Digital Robotics Archive, Circular Startup Index, Bing Chat, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, May 8, 2023

Digital Robotics Archive, Circular Startup Index, Bing Chat, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, May 8, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Carnegie Mellon University: Robotics Project Releases Toolkit, Digital Robotics Archive. “The website, which is hosted on the open-source digital repository system Islandora, allows users to click through historic robotics artifacts in the collection, read about their history, learn about key researchers and watch videos of technology in action.”

Ellen MacArthur Foundation: Discover hundreds of circular economy startups with our new database. “Innovation is key to accelerating the circular economy transition — and there are thousands of circular startups on the market right now, designing and developing innovative solutions to eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials, and regenerate nature. The Foundation’s Circular Startup Index is a searchable, public database featuring more than 500 startups across a range of sectors, industries, and geographies, providing unprecedented visibility of these circular solutions.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Roundtable: Microsoft Opens Bing Chat To All With New Upgrades. “Microsoft had an event yesterday in NYC showing off some new features for Bing Chat, touting some growth figures and announcing it removed the waitlist for the co-pilot feature.”

Mashable: More than half of Twitter Blue’s earliest subscribers are no longer subscribed. “Out of about 150,000 early subscribers to Twitter Blue, just around 68,157 have stuck around and maintained a paid subscription as of April 30. Subscriptions are $8 per month – $11 on mobile.”

CNN: Despite TikTok ban threat, influencers are flocking to a new app from its parent company. “In the days after TikTok’s CEO was grilled by Congress for the first time, many TikTok users began posting about an alternative platform called Lemon8, sometimes with eerily similar language.”

USEFUL STUFF

TechCrunch: How to ask OpenAI for your personal data to be deleted or not used to train its AIs . “While there are lots of reasons why individuals might want to shield their information from big data mining AI giants there are — for now — only limited controls on offer. And these limited controls are mostly only available to users in Europe where data protection laws do already apply. Scroll lower down for details on how to exercise available data rights — or read on for the context.”

Hongkiat: 10 Best Free Note Taking Apps. “Whether you’re a student, a professional, or just someone who likes to jot down ideas as they come, this article is for you. Here is a compilation of the 10 best free note-taking apps that we reckon will help you find the one that meets your need.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

NBC News: ChatGPT is powered by these contractors making $15 an hour. “[Alexej] Savreux is part of a hidden army of contract workers who have been doing the behind-the-scenes labor of teaching AI systems how to analyze data so they can generate the kinds of text and images that have wowed the people using newly popular products like ChatGPT. To improve the accuracy of AI, he has labeled photos and made predictions about what text the apps should generate next. The pay: $15 an hour and up, with no benefits.”

New York Times: Twitter Criticized for Allowing Texas Shooting Images to Spread. “Though gruesome images have become common on social media, where a cellphone camera and an internet connection make everyone a publisher, the unusually graphic nature of the images drew sustained outcry from users. And they threw a harsh spotlight on Twitter’s content moderation practices, which have been curtailed since Mr. Musk acquired the company last year.” If you’re still using Twitter, I recommend TweetDeck as a client. Each column has a setting allowing you to turn media previews off.

SECURITY & LEGAL

Engadget: New York State AG proposes broad regulations for the cryptocurrency industry. “Attorney General Letitia James has proposed a law, the CRPTO Act (Crypto Regulation, Protection, Transparency and Oversight), that’s meant to thwart cryptocurrency fraud and protect investors. Whether or not it’s the ‘strongest and most comprehensive’ set of crypto regulations that James touts, it would theoretically prevent repeats of some high-profile incidents.”

The Register: DEF CON to set thousands of hackers loose on LLMs. “The collaborative event, which AI Village organizers describe as ‘the largest red teaming exercise ever for any group of AI models,’ will host ‘thousands’ of people, including ‘hundreds of students from overlooked institutions and communities,’ all of whom will be tasked with finding flaws in LLMs that power today’s chat bots and generative AI.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WIRED: Listen Up: Using AI to Build Personalized Assistive Hearing Devices. “EARLIER THIS YEAR, Cochlear, the manufacturer of cochlear implants, announced a collaboration with Google and Australian Hearing Hub members, the National Acoustic Laboratories (NAL), Macquarie University, the Shepherd Centre, and NextSense. The aim is to improve existing hearing-assistance technologies, like hearing aids and cochlear implants, and to develop new solutions for folks experiencing hearing loss.” Good morning, Internet…

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May 8, 2023 at 05:31PM
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Prehistory Earth, Portland Metro RLIS, Soft Robotics, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, May 7, 2023

Prehistory Earth, Portland Metro RLIS, Soft Robotics, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, May 7, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

BGR: See where your home was at the time of the dinosaurs using this interactive map. “A new website lets users pinpoint their home city and then see where it was located during the time of the dinosaurs, as well as during other periods of time across ancient Earth. Additionally, the map also showcases how the continents have shifted since the time of ancient Earth and even how ice covered the land throughout history.”

Oregon Metro Government: Nearly 200 GIS layers of Metro’s RLIS now open data. “Metro is eliminating the annual subscription for the Regional Land Information System, greater Portland’s comprehensive geospatial data resource.”

MIT News: Open-source platform simulates wildlife for soft robotics designers. “Since the term ‘soft robotics’ was adopted in 2008, engineers in the field have been building diverse representations of flexible machines useful in exploration, locomotion, rehabilitation, and even space. One source of inspiration: the way animals move in the wild. A team of MIT researchers has taken this a step further, developing SoftZoo, a bio-inspired platform that enables engineers to study soft robot co-design.” I had never heard the term “soft robotics” before, so I used Wiki-Guided Google Search on it and was lead to this article from the Encyclopedia of Robotics. The article gets complicated but there’s plenty there for even a non-technical reader to learn.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Associated Press: New Twitter rules expose election offices to spoof accounts “Tracking down accurate information about Philadelphia’s elections on Twitter used to be easy. The account for the city commissioners who run elections, @phillyvotes, was the only one carrying a blue check mark, a sign of authenticity. But ever since the social media platform overhauled its verification service last month, the check mark has disappeared. That’s made it harder to distinguish @phillyvotes from a list of random accounts not run by the elections office but with very similar names.”

Ars Technica: Google will retire Chrome’s HTTPS padlock icon because no one knows what it means. “Browsers going all the way back to Internet Explorer have used a small padlock icon to denote that a connection is using HTTPS. But according to the team behind the Chromium browser engine, most people still don’t know what that padlock icon actually means.” It is definitely something that isn’t emphasized as often as it used to be.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Native News Online: A New Online Tool Will Let Native Americans Search for Relatives Who Attended Indian Boarding Schools. “The Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) plans to launch a website this summer that will allow Native Americans to search for information on relatives who attended Indian boarding schools.”

Android Police: You can blame this Pixies song for Google Assistant canceling your alarm. “After noticing their alarms didn’t seem to go off on certain days, one Redditor woke up early to get to the bottom of the issue. The Pixies song Where Is My Mind? started playing since it was in a Spotify playlist the user had set as their music alarm in the Google Clock app. If you’re familiar with the song, it starts with a person singing ‘Oooh,’ then someone else cuts them off by exclaiming ‘Stop!’ before music starts playing.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

PC Magazine: Twitter Says ‘Security Incident’ Caused Circles Tweets Leak. “Twitter has admitted that an incident where private tweets intended for posters’ close friends that ended up on strangers’ feeds happened because of a security breach, The Guardian reports(Opens in a new window). Twitter Circles permits users to set a list of close friends and post tweets that only they can read. The incident last month saw Circle tweets popping up in the For You timeline of users who followed the Circle tweet poster but aren’t in their Circle.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Indiana University: Internet search trends reflect concerns following Supreme Court health care decisions. “The study, published April 28 in JAMA Health Forum, analyzed internet searches for abortion- and contraception-related terms following the June 24, 2022, ruling by the United States Supreme Court on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Researchers found that searches increased much more in states where reproductive health care access was more likely to be immediately restricted following the decision.”

The College of New Jersey: Computer science research team explores how machine learning can translate sign language. “Services like Google Translate can help millions of people communicate in over 100 languages. Users can type or speak words to be translated, or even translate text in photos and videos using augmented reality. Now, computer science professor Andrea Salgian and Ben Guerrieri ’26 are working to add one more language to the list: American Sign Language.”

Binghamton University: Data points: How inclusive metadata fosters diversity in museum collections. “Metadata — literally data about data — helps channel that stream, explained Binghamton University Art Museum intern Eliana Ellerton, a senior history major who will finish her master’s degree in 2024 through the 4+1 program. Since last year, Ellerton has been working with Art Museum Curator of Collections and Exhibitions Claire Kovacs on formulating inclusive metadata guidelines, or protocols on how the museum approaches diversity within its archives.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Phys.org: ‘Zero plant extinction’ is possible, says plant ecologist . “Like animals, many plant species are struggling to adapt to a human-dominated planet. However, plants are often overlooked in conservation efforts, even though they are cheaper and easier to protect than animals and play a pivotal role in bolstering our food, fuel and medical systems.” Good morning, Internet…

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May 7, 2023 at 06:23PM
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Yiddish Literature, News Minimalist, Open Scholarship in GLAMs, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 6, 2023

Yiddish Literature, News Minimalist, Open Scholarship in GLAMs, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 6, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Forward: Yiddish literature scholar David Roskies’ extraordinary archive now accessible online. “This week marked the official unveiling of a new, freely accessible Yiddish archive composed of previously unpublished teaching materials, scholarship, literature, notes and ephemera from the collections of Yiddish literature scholar David G. Roskies.”

Boing Boing: Minimalist news site powered by AI. “News Minimalist is another site that presents topical headlines in a plain, fast-loading format. This one aims not for the old-timey plaintext look but for the contemporary darkmodish style, garnished with data science.” I took a quick look. A nice mix of international news and it has an RSS feed. yes please.

EVENTS

British Library Digital Scholarship Blog: Webinar on Open Scholarship in GLAMs through Research Repositories. “If you work in the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) sector and want to learn more about research repositories, then join us on 18th May, Thursday for an online repository training session for cultural heritage professionals.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

WordPress News: Safely Jazz Up Your Website With Staging Sites on WordPress.com. “We’re excited to announce that staging sites are now available for all customers on our Business and Commerce plans. This powerful feature allows you to test changes and updates of all your site elements in a safe and stable environment.”

ABC News (Australia): Google Maps diverts drivers away from country road after fatal Strathmerton crash. “The popular mobile phone navigation app, Google Maps, will no longer send drivers along a regional Victorian road as first preference after a crash that killed five people last month.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Ars Technica: Mozilla acquires review-checking, scammer-spotting service Fakespot for Firefox . “Fakespot, a useful service that explains how products you’ve never heard of could have 12,000 reviews with a 4.6-star average, has been acquired by Firefox-maker Mozilla, and Mozilla plans to integrate it into Firefox.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NDTV: Google Ordered To Take Down Videos Claiming Indian Spices Contain Cow Dung. “The Delhi High Court has directed internet giant Google LLC to block or take down from YouTube certain ‘defamatory’ videos, which targeted major brands including ‘Catch’ by alleging that Indian spices contain urine and cow dung, in case they resurface.”

Washington Post: Computer system used to hunt fugitives is still down 10 weeks after hack. “A key law enforcement computer network has been down for 10 weeks, the victim of a ransomware attack that has frustrated efforts by senior officials to get the system back up and running — raising concerns about how to secure critical crime-fighting operations.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Oxford: Online consumers at risk from ‘intelligent’ price manipulation: Oxford and Imperial experts . “Sophisticated computer algorithms used to set prices in online marketplaces put consumers at risk of collusion among sellers, according to a study today [thurs] from computer scientists at the Oxford Internet Institute and Imperial College.”

Washington Post: Google shared AI knowledge with the world — until ChatGPT caught up. “In February, Jeff Dean, Google’s longtime head of artificial intelligence, announced a stunning policy shift to his staff: They had to hold off sharing their work with the outside world. For years Dean had run his department like a university, encouraging researchers to publish academic papers prolifically; they pushed out nearly 500 studies since 2019, according to Google Research’s website. But the launch of OpenAI’s groundbreaking ChatGPT three months earlier had changed things.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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May 7, 2023 at 12:24AM
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Mapping May 4, Grimes’ Voice, Gmail, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, May 6, 2023

Mapping May 4, Grimes’ Voice, Gmail, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, May 6, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Kent Stater: Mapping May 4 project connects history to its location. “The Mapping of May 4 is a website, and it takes short audio clips of stories from oral histories in the Kent State archives and puts them on a map. It covers the historical events between May 1 and May 5, 1970.”

Complete Music Update: Grimes launches website to replicate her voice using AI. “Grimes has launched a new website making it easier to replicate her voice using AI, should you want to. It was only last month that the musician gave her blessing for people to do so. The website allows users to upload audio of themselves singing or to record directly into the software via their computer microphone. Once processed, the same audio will be returned but with a computer-generated Grimes voice.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Gmail ads are getting more annoying. “Gmail is getting more persistent advertisements that have started popping up in the middle of some users’ inboxes, as first reported by 9to5Google. Several screenshots posted to Twitter show promotional messages mixed in with actual emails on Gmail’s desktop site, and users aren’t very happy about it.” Giving me strong AltaVista vibes.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Tricycle: A Nontoxic Social Media Experience. “The app departs from other social media apps in that there’s no feed, no photos or videos, and no texting element. Rather, Landed connects users one-on-one via audio messages. Each week, on Sunday, users are prompted to share three things they were grateful for in the last week, and, if they want, to share a challenging experience. A few days later, they’ll receive an audio message from their randomly assigned match for the week, and then the matched pair can exchange audio for the rest of the week.”

NPR: Digital news sites fight to survive as online ad dollars dry up. “Online news sites are fighting to survive as online ad dollars dry up. And at the same time, large social media companies, the backbone of the modern internet, are slumping. NPR’s Bobby Allyn reports on what the future of digital news looks like in this uncertain era.”

Yahoo News: People with disabilities have built a community on TikTok. They fear its loss if the app is banned.. “[Katriel] Nopoulos, who uses they/them pronouns, soon discovered that TikTok could be a life-changing tool. Nopolous was born without a lower jaw, so they communicate by using American Sign Language. TikTok allows creators to easily deploy a computer-generated voice to read text out loud. This is both an accessibility issue — so that the blind and visually impaired can absorb their content — and a liberating innovation for Nopoulos. For the first time in their life, Nopoulos could be heard — literally.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Europol: International art trafficking sting leads to 60 arrests and over 11 000 objects recovered. “Law enforcement has arrested 60 people, and recovered 11 049 stolen artefacts as part of a major international art trafficking crackdown across 14 European countries.”

Associated Press: Colorado politicians seek power to block social media users. “Colorado lawmakers pushed a bill to the governor’s desk that would allow politicians to block social media users from their private accounts, just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would consider to what extent that’s legal.”

Courthouse News Service: Fired Twitter employees ordered to arbitrate wrongful termination claims. “Billionaire and new Twitter owner Elon Musk won a first round in federal court Friday when a judge granted Twitter’s motions to dismiss wrongful termination claims from employees fired last fall, ordering them to arbitration instead.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Kyiv Post: OPINION: Russia Getting Beaten by Hackers. “Russia has long prided itself as having the world’s “second greatest army” and the world’s ‘best’ hackers with a large number of hacks against the United States, Europe, and in Ukraine. However, in the past few weeks, it appears that Russia’s reputation was judged too highly, as it has faced one disastrous hack after another by anti-Putin or pro-Ukraine hacking groups.”

Fast Company: New research: Twitter bot detection tools aren’t very good. “A new paper suggests that the field of bot detection is based on a flawed premise due to poor-quality original data. The research, presented this week at the Web Conference (where it was awarded best paper), found that bot detection tools can rely on funky, flawed data sets that replicate mistakes made within one another, rather than trying to actually accurately identify bots.”

WIRED: Twitter Really Is Worse Than Ever. “A YEAR AGO, Elon Musk announced that he wanted to buy Twitter to clear it of bots and turn ‘the de facto public town square’ into a place for unfettered free speech. Social media experts worried that would mean the platform would stop moderating what users post, and warned that the consequence of Musk’s stated absolutism would be that the platform would be overrun with violent and hateful content. It turns out they were right.” Good morning, Internet…

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May 6, 2023 at 05:34PM
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Species Awareness Index, Reddit, AI-Generated Content, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 5, 2023

Species Awareness Index, Reddit, AI-Generated Content, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 5, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Natural History Museum: Monitoring changes in Wikipedia pageviews could help save wildlife. ” Monitoring changes in how people view the natural world could prove invaluable in gaining support for tackling the biodiversity crisis. Many current metrics that monitor these changes are not published in real-time, often due to a lack of resources…. But now researchers have developed a new tool called the Species Awareness Index (SAI), which can track the real-time rate of change in online biodiversity awareness. The index looks at the monthly change in average daily page views for around 40,000 species across 10 of the most popular Wikipedia languages.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Reddit makes easier to share and view linked posts on social media sites. “Admitting that ‘we didn’t make it easy to’ share posts on other social media platforms, Reddit has announced that it’s rolling out new features to fix that issue. Those include an updated “shared link” preview for text posts shared via messaging services, new sharing for Instagram Stories, one-tap screenshot sharing and more.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: AI-written content isn’t the web’s future. It’s already here . “Generative AI tools have captured the world’s attention since ChatGPT’s November release. Yet a raft of online publishers have been using automated writing tools based on ChatGPT’s predecessors, GPT-2 and GPT-3, for years. That experience shows that a world in which AI creations mingle freely and sometimes imperceptibly with human work isn’t speculative; it’s flourishing in plain sight on Amazon product pages and in Google search results.”

The Tablet: Church Must Protect Its Huge Audiovisual Archives, Media Assets, Pope Says. “There is real ‘cultural urgency’ for the entire Catholic Church to preserve its audiovisual, documentary and other media archives and assets, Pope Francis said. Even recently created materials are ‘a fragile asset that require constant care,’ he wrote.”

College of the Holy Cross: Holy Cross Associate Professor: Poetry More Accessible Today Thanks to Technology. “Technology continues to change the way humans live, communicate and even write, the latter thanks to ChatGPT, the news-making artificial intelligence natural language processing tool. And while AI and technology advances like ChatGPT could appear as a threat to literature and its works, the opposite is true, according to poet Oliver de la Paz, associate professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross and poet laureate for the city of Worcester. Technology has led to the democratization of poetry’s accessibility, he said, not its demise, and should be embraced for the opportunities it affords artists to more broadly share their work.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Wall Street Journal: TikTok Tracked Users Who Watched Gay Content, Prompting Employee Complaints. “TikTok doesn’t ask users to disclose their sexual orientation, but it cataloged videos users watched under topics such as LGBT, short for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, the former employees said. The collection of information, which could be viewed by some employees through a dashboard, included a set of affiliated users who watched those videos, and their ID numbers, they said.”

Smart Cities Dive: Dallas ransomware attack causes critical service outages. “Dallas, the ninth-most populated city in the U.S., is responding and attempting to recover from a ransomware attack that shut down multiple critical systems, including websites for the police department and city hall. The city continues to receive and dispatch emergency 911 calls, and service from police and fire remain unaffected, Dallas said in a statement issued Wednesday night.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Notre Dame News: Companies hide negative news by issuing unrelated press releases alongside SEC filings, study shows . “To distract investors from bad news, companies strategically issue unrelated press releases on the same day they file negative news with the SEC via Form 8-K, according to a new study from the University of Notre Dame. Form 8-K is the report publicly traded companies must file with the SEC between quarterly reports to notify shareholders of any major events. Sometimes the news is positive, sometimes it’s negative.”

Nationwide Children’s: Survey: Half of Parents Believe Their Children’s Mental Health Suffered Due to Social Media during the Past Year. “According to a new national survey conducted online by The Harris Poll on behalf of The On Our Sleeves Movement For Children’s Mental Health, half (50%) of parents of children younger than 18 feel their child(ren)’s mental health has suffered during the past 12 months because of social media use.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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May 6, 2023 at 01:18AM
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Moscow Times, FindSupport.gov, Phil Bryant Text Messages, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, May 5, 2023

Moscow Times, FindSupport.gov, Phil Bryant Text Messages, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, May 5, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Moscow Times has announced that its archives are now available online.. From the home page: “The Moscow Times has been Russia’s leading independent English-language media outlet since 1992, publishing daily stories about politics, society, economy and culture. From the privatizations of the 1990s and Putin’s rise to power to ballet performances and the invasion of Ukraine, our archive is an essential instrument to understand and explore every aspect of Russia’s post-Soviet history.”

US Department of Health and Human Services: HHS Launches New Website to Help People Find Support for Issues with Mental Health, Drugs, or Alcohol. “…the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today launched FindSupport.gov, a new user-friendly website, designed for the general public, to help people identify available resources, explore unbiased information about various treatment options, and learn how to reach out to get the support they need for issues related to mental health, drugs, or alcohol.”

Mississippi Today: Gov. Bryant promised to release ‘all’ his welfare scandal-related texts. But some key ones are missing.. “Former Gov. Phil Bryant opted Thursday to release hundreds of pages of text messages with figures in the Mississippi welfare scandal after initially fighting a subpoena against him. But several key messages between the state’s chief executive and his appointed welfare director are missing from the batch, according to a separate trove of leaked text messages obtained and possessed by Mississippi Today.”

EVENTS

TechCrunch: Google I/O 2023 is next week; here’s what we’re expecting. “Google’s annual developer conference returns to Mountain View’s Shoreline Amphitheater next week, and for the first time in four years, we’ll be returning along with it. The kickoff keynote is always jammed-packed full of information, debuting all of the different software projects the company has been working on for the past year.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

WIRED: Google Is Rolling Out Password-Killing Tech to All Accounts. “You can log in with passkeys using biometric sensors like fingerprint or face scanners, your smartphone’s device lock PIN, or physical authentication dongles like YubiKeys.”

Bloomberg: Google Gives Early Look at Pixel Fold Phone Before Debut Next Week. “Alphabet Inc.’s Google gave a surprise early look at a foldable Pixel smartphone, heralding its move into a category currently dominated by Samsung Electronics Co. The company posted a video and photos of the device, called the Pixel Fold, showing a phone with a large external display and an even bigger internal screen that can close up like a clamshell.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Axios: New project explores lives of Afro Mexicans in the U.S.. “A new project at the University of New Mexico seeks to record oral histories and gather photos of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in the U.S. who are the descendants of formerly enslaved Black people.”

Dazed: The history of chain mail: from Jesus to TikTok. “There are thousands of variations of chain messages, typically found in the corners of TikTok where spiritual content runs rampant. Each letter follows a simple formula: they compel users to interact, share and ‘use this sound’ to supposedly call in the life of their dreams or else risk immense misfortune.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNBC: Virgin Islands issued subpoena to Google co-founder Larry Page in lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase over Jeffrey Epstein. “The government of the U.S. Virgin Islands has tried without success so far to serve a subpoena on Google co-founder Larry Page for documents for its civil lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase related to sex trafficking by the bank’s longtime customer Jeffrey Epstein, a court filing revealed Thursday.”

Washington Post: Bill would require disclosure of AI-generated content in political ads. “On Tuesday, Rep. Yvette D. Clarke (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation that would require disclosure of AI-generated content in political ads — part of an effort, she said, to ‘get the Congress going on addressing many of the challenges that we’re facing with AI.'”

Associated Press: Anti-Muslim Twitter feed in Spain: ‘A recipe for disaster’. ” The person who operates the Twitter account claims to be an Islamic fundamentalist living in Spain, empathizing with violent extremists and longing for the days, more than six centuries ago, when Muslims ruled the country. The views are as fake as the account, part of a loose and informal effort by far-right nationalists in Spain to use social media to stir up anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant fervor and to undermine faith in Spain’s multicultural democracy.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Cornell Chronicle: AI-CLIMATE institute aims to curb emissions, boost economy. “Cornell is one of six universities receiving a total of $20 million over five years from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to form an institute aiming to create more climate-smart practices that will curb U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, while boosting the economy in the agriculture and forestry industries.” Good morning, Internet…

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May 5, 2023 at 05:32PM
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Charles W. Chesnutt, Android, Google, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 4, 2023

Charles W. Chesnutt, Android, Google, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 4, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

University of Nebraska-Lincoln: Chesnutt Archive adding author’s correspondence. “The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities is now adding correspondence through a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. About 170 letters between Chesnutt and important historical figures such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois and others have been added thus far.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Android can automatically archive apps you aren’t using. “After a teaser last year, Google is ready to help you save space on your phone by shelving unused apps. The company is rolling out an auto-archive feature that removes key parts of apps without erasing personal data. So long as an app is still available on the Play Store, you just have to tap its icon to re-download the missing pieces. This can free as much as 60 percent of an app’s space, Google says.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CNBC: Google employees complain about CEO Sundar Pichai’s pay raise as cost cuts hit rest of the company. “Google CEO Sundar Pichai received a hefty pay raise last year, making him one of the highest-paid CEOs in America. Last week, his company announced the authorization of a $70 billion stock buyback. Meanwhile, Google parent Alphabet has been aggressively cutting costs, including the elimination of 12,000 jobs, in response to slowing revenue growth. That confluence of events has raised the ire of Google’s workforce.”

The Verge: TikTok’s head of US trust and safety is leaving. “TikTok’s head of trust and safety for the US, Eric Han, is leaving the company on May 12th, according to two people familiar with the matter and an internal memo to employees I’ve seen. His departure comes as TikTok is still trying to clench a deal to avoid a ban by the US government.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

San Francisco Chronicle: Court tosses lawsuit accusing Twitter of profiting from sex trafficking. “A federal appeals court on Wednesday dismissed a suit accusing Twitter of profiting from sex trafficking by allowing a paying customer to post nude photos of two 13-year-old boys. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals relied on a 1996 federal law that shields tech platforms from liability for content posted by others, a law now under review in the Supreme Court.”

Oregon State University: OSU research shows how hackers can target smart meters to destabilize electricity grid. “A power transmission grid can be destabilized by hackers who manipulate smart meters to create an oscillation in electricity demand, researchers in the Oregon State University College of Engineering have shown.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Scottish Field: Artificial Intelligence To Help With Gaelic Subtitles. “ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) is being used to create a Gaelic subtitle service that could be used by the BBC. Linguists and AI researchers from Edinburgh and Glasgow universities have been awarded £225,000 by the Scottish Government to develop the system.”

Washington State University: Gender gap found in research grant award amounts, re‑applications. “Women researchers received substantially less funding in grant awards than men — an average of about $342,000 compared to men’s $659,000, according to a large meta-analysis of studies on the topic. Women were also less likely to receive second grants to continue their research.”

VentureBeat: Private AI’s PrivateGPT aims to combat ChatGPT privacy concerns. “Today, data privacy provider Private AI, announced the launch of PrivateGPT, a ‘privacy layer’ for large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The new tool is designed to automatically redact sensitive information and personally identifiable information (PII) from user prompts. ”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

UNESCO: UNESCO supports the launch of a MOOC of initiation to Dongba script, “the last living pictographic script in the world”. “The Naxi community numbers around 300,000 people living in Northern Yunnan in south-west China. The Dongba script used by the Naxi is considered the last living pictographic script in the world and is at risk of disappearing, as only a very small number of people can actually use the language. Dongba pictograms have a strong cultural role for the Naxi and are a manifestation of the beliefs of the Naxi people: a form of shamanism based on the cult of nature, associated with popular beliefs and Tibetan cultural influences.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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May 5, 2023 at 12:10AM
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