times: When Visiting Michelangelo’s David, She Brings a Duster. “Imagine a job that lets you get up close and personal — really, really up close and personal — with one of the world’s most famous statues. It is one perk of being the in-house restorer of the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, Italy, where Eleonora Pucci’s task is to regularly dust Michelangelo’s David, which she described recently as exhilarating, if somewhat nerve-racking.” The link is to a gift article; you should be able to read this without encountering a paywall. 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.

November 30, 2022 at 01:06AM
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Safeguarding Science Toolkit, Altered States Database, Estonia WWII Refugees, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, November 29, 2022

Safeguarding Science Toolkit, Altered States Database, Estonia WWII Refugees, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, November 29, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Homeland Security Today: NCSC and Partners Unveil ‘Safeguarding Science’ Toolkit to Help U.S. Research Enterprise Guard Against Threats. “The Safeguarding Science online toolkit is designed for individuals and organizations in the U.S. scientific, academic, and emerging technology sectors who are seeking to develop their own programs to protect research, technology, and personnel from theft, abuse, misuse, or exploitation.”

Scientific Data: The Altered States Database: Psychometric data from a systematic literature review . “In this paper, we present the development of the Altered States Database (ASDB), an open-science project based on a systematic literature review. The ASDB contains psychometric questionnaire data on subjective experiences of altered states of consciousness (ASC) induced by pharmacological and non-pharmacological methods.”

ERR: Estonia establishing database of World War II refugees. “An estimated 80,000 Estonians fled the country during World War II and the Institute of Historical Memory is now establishing a database to enable further research. It is also seeking people’s help.” The database is available and has a little bit of information, but it’s very early days for this project.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Land: YouTube just announced its 2023 class of #YouTubeBlack Voices Fund creators. “Earlier this year, YouTube announced a new fund aimed at helping black creators find dedicated partner support, seed funding invested into the development of their channels, and the opportunity to participate in bespoke training, workshops and networking programs. This week they named the first 30 creators for the 2023 class.”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: How to Make Autocorrect Work the Way You Want. “If autocorrect isn’t behaving the way you want it to, or you want to make it better or turn it off altogether, these are the settings and the screens you need to know about.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: Twitter grapples with Chinese spam obscuring news of protests. “Twitter’s radically reduced anti-propaganda team grappled on Sunday with a flood of nuisance content in China that researchers said was aimed at reducing the flow of news about stunning widespread protests against coronavirus restrictions.”

Variety: National Film Archive of India on Mission to Restore 5,000 Films. “The National Film Archive of India (NFAI) has undertaken the massive task of restoring 5,000 priceless classics of Indian cinema.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Guardian: Twitter failed to detect upload of Christchurch mosque terror attack videos. “Twitter has removed freshly uploaded footage of the Christchurch terror attack that was circulating on the platform, but only after the New Zealand government alerted the company, which had failed to recognise the content as harmful.”

CNET: FCC Unveils Rules for Clear Broadband Labels to Help Consumers Comparison Shop. “The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday unveiled rules that will require all internet service providers to display clear labels for their services — similar to the nutrition labels on food products — showing exactly what the customer is purchasing.”

Europol: International operation shuts down websites offering counterfeit goods and pirated content. “As of this year’s Cyber Monday, law enforcement agencies across several continents have taken down 12 526 websites, disconnected 32 servers used to distribute and host illegal content for 2 294 television channels and shut down 15 online shops selling counterfeit products on social media sites. In the physical realm, investigators seized 127 365 counterfeit products such as clothes, watches, shoes, accessories, perfumes, electronics and phone cases worth more than EUR 3.8 million.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

MIT News: Empowering social media users to assess content helps fight misinformation. “Using their findings, the researchers developed a prototype platform that enables users to assess the accuracy of content, indicate which users they trust to assess accuracy, and filter posts that appear in their feed based on those assessments. Through a field study, they found that users were able to effectively assess misinforming posts without receiving any prior training. Moreover, users valued the ability to assess posts and view assessments in a structured way.”

CogDogBlog: Gizmo-ing Stuff to Mastodon. “Once Jim Groom took the nudge to figure out how to spin up Mastodon in the Reclaim Hosting cloud gizmo (see, thingamagig!) and launch a place for DS106 I was starting to think how it might be possible to wire up the DS106 Daily Create (well into its 10th year, never missed a day, and zeroing in on the 4000th TDC, one has to hum the song Where Have All the MOOCs Gone) to join Tootland.” Good morning, Internet…

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November 29, 2022 at 06:29PM
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