Courtauld Institute of Art Photography, Robert Randall, Politics Archives, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, May 13, 2023

Courtauld Institute of Art Photography, Robert Randall, Politics Archives, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, May 13, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Courtauld Institute of Art: One million rarely seen photographs from The Courtauld’s collection unveiled thanks to major public project. “The Courtauld Institute of Art has completed a major five-year project to open up its internationally-renowned collection of photographs to the public for free, working with 14,000 volunteers to digitise over one million images from The Conway Library as part of the biggest public inclusion project in The Courtauld’s history.”

Marijuana Moment: Activist Preserves Legacy Of Husband Who Won Right To Medical Marijuana Grown By The Feds 45 Years Ago. “Forty-five years ago, a tenacious glaucoma patient named Robert Randall made history, becoming the first person in the U.S. under prohibition to secure a legal supply of cannabis that was grown, processed and delivered by the federal government itself. Now his widow, Alice O’Leary Randall, a lifelong reform advocate, is marking the anniversary by releasing a digitized ‘Factual Record’ of the case…”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

University of Georgia: UGA’s Russell Library Awarded NEH Grant to Contribute to National Political Digital Archive. “Through a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Georgia Libraries will partner with other academic institutions to expand a nation-wide online congressional archive with content from many of the nation’s most influential politicians.”

CNBC: Goldman Sachs created an A.I.-powered social media startup for corporate use. “Goldman Sachs, known more for its Wall Street bankers than its technology, has just spun out the first startup from its internal incubator. The company, a networking platform for employees called Louisa, was funded and owned by the New York-based investment bank until a few weeks ago, when it became independent, according to founder-CEO Rohan Doctor.”

VoicebotAI: Stability AI’s New Stable Animation SDK Turns Generative AI into a Cartoon Studio. “Synthetic media startup Stability AI has introduced a new tool for producing animation with its open-source Stable Diffusion generative AI models. The new Stable Animation SDK creates animated videos out of a text prompt, with potential assistance from an image or existing video clip.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: YouTuber who crashed plane admits he did it for money and views. “A YouTuber who deliberately crashed a plane to ‘gain notoriety and make money’ has agreed to plead guilty to obstructing a federal investigation, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) announced yesterday. In his plea agreement, California pilot Trevor Jacob admitted to ‘deliberately destroying’ the plane wreckage and repeatedly lying to officials.”

Reuters: Russia fines Google over ‘LGBT propaganda’ and ‘false information’ – agencies. “A Russian court fined Alphabet’s Google 3 million roubles ($38,600) on Thursday for failing to delete YouTube videos it said promoted ‘LGBT propaganda’ and ‘false information’ about Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, Russian news agencies reported.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Globe and Mail: The downside of AI: Former Google scientist Timnit Gebru warns of the technology’s built-in biases. “When Ms. Gebru – who’s 39 and holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a PhD in computer vision from Stanford University – started her career, she stood out. She’s Black, a woman and works in an industry famously lacking in diversity. She moved to the U.S. as a teenager to escape the 1998-2000 Eritrean-Ethiopian War. The discrimination she faced after moving and throughout her career has left a lasting mark.”

MakeUseOf: What Is OpenAI’s Shap-E, and What Can It Do?. “In May 2023, Alex Nichol and Heewon Jun, OpenAI researchers and contributors, released a paper announcing Shap-E, the company’s latest innovation. Shap-E is a new tool trained on a massive dataset of paired 3D images and text that can generate 3D models from text or images. It is similar to DALL-E, which can create 2D images from text, but Shap-E produces 3D assets.”

Brazen Careerist: Grappling With The Death Of Heather Armstrong: Where Does Dooce Leave Us Now?. “People say Heather killing herself is not all that surprising given her problems with addiction. This is what I know from having Heather as my secret coworker for the last 20 years: before the addiction killed her, the blog did.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Colorado State University: New drone application improves tracking for songbird research. “CSU drone experts have helped develop a way to track songbirds during breeding season in the central and western regions of the Great Basin, an application that shows promise for wildlife biology in general. The university’s Drone Center partnered with researchers at Oregon State University to deploy a new and unobtrusive way to study how birds… respond to environmental change.”

WBUR: Boston bus stops double as digital libraries under new pilot program. “Bus stops in Boston are beginning to double as digital libraries under a new pilot program being rolled out across the city. Riders at 20 bus stops can now dip into free digital content by using a QR code to browse and borrow audiobooks, eBooks, e-newspapers and e-magazines for all ages, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said Thursday.” Good morning, Internet…

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May 13, 2023 at 05:29PM
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Nation of Georgia, S.S. Caribou, Mapping Historic Boston, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, May 12, 2023

Nation of Georgia, S.S. Caribou, Mapping Historic Boston, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, May 12, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Agenda Georgia: New website on Georgia’s travel destinations, events launched by national body for visitors. “The new gateway features around 3,200 articles in both Georgian and English about significant tourist attractions, a calendar of interesting tourist events throughout Georgia as well as a centralised platform for intercity transport, plans for hikes and walking adventures, the Administration said.”

Local Journalism Initiative: S.S. Caribou remembered in online museum. “On Apr. 23 at 2:00 p.m., a new online museum exhibit on the sinking of the ferry, S.S. Caribou, during World War II was launched by the Railway Heritage Museum. The sinking, which resulted in the death of 137 people, is considered the deadliest enemy attack in both Canadian and Newfoundland waters during the war.”

New-to-me, from College of the Holy Cross: Students Combine Century-Old Documents and Modern Technology to Research Boston Landscape. “Boston’s Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway is a bustling 17-acre public park and green space, home to food trucks, fountains and even a carousel. But during the second half of the 20th century, that same space hosted one of the most congested elevated highways in the U.S. — the Central Artery. A century prior to that, the area was home to a candy factory, fruit markets and grocers, a Black barbershop, and more. College of the Holy Cross students enrolled in its Making the Modern City course could see all of those iterations at once, thanks to a Boston Public Library tool called Atlascope and Amy Finstein, assistant professor of visual arts. With a click of their cursor, students could walk the streets and travel through decades, watching the area change.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Elon Musk’s Twitter: Everything you need to know, from layoffs to verification. “If you’re just catching up, here’s a complete timeline of what’s going down at the bird app, starting with the most recent news.” I am skipping a lot of the Twitter feature stuff and all of EM’s announcements that don’t involve an actual physical change. I have no intention of indexing any articles about this new CEO, for example, until they are either named and confirmed or they take the post. Thanks to TechCrunch for these roundup articles.

Interfax-Ukraine: Almost 1,500 objects of cultural infrastructure of Ukraine suffer due to Russian aggression – Culture Ministry. “In connection with the Russian armed aggression against Ukraine, 1,464 objects of cultural infrastructure have already suffered, almost a third of them have been destroyed, the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy reports.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

AFP: Disinformation adds dark note to pivotal Turkish election. “Aired at a huge rally and beamed live on TV, the video showed opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu trying to rally his supporters to the tune of his campaign song. In the next sequence, members of Turkey’s banned PKK group echoed that call while clapping their hands to the beat of Kilicdaroglu’s election jingle. The message Erdogan was trying to project was clear: the secular opposition leader had formed a union with ‘terrorists’. Only it was a montage, one of the latest pieces of disinformation to pollute the campaign of one of Turkey’s closest and most important elections in generations.”

Reuters: Mexico to launch database of over 100,000 ‘disappeared’ people . “Mexico will launch a new tool later this month to help record information on the tens of thousands of people who have gone missing, the country’s federal prosecutors office (FGR) said on Thursday. The registry is set to gather information from a number of databases covering mass and clandestine graves, arrests, torture crimes, criminal records, fingerprints and genetics, the FGR said in Mexico’s official gazette.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Guardian: Social media firms should reimburse online fraud victims, say UK bankers. “The boss of the banking industry body UK Finance has called on social media companies to reimburse victims of online fraud, accusing them of “profiting” from scams taking place on their platforms. Figures from its fraud report show that 78% of authorised push payment scams, where a victim is tricked into approving a transaction, started online in the second half of last year, with about three-quarters of those beginning on social media.”

Fortune: Former FTX chief compliance officer cooperating in crypto lawsuit against Tom Brady, Shaq and celebrity promoters. “Dan Friedberg, the former chief compliance officer of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, is cooperating with the plaintiffs bringing a class action suit versus a group of sports stars and entertainers, Fortune has learned from a new legal filing. The lawsuit’s targets include, among others, Shaquille O’Neal, Tom Brady, Naomi Osaka, and Larry David.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Scientific American: How AI Knows Things No One Told It. “No one yet knows how ChatGPT and its artificial intelligence cousins will transform the world, and one reason is that no one really knows what goes on inside them. Some of these systems’ abilities go far beyond what they were trained to do—and even their inventors are baffled as to why. A growing number of tests suggest these AI systems develop internal models of the real world, much as our own brain does, though the machines’ technique is different.”

University of Adelaide: Shining a light on dark web wildlife trade. “A huge amount of wildlife is traded on the internet, with e-commerce marketplaces, private forums and messaging apps being the most popular means to sell and buy live animals, plants, fungi and their parts and products online.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Northeastern Global News: Why the video game industry is making a big mistake by ignoring older adults. “In April, AARP held its first Games Summit at its headquarters in Washington D.C., and for many people outside the video game industry, the event might seem like a head-scratcher. An organization focused on advocating for people in the 50-plus demographic talking about video games, a medium typically thought to be for younger people? But, for AARP––and the games industry––holding the summit actually makes perfect sense. Almost half of people aged 50 and older play video games, according to a recent report from AARP, and almost half of those people said they play daily. And this isn’t an insignificant piece of the gaming audience.” Good morning, Internet…

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May 12, 2023 at 05:30PM
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Canada Baby Names, Georgia Tax Refunds, National Széchényi Library, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 11, 2023

Canada Baby Names, Georgia Tax Refunds, National Széchényi Library, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 11, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

CTV News: New searchable StatCan database lists Noah, Olivia top names in 2021. “Expectant parents and trend watchers have a new online tool to track Canada’s most popular baby names. Statistics Canada launched a searchable database of popular baby names Tuesday, revealing Noah and Olivia as the top monikers for 2021.”

Georgia Department of Revenue: DOR Unveils Surplus Tax Refund Eligibility Status Tool . “State Revenue Commissioner Frank O’Connell today announced a tool for Georgians to view their eligibility for surplus tax refunds. HB 162 and HB 1302 provided for surplus tax refunds of up to $500 for Georgia filers.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

National Széchényi Library: 10,000 digitised pages: the first milestone of the collaboration between the NSZL and the Haydneum . “In connection with the inauguration of the centre, the NSZL and the Haydneum – Hungarian Centre for Early Music have entered into a cooperation agreement, which has resulted in the first 10,000 pages. The aim of the collaboration is to process, manage and revitalise the significant cultural, musical and musicological heritage of Hungary between 1600 and 1850.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

NARA: Shogan Confirmed by U.S. Senate as 11th Archivist of the United States . “The United States Senate voted today to confirm Dr. Colleen Shogan as the 11th Archivist of the United States. Nominated by President Biden on August 3, 2022, Shogan will begin her tenure as the head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) next week. She will be the first woman to hold the position permanently, succeeding David S. Ferriero, who retired in April 2022.”

Guelph Today: City briefly makes Twitter account private after flood of hate. “Online hate in response to an upcoming rainbow crosswalk in Guelph reached a level where city staff had to temporarily make the city’s Twitter account private just to get things under control.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

StarTribune: A Golden Valley bank robbery blew up on social media. It never actually happened.. “One morning in March, a man passed a note demanding money to a teller at a Golden Valley bank branch, then wandered out. The teller hit a panic button to summon police. Hennepin County deputies took a report, categorizing the incident as an ‘attempted robbery.’ Online, the passing of a note took on far larger dimensions.”

Rest of World: In Venezuela, crime victims turn to influencers to find justice. “[María Virginia] Montiel is among the lucky beneficiaries of a strange form of seeking justice that is gaining popularity in Venezuela, where access to formal legal channels has become increasingly limited. In recent years, several victims of crimes — from scams and kidnapping to animal cruelty and gender-based violence — have received justice after their posts on social media platforms went viral, thanks to influencers-turned-social justice warriors.”

Court News Ohio: Board Overseeing Opioid Settlement Funds Must Make Records Public. “The foundation formed to distribute settlement funds that local and state governments are receiving from opioid makers and distributors is the functional equivalent of a public office and must makes its records publicly available, the Supreme Court of Ohio ruled today.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Carnegie Mellon: Good Design is the Magic Behind AI Game. “… a team of Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) students, have created a role-playing video game, Hysteria in Howlsbend, set in a fictional colonial town. The player takes the role of the deputy governor of Massachusetts and must interview three townsfolk to determine which of them is the witch who killed the local reverend. Even Charles Agriogianis, a game designer on the project, doesn’t know what the townsfolk will say. They are voiced, in part, by AI.”

GW Today: Student Research at GW and Beyond Grows through Digitized Scientific Collections. “The initiative is part of the Biological Collections and Ecology and Evolution Network (BCEENET), a community of educators, collections managers and data experts who promote undergraduate scientific exploration using free online resources—providing training materials for educators who want to pass this expertise on to their students.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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May 12, 2023 at 12:55AM
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Catholic-Run Native Boarding Schools, Physical Activity Policies, Chicago Recovery Plan, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, May 11, 2023

Catholic-Run Native Boarding Schools, Physical Activity Policies, Chicago Recovery Plan, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, May 11, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Dialog: Unveiling of list of Catholic-run Native boarding schools allows for ‘subsequent generations to achieve healing’. “On May 9, [Maka] Black Elk and a group of archivists, historians, tribal members and other supporters unveiled a list of some 87 Catholic-run Native boarding schools that had operated in 22 U.S. states prior to 1978. The schools were among more than 400 overseen by the U.S. federal government in the 19th and 20th centuries, with many sites operated by Christian churches and organizations.”

World Health Organization Europe: Physical activity in the EU: policies that make people happier. “WHO/Europe has created a new database in its European Health Information Gateway that shows what WHO-recommended policies have been implemented in the EU. Overall, there are 23 policy indicators for countries in the database, ranging from physical activity promotion policies for vulnerable social groups, through awareness campaigns, to funding.”

City of Chicago: Chicago Launches Recovery Plan Data Transparency Website. “ChiRecoveryPlan.com allows residents to see a comprehensive summary of the Chicago Recovery Plan programs active in their community. At a glance, users can see the number of trees planted nearby, where local businesses have received grants to reactivate vacant storefronts — and how many community members have participated in City youth programs. Residents can also use the site to conduct a deeper dive into how specific programs are serving residents citywide.”

EVENTS

TechCrunch: Google I/O 2023 is a wrap — here’s a list of everything announced. “Since we know you don’t always have time to watch a two-hour presentation, the TechCrunch team took that on and delivered story after story on new products and features. Here, we give you quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they were announced, all in an easy-to-digest, easy-to-skim list.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Guardian: Google launches new AI PaLM 2 in attempt to regain leadership of the pack. “In its preliminary research, the company warned that systems built on PaLM 2 ‘continue to produce toxic language harms’, with some languages issuing ‘toxic’ responses to queries about black people in almost a fifth of all tests, part of the reason the Bard chatbot is only available in three languages at launch.”

USEFUL STUFF

Global Investigative Journalism Network: 4 More Essential Tips for Using the Wayback Machine . “The previous edition of Digital Investigations offered advice for getting the most out of the Wayback Machine. Now I’m back with even more tips, thanks to an interview with Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine. He pointed to a few features I forgot to mention along with one I wasn’t aware of.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Associated Press: Mommy blogger Heather Armstrong, known as Dooce to fans, dead at 47. “The pioneering mommy blogger Heather Armstrong, who laid bare her struggles as a parent and her battles with depression and alcoholism on her site Dooce.com and on social media, has died at 47.”

Muckrock: Help build a public archive of COVID-19 related materials. “Have you been reporting on COVID, or do you have COVID-related documents on DocumentCloud? MuckRock invites you to contribute your documents to a public digital archive to help journalists, researchers and historians tell the stories of the pandemic.”

Daily Beacon (University of Tennessee): Digital archive of Orange and White, Daily Beacon expected next academic year. “Ask most UT alumni for a story from their college years involving The Daily Beacon, and they’ll have one. Maybe it was the lines of students reading the paper each morning over breakfast or a race to finish the crossword puzzle before class. Maybe it was the craziest entries from the crime log or a buzzy story about administration. Next academic year, for the first time, these memories will be accessible with the click of a few keys once UT Libraries completes a full digital archive of The Daily Beacon and its predecessor, The Orange and White.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Associated Press: Elon Musk’s tweets about Texas mall gunman spread misleading claims, question shooter’s background. “Misleading claims about the neo-Nazi gunman responsible for Saturday’s mass shooting at a Dallas-area shopping center are reverberating across Twitter, in large part because of Twitter owner Elon Musk.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

MIT: MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication takes aim at the destructive nature of social media. “The MIT Center for Constructive Communication (CCC) and the closely affiliated nonprofit Cortico today announced the launch of a broad-based effort that draws on expertise in face-to-face human dialogue, digital networks, and machine learning to develop safe and trusted spaces for meaningful, nonpolarizing human connection and civic impact.”

Arkeonews: Staging of religion on rock paintings that are thousands of years old in southern Egypt desert. “Egyptologists at the University of Bonn and the University of Aswan want to systematically record hundreds of petroglyphs and inscriptions dating from the Neolithic to the Arab period and document them in a database. The desert in southern Egypt is filled with hundreds of petroglyphs and inscriptions oldest dating from the fifth millennium B.C. and few have been studied.” Good morning, Internet…

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May 11, 2023 at 05:30PM
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Ireland Genealogy, Covid Postcards, EU Fishing Authorisations, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 10, 2023

Ireland Genealogy, Covid Postcards, EU Fishing Authorisations, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 10, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Cork Beo (Ireland): Cork genealogy database holds 57,000 burial records to help search for ancestors. “Volunteers in Cork have put together an impressive genealogy database to help people look into their own history and fill out the family tree. It’s all part of the Cork Graveyard Project run by Skibbereen Heritage Centre which has compiled an online database of Cork County Council burial registers and graveyard surveys.”

Washington Post: You definitely don’t wish you were here: Postcards in the age of covid. “Clarissa’s covid collection began as these things tend to, with a single item: a pandemic-related card she acquired as part of her interest in current events. There have to be more, she thought — the collector’s mantra…. She learned that an English collector named Mark Routh also had an interest in the topic. They joined forces to acquire cards and enter them into an online database… The database has around 1,900 cards, from more than 60 countries. The styles are all over the map: some funny, some sad, some heroic.”

European Commission: EU Fishing Authorisations website launched. “Today, the European Commission has launched a new website on EU Fishing Authorisations. Users can now search for data on fishing authorisations that have been granted during the last 10 years for EU vessels fishing outside EU waters and for non-EU vessels fishing in EU waters.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Wall Street Journal: Wendy’s, Google Train Next-Generation Order Taker: an AI Chatbot. “Wendy’s is automating its drive-through service using an artificial-intelligence chatbot powered by natural-language software developed by Google and trained to understand the myriad ways customers order off the menu.”

WIRED: Death of an Author Prophesies the Future of AI Novels. “Death of an Author, by Stephen Marche, is the best example yet of the great writing that can be done with an LLM like ChatGPT. Not only is it an exciting read, it’s clearly the product of an astute author and a machine with the equivalent of a million PhDs in genre fiction. ChatGPT read basically the entire internet and all of literature, finding billions of parameters that go into ‘good’ writing.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Indy Week: Local Boards of Elections Face Harassment, Influx of Public Records Requests, Spread of Disinformation. “For the past few years, local boards of elections have also been under heightened scrutiny. Some election workers have received threats, while others have been assaulted by so-called poll watchers. Gary Sims, who has served as the director of the Wake County Board of Elections for eight years and is set to retire at the end of this month, can attest to the phenomenon personally.”

Reuters: EU draft rules propose tougher cybersecurity labelling rules for Amazon, Google, Microsoft. “Amazon, Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft and other non-European Union cloud service providers looking to secure an EU cybersecurity label to handle sensitive data can only do so via a joint venture with an EU-based company, according to an EU draft document seen by Reuters.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EdScoop: Gallaudet experiments with using holograms to teach ASL . “While online video conferencing tools are helpful to reach remote learners, the technology has limitations for ASL users, Laurene Simms, Gallaudet’s chief bilingual officer, said in an interview. She said ASL is a spatial language and facial expression and body positioning convey meaning alongside hand gestures. On a small computer screen, she said, it can be difficult for people to communicate in ASL since full body movement isn’t easily captured. To address this, researchers at Gallaudet are exploring the potential use of hologram technology in ASL instruction to beam life-size ASL instructors into classrooms from anywhere in the world.”

Ars Technica: AI gains “values” with Anthropic’s new Constitutional AI chatbot approach. “On Tuesday, AI startup Anthropic detailed the specific principles of its ‘Constitutional AI’ training approach that provides its Claude chatbot with explicit ‘values.’ It aims to address concerns about transparency, safety, and decision-making in AI systems without relying on human feedback to rate responses. Claude is an AI chatbot similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT that Anthropic released in March.”

Psychology Today: Social Media and Empathy Around the Globe. “To investigate the relationship between empathy and social media use, alongside colleagues at the University of Indiana, we asked more than 1,250 Americans to estimate how frequently they checked Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and to complete questionnaires where they self-described various qualities that researchers call empathy, such as trying to take other people’s perspectives, feeling concerned for other people in distress, and feeling bad when others feel bad.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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May 11, 2023 at 12:31AM
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Mexico Journalists, Persistent American Poverty, Understanding LLMs, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, May 10, 2023

Mexico Journalists, Persistent American Poverty, Understanding LLMs, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, May 10, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Rest of World: The online repository that keeps the work of Mexico’s murdered journalists alive. “In the past two decades, over 150 journalists have been killed in the country. Defensores de la Democracia is building a living online archive to preserve their work.”

Census Bureau: Census Bureau Releases New Report About Persistent Poverty at County and Census-Tract Level. “The report examines county and subcounty geographies (specifically, census tracts), identifying additional populations that may benefit from targeted intervention. It explores census tracts over the same 30-year period (1989 to 2015-2019) as counties allowing for a more direct comparison.”

TechCrunch: OpenAI’s new tool attempts to explain language models’ behaviors. “It’s often said that large language models (LLMs) along the lines of OpenAI’s ChatGPT are a black box, and certainly, there’s some truth to that. Even for data scientists, it’s difficult to know why, always, a model responds in the way it does, like inventing facts out of whole cloth. In an effort to peel back the layers of LLMs, OpenAI is developing a tool to automatically identify which parts of an LLM are responsible for which of its behaviors. The engineers behind it stress that it’s in the early stages, but the code to run it is available in open source on GitHub as of this morning.”

Niagara Frontier Publications: ABC News Digital debuts multimedia project ‘Buffalo: Healing from Hate – One Year Later’. “ABC News announced ABC News Digital’s ‘Buffalo: Healing from Hate – One Year Later,’ a multimedia project chronicling the one-year mark of the May 14, 2022, mass shooting that claimed the lives of 10 people at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The 19th: ‘The world’s largest Black group chat’: Behind the mission to preserve Black Twitter. “[Meredith] Clark is part of Archiving The Black Web, a group of digital archivists seeking to preserve the stories of Black people and extend existing archival practices to the digital sphere. This group and others hope to document not just the content created on the platform but how Black people use it for communication and community.”

Washington Post: Fake sign language is spreading on TikTok. Deaf people are worried.. “Anthony Eagle Jr. is big on TikTok. He boasts over 850,000 followers, many of whom love the way he performs sign language renditions of songs. There’s just one problem — the sign language is sometimes wrong. When Eagle, 39, of Winston-Salem, N.C., signs the song, ‘Love the Way You Lie,’ his rendition is riddled with mistakes, like signing the word ‘lie’ with two hands in the wrong position. To a deaf person who uses sign language, it looks like gibberish.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BBC: Briton pleads guilty in US to 2020 Twitter hack. “A British national extradited to the US last month has pleaded guilty in New York to a role in one of the biggest hacks in social media history. The July 2020 Twitter hack affected over 130 accounts including those of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Joseph James O’Connor, 23, known as PlugwalkJoe, pleaded guilty to hacking charges carrying a total maximum sentence of over 70 years in prison.”

Ars Technica: Feds seize 13 more DDoS-for-hire platforms in ongoing international crackdown. “The US Justice Department has sized the domains of 13 DDoS-for-hire services as part of an ongoing initiative for combatting the Internet menace. The providers of these illicit services platforms describe them as ‘booter’ or ‘stressor’ services that allow site admins to test the robustness and stability of their infrastructure. Almost, if not all, are patronized by people out to exact revenge on sites they don’t like or to further extortion, bribes, or other forms of graft.”

The Guardian: Why is Google stonewalling regulation in Brazil?. “Newspaper Folha de S Paulo reported that Google’s strategy included sending emails to YouTubers saying there would be less money to invest in their channels and asking them to talk to their Congress. The tech giant also fumbled with search results, prominently showing its own blog post and other articles that were critical of the bill, according to a study by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CTV News: Pinterest identifies 1,403% more child abuse material in 2022, but majority of reports come from Facebook. “Major social media sites and digital platforms reported a nine per cent increase in suspected child sexual abuse material in 2022, with 85.5 per cent of all 31.8 million reports coming from Meta platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.”

Toronto Star: Canada set to name foreign labs, universities that pose risk to national security. “Ottawa is in ‘advanced stages’ of drafting a list of entities that pose a risk to national security, and top universities are prepared to avoid working with these entities despite what could be a loss of $100 million or more in annual research funding from foreign partners.”

The Washington Post: Google promised to delete sensitive data. It logged my abortion clinic visit.. “When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, privacy advocates, including me, raised an alarm that data from smartphones could be used to help prosecute abortions. Google offered a partial solution: It would proactively delete its trove of location data when people visited ‘particularly personal’ places, including abortion clinics, hospitals and shelters. Nearly a year later, my investigation reveals Google isn’t doing that in any consistent way. And its response to me shows it isn’t taking accountability.” Good morning, Internet…

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May 10, 2023 at 05:33PM
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New Hampshire Zoning Atlas, SoundCloud, APA Recommendations, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 9, 2023

New Hampshire Zoning Atlas, SoundCloud, APA Recommendations, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 9, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Concord Monitor: Zoning Atlas provides new tool to map state-wide housing needs and barriers to development . “A new tool from researchers at Saint Anselm College, the New Hampshire Zoning Atlas, provides an online catalog of housing-related zoning regulations in the state that makes it easier to distinguish welcoming communities from restrictive ones.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: SoundCloud debuts a fan engagement tool for artists. “Music streaming platform SoundCloud is today launching a new tool to let artists engage with their fans better. The new product, conveniently called Fans, lets artists direct message their followers and sort their listeners through different engagement measures.”

The Hill: APA issues new guidelines on social media use for kids . “The American Psychological Association is urging parents to limit the content their kids are exposed to on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram as part of a new set of guidelines on social media use.”

USEFUL STUFF

Bellingcat: Chronolocation: Determining When a Photo was Taken Using Facebook, Google Street View and Assorted Tiny Details. “How can open source investigators determine when a photograph or video was taken Observing the length of shadows visible in an image or clip and employing tools like Suncalc offers one useful method. But this process of ‘chronolocation’ – determining when a picture was taken rather than just where (which is known as geolocation) – isn’t always feasible.”

The Verge: How to avoid spoilers online. “To protect myself, I’ve cobbled together a few tools and solutions that I’d like to share with you. Hopefully, they will help you avoid spoilers for Zelda or the game, show, or movie, etc. of your choice. But as I’ll discuss a bit later on, there’s no way you can completely guarantee you can avoid spoilers, so be vigilant out there.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

University of Louisville: UofL researchers’ artifact archive tells the story of Louisville. “Researchers from the UofL Center for Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, or CACHe, say this searchable archive is meant to showcase and expand access to anthropological findings from Louisville and surrounding counties in the lower Ohio River Valley. The archive will include pictures, descriptions and 3D scans of artifacts from pre-contact Native American settlements and colonial life as Louisville was founded and grew.”

Irish Times: Google security guard who denied ‘sleeping’ on job fails to overturn sacking. “A security guard at Google’s European headquarters who denied that he was caught ‘sleeping’ on the job and instead said he ‘just had his eyes closed for a long duration of time’ has failed in a statutory challenge to his sacking.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Vietnam to require social media users to verify identity. “Vietnam is preparing to make it mandatory for social media users of both local and foreign platforms to verify their identity in a bid to rein in online scams, state media reported on Monday.”

MIT Technology Review: How to hack a smart fridge. “Do you know how many internet-connected devices there are inside your home? I certainly don’t. These days, it could be almost anything: a thermostat, a TV, a lightbulb, an air conditioner, or a refrigerator. But what I do know, thanks to some of the conversations I’ve had over the past few weeks, is just how much data they’re producing, and how many people can access that data if they want to. Hint: it’s a lot.”

AFP: ‘No time to waste’ on AI law, says EU’s Vestager . “The European Union needs to speed up work on artificial intelligence (AI) regulation, Commission vice president Margrethe Vestager said Monday, as policymakers wrestle with the risks from the emergent technology.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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May 10, 2023 at 12:19AM
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