New researches

Monday, January 16, 2023

USITC Investigations, St. Louis Cardinals, Twitter, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 16, 2023

USITC Investigations, St. Louis Cardinals, Twitter, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 16, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

United States International Trade Commission: USITC Launches New Investigations Database System . “The United States International Trade Commission (USITC) today deployed the Investigations Database System (IDS), an innovative new data management tool that captures, manages, and displays USITC investigation-related information…. A major new feature is the ability to conduct quick searches and advanced searches of the centralized investigation database that generate in-depth search results across multiple practice areas, providing new perspectives and value-added insights for users.”

UniWatch: More Research Leads to Incredibly Comprehensive St. Louis Cardinals Uni/Logo Database. “Oliver has now created an incredible online database (similar to the Gridiron Uniform Database or Dressed to the Nines), in which Oliver ‘redrew all our uniform models and reincorporated all of our new research,’ to create the most comprehensive collection of the logos and uniforms of the Cards!”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Twitter may have deliberately cut off third-party clients like Tweetbot. “Since Thursday evening, many of the most popular apps you can use to scroll Twitter without going through the company’s own software, including Tweetbot and Twitterrific, have not worked, with no official communication from Twitter. On Sunday, The Information shared messages from Twitter’s internal Slack channels that suggest the company is aware of the outage and likely the cause of it as well.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Smithsonian: National Museum of American History Will Preserve Alexander Graham Bell’s Experimental Sound Recordings. “The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History will embark this fall on a new round of sound recovery to restore some of the world’s earliest recordings. … the work will focus on hundreds of records created by Alexander Graham Bell and his colleagues at Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and at Bell’s property in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, between 1881 and 1892.”

Rolling Stone: Far-Right Superstars Are Failing on Rumble. Who’s Winning?. “The outsider streaming site that just partnered up with Donald Trump Jr. is growing — but not in the way most people think.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Guardian: Saudi prosecutors seek death penalty for academic over social media use. “A prominent pro-reform law professor in Saudi Arabia is facing the death penalty for alleged crimes including having a Twitter account and using WhatsApp to share news considered ‘hostile’ to the kingdom, according to court documents seen by the Guardian.”

Discovered on Mastodon: Stable Diffusion Litigation. From the home page: “On behalf of three wonderful artist plaintiffs—Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz—we’ve filed a class-action lawsuit against Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney for their use of Stable Diffusion, a 21st-century collage tool that remixes the copyrighted works of millions of artists whose work was used as training data. Joining as co-counsel are the terrific litigators Brian Clark and Laura Matson of Lockridge Grindal Nauen P.L.L.P.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

ZDNet: Can AI detectors save us from ChatGPT? I tried 3 online tools to find out. “With the sudden arrival of ChatGPT, educators and editors are facing a worrying surge of automated content submissions. We look at the problem and what might be done.”

University of Calgary: Transdisciplinary UCalgary team investigates ethical use of AI in post-secondary. “New research shows that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in academic settings is leading to a decline in the integrity of academic work. As AI technology continues to advance, it is becoming easier and easier for students to cheat on assignments and exams.

Sounds convincing and attention grabbing, right? The only thing you need to know about the first paragraph of this story is that it wasn’t written by a human.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Washington Post: A Yorkie was dognapped. A man who hunted al-Qaeda came to the rescue.. “Most stolen dogs are never recovered, but what followed was an improbable effort to crack the identity of the dognapper. It brought together [Raquel] Witherspoon, neighbors, TV news, police and a former Marine Corps intelligence operator who offered skills he honed on the battlefields of Iraq to capture al-Qaeda fighters.” I didn’t know that Instagram trick. That’s a good one. Good afternoon, Internet…

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January 17, 2023 at 01:59AM
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Investigative Journalism Foundation, California Driving, Michigan Mental Health, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, January 16, 2023

Investigative Journalism Foundation, California Driving, Michigan Mental Health, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, January 16, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

NiemanLab: “Canada’s ProPublica” is sharing the databases behind its hard-hitting stories. “A week after launching, [Investigative Journalism Foundation] has shown some political leaders have been breaking their party’s pledge to stop allowing lobbyists to attend cash-for-access fundraisers, taken a sobering look at the country’s public-housing system in partnership with The Walrus, and cataloged, alongside the National Observer, a lobbying blitz by Canada’s largest oil and gas group.”

StreetsBlog Cal: New Tool Helps Planners and Public Visualize Vehicle Miles Traveled. “Fehr & Peers has developed a new tool to help planner and the public ‘see’ how much driving people do, both locally and regionally, in California. This is useful for planning, for grant applications, for estimating traffic impacts from projects, and for estimating greenhouse gases from transportation.”

State of Michigan: State Launches New Workplace Mental Health Hub, Upcoming Webinar Series. “To further support mental health and wellbeing for more Michiganders, the state of Michigan launched Michigan.gov/WorkplaceMentalHealth, a centralized workplace mental health hub to share resources and strategies aimed at helping employees and employers across the state address mental health in the workplace.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

ReviewGeek: YouTube Tests Out Ad-Supported Free TV Channel Streaming. “At this point, it’s pretty clear that Google is going all-in on YouTube’s video streaming initiative. It’ll have the NFL Sunday Ticket starting next season, and now we’re hearing YouTube is testing a hub where it’ll offer cable-TV channels for free, but with ads.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: This App Uses AI to Generate Custom Playlists. “PlaylistAI is an app that uses AI to help you create playlists easily, and it is compatible with Spotify and Apple Music. It lets you specify the kind of music you’re looking for and creates custom playlists for you. Here are a few ways you can use PlaylistAI to expand your musical horizons.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Globe and Mail: Canadian companies inadvertently finance conspiracy-theory sites through ads placed on Google. “Google has placed ads from a host of Canadian companies – including airlines, banks, clothing and food stores – as well as public bodies such as Quebec City tourism – on sites that have raised alarm bells with groups tracking pro-Russian coverage and misinformation. The Globe found more than a dozen ads for Canadian companies appearing on American and French sites including for companies such as Scotiabank, Jetlines, Mattress Mart and Farm Boy.”

SWI: Swiss cinema adapts to energy crisis.”Cinémathèque Suisse has also developed scenarios to anticipate possible power cuts and enable it to continue its activities. Priority has been given to the ‘physical’ film collections, which must be stored at a certain temperature and humidity level, as well as to the digital archives stored on different servers.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Fake OnlyFans dating sites abuse UK Environment Agency open redirect. “Threat actors abused an open redirect on the official website of the United Kingdom’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) to direct visitors to fake OnlyFans adult dating sites. OnlyFans is a content subscription service where paid subscribers get access to private photos, videos, and posts from adult models, celebrities, and social media personalities.”

BBC: US farmers win right to repair John Deere equipment. “Tractor maker John Deere has agreed to give its US customers the right to fix their own equipment. Previously, farmers were only allowed to use authorised parts and service facilities rather than cheaper independent repair options. Deere and Co. is one of the world’s largest makers farming equipment.”

The Print (Pakistan): Pakistan National Assembly bans entry of YouTubers, TikTokers, social media influencers into premises. “The Pakistan National Assembly Secretariat has banned the entry of YouTubers, TikTokers and other social media influencers into its premises, ARY News reported. The decision has been taken after an incident of misbehaviour with lawmakers by some unauthorised YouTuber/social media influencers at Gate No 1 of Parliament House on December 23 last year, as per the ARY News report.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Brookings Institution: ChatGPT: Educational friend or foe?. “In our own test, the first author (Kathy) gave the bot a complicated essay question that she asks her Honors psychology students to answer. It did a respectable job. Yet—the bot produced no more than a B- or C+ essay. Why? To date, the bot cannot distinguish the ‘classic’ article in a field that must be cited from any other article that reviews the same content. The bot also tends to keep referencing the same sources over and over again. These are issues that can be easily resolved in the next iteration. More centrally, however, is that the bot is more of a synthesizer than a critical thinker.”

WIRED: It’s Time to Teach AI How to Be Forgetful. “Intelligent forgetting is just one dimension of psychological AI, an approach to machine intelligence that also incorporates other features of human intelligence such as causal reasoning, intuitive psychology, and physics. In 2023, this approach to AI will finally be recognized as fundamental for solving ill-defined problems.” Good morning, Internet…

January 16, 2023 at 06:32PM
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Sunday, January 15, 2023

Investigative Journalism Tools, Metra Train Tracker, TED-Ed, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 15, 2023

Investigative Journalism Tools, Metra Train Tracker, TED-Ed, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 15, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Inside AFP: Fighting disinformation: AFP shares tools in videos. “From finding the origin of a video online to using archives to identify old versions of web pages, reading foreign languages with a smartphone or using mapping tools, these videos demonstrate tools used by AFP journalists around the world in their investigations. A dozen videos are already available in English and French on AFP’s YouTube channels and on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, sharing key tips for online verification.” Every video I looked at was thoroughly capitioned.

Railfan & Railroad Magazine: Metra Rolls Out New Online Train Tracker. “[The site] was launched on Tuesday and now lets users check train departures from specific stations and look at trains on a real-time map to see where exactly they are.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Larry Ferlazzo: TED-ED Animated Videos Are Now In Five Languages. “Over the years on this blog, I’ve shared a fair number of both English and Spanish-language TED-Ed animated videos. They’ve just announced an expansion to three other languages, and now have five separate channels.”

USEFUL STUFF

The Verge: How to use your phone to find hidden cameras. “Want to make sure your privacy is being respected? There are a couple of ways you can kinda, sorta find out if there are any hidden cameras in your space.” The one comment at this writing offers a third method.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Library of Congress: Library of Congress Awards Second Round of More than $500,000 to Support Contemporary Cultural Field Research within Diverse Communities. “The Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center is pleased to announce the second recipient cohort of the Community Collections Grant program. Launched by the Library’s Of the People: Widening the Path initiative, this series of grants is awarded to individuals and organizations working to document cultures and traditions of Black, Indigenous and communities of color historically underrepresented in the United States and in the Library’s collections.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Politico: DOJ antitrust chief cleared to oversee Google probes. “The Justice Department has cleared antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter to oversee investigations and litigation involving Google, potentially paving the way for him to lead a federal antitrust case challenging the search giant’s dominance of the online advertising market, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.”

Motherboard: Researchers Could Track the GPS Location of All of California’s New Digital License Plates. “A team of security researchers managed to gain ‘super administrative access’ into Reviver, the company behind California’s new digital license plates which launched last year. That access allowed them to track the physical GPS location of all Reviver customers and change a section of text at the bottom of the license plate designed for personalized messages to whatever they wished, according to a blog post from the researchers.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Locus Magazine: Commentary: Cory Doctorow: Social Quitting. “In some ways, this shouldn’t surprise us. All the social networks that preceded the current generation experienced this pattern: SixDegrees, Friendster, MySpace, and Bebo all exploded onto the scene. One day, they were sparsely populated fringe services, the next day, everyone you knew was using them and you had to sign up to stay in touch. Then, just as quickly, they imploded, turning into ghost towns, then punchlines, then forgotten ruins.”

PR Newswire: Mars Petcare and the Broad Institute create open-access database of dog and cat genomes to advance preventive pet care (PRESS RELEASE). “Mars Petcare is partnering with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a world leader in the genetic and molecular analysis of diseases, to create one of the largest open access cat and dog genome databases in the world. Genomes from 10,000 dogs and 10,000 cats enrolled in the MARS PETCARE BIOBANK initiative will be sequenced over the next 10 years. Insights from the open access database can help advance individualized pet health care for future generations of dogs and cats.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

This is Colossal: Hapless Hangups and Silly Spoofs Abound in the 2022 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards. “In this year’s juried contest, 5,000 entries from 85 countries amounted to fierce competition, showcasing ‘seriously funny’ images in an effort to highlight the diversity of the world’s wildlife and raise awareness of the need for conservation. In partnership with the Whitley Fund for Nature, the contest contributes 10% of revenue toward conservation efforts in countries across the Global South.” Good afternoon, Internet…

January 16, 2023 at 01:37AM
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Ford F-Series Truck Photography, Twitter, Google Stadia, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, January 15, 2023

Ford F-Series Truck Photography, Twitter, Google Stadia, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, January 15, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Detroit Free Press: Ford adds vintage pickup truck images to public website for free downloading. “Ford Motor Co. unveiled images so rare and popular for public viewing in June that its website crashed. Now, a batch of coveted vintage photos of the best-selling F-Series trucks has just posted online to recognize the 75th anniversary of the iconic pickup. The company hopes to avoid drama this time by doubling computer server capacity of the Ford Heritage Vault site.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Washington Post: Hate speech rises on Twitter in its largest markets after Musk takeover. “Musk has fired or accepted resignations from about three-fourths of Twitter’s employees since his $44 billion takeover at the end of October. He has also terminated thousands of contractors who were monitoring the site for slurs and threats. Those cuts went deepest outside North America, where more than 75 percent of the company’s 280 million daily users live and where Twitter already had fewer moderators who understood local languages and cultural references and where the political landscape could be chaotic and prone to violence.”

Entrepreneur: Twitter Is Offering Free Ads to Bring Advertisers Back. “The WSJ cites emails it reviewed in which Twitter said it would match ad spending to the tune of $250,000, with the catch that the full half-million dollars worth of ads run by the end of February. While Twitter has yet to comment, the deal is consistent with other efforts to stimulate ad revenue on the platform.”

Engadget: Your Google Stadia controller won’t be a paperweight after the service shuts down. “Google is giving Stadia users some consolation prizes before the game streaming service shuts down on January 18th. To start, it’s planning to release a tool that will enable Bluetooth support on the Stadia controller. You’ll have to wait until next week to download it, but this should make the device useful for just about any title that has gamepad support, so long as the platform recognizes the hardware in the first place.”

USEFUL STUFF

Hongkiat: 7 Ways to Compress and Optimize Your Videos. “These tools work on a video to compress it to a smaller size while retaining its quality. Of course, there are lots of factors that define a video’s quality and size, but these tools help you to minify videos as easily as possible. Here’s my recommendation for seven video compression tools to optimize your videos.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Futurism: CNET Is Quietly Publishing Entire Articles Generated By AI. “CNET, a massively popular tech news outlet, has been quietly employing the help of ‘automation technology’ — a stylistic euphemism for AI — on a new wave of financial explainer articles, seemingly starting around November of last year. In the absence of any formal announcement or coverage, it appears that this was first spotted by online marketer Gael Breton in a tweet on Wednesday.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Global News (Canada): Kraken, Elon Musk and dead Canadian doctors: Disinformation surges 3 years into the pandemic. “The bogus theory – promoted by a small group of Canadian doctors who have spent the pandemic falsely claiming or suggesting that the vaccine kills or harms people – insists, without proof, that the vaccine may have played a role in the death of an ever-growing number of physicians. Global News has spent months investigating the list of doctors and speaking to their families and has found no link of the COVID vaccine to any of their deaths.”

Ars Technica: Vulnerability with 9.8 severity in Control Web Panel is under active exploit. “Malicious hackers have begun exploiting a critical vulnerability in unpatched versions of the Control Web Panel, a widely used interface for web hosting.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Leiden University: ROBUST AI programme receives 25 million euros from Dutch Research Council. “The ROBUST consortium, which is the initiative of the Innovation Center for Artificial intelligence (ICAI), has received 25 million euros from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to strengthen fundamental AI research. The Leiden interdisciplinary research programme SAILS is part of ROBUST.”

Western University: Western researchers develop new open-source app for precise brain mapping. “The hippocampus is a small, complex, folded brain structure that holds clues to several brain disorders. It is also one of the most difficult-to-map regions of the brain. After developing a successful technique to digitally unfold the hippocampus, researchers at the Western Institute for Neuroscience have now built a new app using artificial intelligence (AI) to precisely map the structure. As part of a team led by Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry professor Ali Khan, former PhD student Jordan DeKraker has developed an open-source app, HippUnfold, which uses state-of-the-art AI to digitally unfold the hard-to-reach areas of the hippocampus.”

Daily Beast: Way Too Many Government Documents Are Classified. “One of the reasons so many officials have feared the circumstance in which Biden now finds himself is because so many encounter classified documents in their day-to-day work. Classifying so many documents makes the likelihood of errors higher. But it also makes it harder to share or find information necessary to policymakers…. Experts have sounded the alarm about this problem for decades, and every few years there is even a call to fix it—but it never happens.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Boing Boing: New Yorker documents every pizza slice he’s eaten for past nine years, shares hard data. “Since 2014, New Yorker Liam Quigley has been documenting and then consuming pizza slices and keeping track of their prices and quality. He’s currently got data on 464 slices.” Good morning, Internet…

January 15, 2023 at 06:29PM
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Saturday, January 14, 2023

Newspaper Vocabulary, Character Chatbots, Nebraska Community Services, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 14, 2023

Newspaper Vocabulary, Character Chatbots, Nebraska Community Services, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 14, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Hold the Front Page: Former editor creates dictionary of “lost language of newspapers”. “Neil Benson has created a glossary of both current and extinct newspaper production terms after launching an appeal on Facebook for journalists to contribute to it. The glossary features dozens of terms used throughout the newspaper industry’s history and has been widely shared since being published on his blog.”

New York Times: A.I. Is Becoming More Conversational. But Will It Get More Honest?. “At a new website called Character.AI, you can chat with a reasonable facsimile of almost anyone, live or dead, real or (especially) imagined.”

Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services: DHHS To Launch The IServe Nebraska Explore Benefits Tool. “The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) will soon launch a new feature of the iServe Nebraska portal – Explore Benefits, an anonymous, mobile-friendly, pre-screening tool to help Nebraskans identify benefits for which they may qualify.” The tool will launch in both English and Spanish on January 27.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Purdue University: CGT Analysis Database Expanded w/ New Features. “The new version of the database captures economic flows across 160 countries and regions, 141 of which represent individual countries accounting for 99% of global output and 96% of global population. The economic flows are categorized into 65 economic sectors: 20 in agriculture and food, 25 in manufacturing and 20 in services. The latest version of GTAP reflects these flows for five reference years (2004, 2007, 2011, 2014 and 2017).”

9to5 Mac: Tweetbot and other Twitter apps still broken as Elon Musk stays silent. “Tweetbot, Twitteriffic, and other popular third-party clients for Twitter are still completely broken due to issues with Twitter’s API. Despite growing complaints from Twitter users and developers alike, Elon Musk has remained silent. This is leading some people to speculate that this change is intentional and that Twitter is shutting down third-party clients altogether.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: How to Back Up Your Gmails to Avoid Paying for Storage. “There are two steps to dealing with a Gmail backup. The first, of course, is downloading the messages from Google, but it doesn’t end there. Google will send you the files in .mbox format, a file format none of the apps on your computer can likely read. But, that’s okay. We’ll fix that.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Central Tibetan Administration: CTA to Soon Begin Records Digitisation Project. “The Department of Religion and Culture, CTA, held a preliminary meeting on Digital Library Initiative today presided over by Sikyong Penpa Tsering, the incumbent Kalon of the department. Sikyong underlined the necessity of digitally archiving the prolonged preservation of important and invaluable paper-based documents of bygone ages and tabled the proposition of collaborating with major libraries in India, Nepal and Bhutan for the conservation of documents.”

The Verge: Microsoft doesn’t own the rights to Minecraft’s ending — no one does, its author claims. “There is no question who wrote the poem at the end of Minecraft, the best-selling video game of all time. Julian Gough is the one who gave the game’s unseen gods their voice, beautifully telling the player how the universe loves them — and how the player is the universe, dreaming of itself…. What we did not suspect — not till we read Gough’s new Twitter thread and an epic 10,000-word blog post that is well worth a full read — is that Microsoft may not actually own the rights to the game’s ending.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Yale Climate Connections: Smartphone apps help rural Alaskans monitor effects of warming climate. “The project provides people in remote communities with training and tools to record coastal erosion rates, when sea ice melts, or other data of interest. Participants enter their observations in a smartphone app. It works offline and then syncs to an online database when cell service is available. Tribes can use the data they collect to better manage natural resources as the climate warms. And they can share it with others, like state or federal biologists.”

The Conversation: Disquiet in the archives: archivists make tough calls with far-reaching consequences – they deserve our support. “Buffeted by strong and competing forces, archivists are in a tough spot. Their ability to navigate a path forward, moreover, is made more difficult by non-archivists’ foggy and unrealistic expectations of what archivists actually do, and what they might do in the future.” Good afternoon, Internet…

January 15, 2023 at 01:30AM
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Downtown San Francisco Development, Philadelphia Workforce Diversity, Pay Transparency Law Tracking Map, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, January 14, 2023

Downtown San Francisco Development, Philadelphia Workforce Diversity, Pay Transparency Law Tracking Map, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, January 14, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

San Francisco Chamber of Commerce: San Francisco Chamber of Commerce Invests in Downtown with Launch of NEW Data Dashboard and Urban Planning Initiative. “This dashboard is open to the public and highlights key indicators of the city’s downtown economy. It is intended for elected officials, new and existing businesses, and media to explore downtown office activity, areas of investment, and sector-specific demands to inform decisions around the recovery of San Francisco.”

City of Philadelphia, coincidentally: The City of Philadelphia’s New Workforce Diversity Dashboard Provides Ongoing Access to the City’s Workforce Progress. “The City of Philadelphia has launched a Workforce Diversity Dashboard, an interactive tool that provides monthly insight into many aspects of the City’s workforce. The dashboard is a product of extensive collaboration by leaders within the City’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Office of Innovation & Technology (OIT), and the Office of Human Resources (OHR).”

PR Newswire: Compa Launches Pay Transparency Law Tracking Map (PRESS RELEASE). “The interactive map contains up-to-date legislative information about pay transparency at the state level and at the local level when appropriate. In addition to current state and local laws, the map also includes information on pending state legislation and identifies states without pay transparency laws. The tool categorizes the data into three areas: what employers must do, can do, and cannot do with regards to disclosing salary data.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

9to5 Google: Google Photos tweaks and simplifies backup terminology. “To simplify backups, Google Photos has updated two terms related to the process across the mobile and web apps as well as in support documentation.”

USEFUL STUFF

Gizmodo: How to Understand Twitter’s New Checkmarks and Labels. “It’s fair to say it’s been a busy few months for Twitter, with a lot of changes coming in a short amount of time. Those changes have included a revamp of how checkmarks and account labels are used, and if your head is spinning while scrolling through your Twitter timeline, then we’re here to carefully and calmly explain what each badge and icon means… at least until the next revamp.”

The Verge: Seven free alternatives to the LastPass password manager. “Back in February 2021, the LastPass password manager announced it was changing its free version so that it would only work on one type of device and that people who wanted to use it on both their computer and mobile devices would have to start paying for a subscription. More recently, LastPass members may have a more important reason to consider a change: two breaches in 2022 have resulted in user data being accessed by hackers.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Media Matters: New year, new scam: TikTok’s largest weight loss advertiser is marketing predatory scams to young users. “TikTok’s largest weight loss advertiser, Kilo Group, is dumping money into predatory scams targeting users, particularly women, despite violating the platform’s own content guidelines. These ads promise unrealistic weight loss and extreme body changes, all while trying to trap users into auto-renewing subscriptions — fitting the Better Business Bureau’s profile of a weight loss scam.”

New York Times: The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera. “Last spring, Anthony Tabarez celebrated prom like many of today’s high schoolers: dancing the night away and capturing it through photos and videos. The snapshots show Mr. Tabarez, 18, and his friends grinning, jumping around and waving their arms from a crowded dance floor. But instead of using his smartphone, Mr. Tabarez documented prom night with an Olympus FE-230, a 7.1-megapixel, silver digital camera made in 2007 and previously owned by his mother.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Gay Times: Twitter exodus: Is Mastodon a safer alternative for LGBTQ+ users?. “Could Mastodon rival Twitter as a safer social media platform for the LGBTQ+ community? Millions flocked to the microblogging platform last year following tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter.”

Daily Post (Nigeria): 2023 elections: Group trains 108 fact checkers to curb fake news. “Food Basket Foundation International, FBFI, has said that it has concluded plans to train and deploy no fewer than 108 fact checkers ahead of the 2023 general elections. FBFI noted that the decision was taken to curb the menace of misinformation and disinformation before, during and after the elections.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Tech Xplore: Simulating discrimination in virtual reality. “To assist with perspective-taking, MIT researchers have developed ‘On the Plane’—a virtual reality role-playing game (VR RPG) that simulates discrimination. In this case, the game portrays xenophobia directed against a Malaysian America woman, but the approach can be generalized.”

Tubefilter: There’s an AI VTuber now and it has 70,000 followers on Twitch. “As her name implies, Neuro-sama is essentially a neural network with a VTuber-style face. Her creator, who goes by the anonymous title Vedal, has steered their virtual creation to a substantial following on Twitch. On the vedal987 channel, Neuro-sama streams games like Minecraft, and her gameplay is strong enough that it doesn’t immediately give her away as an artificial intelligence. Her abilities are fascinating enough to draw more than 70,000 followers on Twitch.”

PharmaPhorum: Bayer taps Google’s quantum power for drug discovery. “Bayer has signed an agreement with Google aimed at using high-level processing power to handle quantum chemistry calculations used to predict the chemical and physical properties of drug molecules at the atomic scale.” Good morning, Internet…

January 14, 2023 at 06:35PM
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Friday, January 13, 2023

Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery, Illinois WBE, Library Ebooks, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 13, 2023

Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery, Illinois WBE, Library Ebooks, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 13, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Sent to me by my Twitter pal Mandy W: The Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery . From the About page. “Welcome to the Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery! Here you will find all the original illustrations to Charles Dickens’s novels (and Sketches by Boz), where you are free to download, browse, share, remix, research, or use in whatever ways you can imagine.”

Illinois Department of Public Health: IDPH and DPI launch an online COVID-19 tracker. “The Discovery Partners Institute (DPI) and the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) announced today a new website that tracks the levels of COVID-19 in wastewater samples in Chicago and other cities across Illinois…. On the new site, visitors can search by city or county for up-to-date figures and trendlines from any one of 75 wastewater treatment plants around Illinois that are voluntarily collecting samples of raw sewage to be screened for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Publishers Weekly: Record Number of Libraries Surpassed One Million Digital Lends in 2022. “In a release, OverDrive officials said 10 library systems hit this milestone for the first time in 2022 (down from 22 in 2021, and 29 in 2020). Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Public Library became the first library system to surpass 10 million digital circulations via OverDrive.”

The Street: After Musk Took Over Twitter, McDonald’s, Starbucks Stopped Tweeting. “Ronald McDonald is not the only one experiencing the silence of the tweets. Coca-Cola’s, Starbucks, Sonic Drive-In, General Mills, and Dairy Queen are among the companies that seem to be stuck in 2022. And while Twitter is getting the silent treatment, all these companies have been active on Facebook and Instagram.”

Search Engine Land: Apple Maps relaunches Apple Business Connect. “In Business Connect, businesses can manage their place card, including adding and updating photos and logos; inviting customers to take actions like ordering food or making a reservation directly from Maps; and presenting customers with special promotions.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

College of Charleston: College Libraries Receive Grant to Launch New Lowcountry Oral History Initiative . “The College of Charleston Libraries has been awarded a $150,000 grant from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation’s (GDDF) ‘Broadening Narratives’ initiative in support of the new Lowcountry Oral History Initiative (LOHI). To deepen understanding of the Lowcountry’s rich history and culture, LOHI gathers and makes available recorded memories from the region’s residents.”

CNBC: Crypto.com to cut 20% jobs as industry rout deepens after FTX collapse. “The Singapore-based company’s announcement comes amid concerns about reserves and solvency across the sector, and only a few days after rival exchanges Coinbase Global Inc and Huobi announced their plans to lay off about 20% of their staff. A source told Reuters last week that Genesis, too, had cut jobs, equating to 30% of its workforce.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

PetaPixel: Photo Agency Sues Twitter for $228.9 Million Over Copyright Infringement. “A photo agency has filed a $228.9m copyright infringement lawsuit against Twitter after thousands of its photographs were uploaded by users of the social media site. Photo agency Backgrid and ten anonymous defendants have sued Twitter for allegedly failing to take down more than 1,500 photographs of celebrities owned by them and illegally posted to the platform by users.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: Why Do Some Films Get Restored and Others Languish? A MoMA Series Holds Clues.. “Decisions about which films become candidates for preservation — or even what preservation means for any given movie — are rarely clear-cut. They depend on a combination of commercial interests, historical judgments, economic considerations and the availability and condition of film materials.”

Pew (PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW!): Links shared by prominent accounts on Twitter differ widely from those shared on alternative social media. “Established social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter differ in key ways from alternative social media sites such as Parler and Truth Social, a recent Pew Research Center study found. And these differences extend to the kinds of links that are shared by prominent accounts on each type of social media site, according to a new Center analysis.” Good afternoon, Internet…

January 14, 2023 at 01:14AM
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