Wednesday, October 18, 2023

Small Satellite Reliability Initiative, Google, Text Extraction, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, October 18, 2023

Small Satellite Reliability Initiative, Google, Text Extraction, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, October 18, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

NASA: NASA Releases Small Spacecraft Reliability Knowledge Base Tool v3.0. “The [Small Satellite Reliability Initiative] Knowledge Base is a free, pubicly available, comprehensive and searchable online tool that consolidates and organizes resources, best practices, and lessons learned from previous NASA small satellite missions and missions sponsored by other organizations. The SSRI Knowledge Base is updated on a regular cadence with best practices, lessons learned, and unique resources for the 58 topic pages.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Eyerys: Google Introduces ‘AR One Sans,’ A Font Meant For Augmented Reality Headsets. “A font is those stylized characters for text information. And Google has just introduced what it calls the ‘AR One Sans’, which is a type family purposefully designed for AR environments and user interfaces. What makes it unique, is its high-readability on user interface with busy backgrounds.”

USEFUL STUFF

Make Tech Easier: 7+ Ways to Extract Text From an Image. “There are many reasons to copy the text you see in an image. You may have a screenshot with instructions or a photo of a billboard with details. This guide includes several ways to extract text from an image, depending on your platform or device.”

PC World: 22 awesome open source programs that do everything you need. “Good software is the basis of all PC use, but many professional programs are too expensive for private use. This is where the free software-based applications step in, which, including their source code, are available free of charge on the internet. This immediately raises the question of quality and functionality. Don’t worry, open source software is often a real competitor to professional products. In this guide, we present the best open source tools for typical areas of application — from Office, to media editing, to file management and backup.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

404 Media: AI Images Detectors Are Being Used to Discredit the Real Horrors of War. “A free AI image detector that’s been covered in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal is currently identifying a photograph of what Israel says is [too graphic for me to mention in a summary] as being generated by AI. However, the image does not show any signs it was created by AI, according to Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley and one of the world’s leading experts on digitally manipulated images.” This story is extremely disturbing and graphic.

Washington Post: A flood of misinformation shapes views of Israel-Gaza conflict. “Social media has long played a critical role in battles in the area. During the 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in 2021, posts of carnage in Gaza rallied the public to the Palestinian cause. Researchers say increased internet access and the spread of smartphones enabled a watershed moment, revealing how tech platforms could show the horror and human toll of such events. But now, a volatile, months-long fight over Israel’s democratic future has primed conspiracies and false information to spread within its borders.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Hindu: All of Google’s eyes, now on Madras High Court. “The court will decide the fate of civil suits filed against service fees levied on owners of mobile apps featured on Google Play. The litigants have accused Google of abusing its dominant position in the market to impose ‘unconscionable and arbitrary’ conditions.”

Associated Press: Australian safety watchdog fines social platform X $385,000 for not tackling child abuse content. “Australia’s online safety watchdog said on Monday it had fined X — the social media platform formerly known as Twitter — 610,500 Australian dollars ($385,000) for failing to fully explain how it tackled child sexual exploitation content.”

BBC: Inside the deadly instant loan app scam that blackmails with nudes. “A blackmail scam is using instant loan apps to entrap and humiliate people across India and other countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At least 60 Indians have killed themselves after being abused and threatened. A​ BBC undercover investigation has exposed those profiting from this deadly scam in India and China.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog: Cataloguing the Cotton charters. “A new project is underway to examine one of the British Library’s oldest and most important collections. The Cotton charters and rolls are being catalogued as part of the Library’s Hidden Collections initiative. Begun by the antiquarian and politician Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631), and augmented by his son and grandson, the Cotton collection was the first library to be presented to the nation, in 1702, and it has been part of the British Library and its predecessor, the British Museum Library, since the latter’s foundation in 1753.”

New York Times: Wearables Track Parkinson’s Better Than Human Observation, Study Finds. “An Oxford University researcher and her team showed that digital wearable devices can track the progression of Parkinson’s disease in an individual more effectively than human clinical observation can, according to a newly published paper.”

Truth or Fiction: So Long, and Thanks for All the Facts. “Visibility and visits are the lifeblood of digital publishing, and the absence of fact checks to an audience is the absence of sustaining revenue to a site or project; this is how efforts like ours are slowly starved into silence. It’s not just counterdisinformation that is under attack. Related services and fields have been chronically starved away for decades and replaced with distortions and outright lies.” Yup. Good morning, Internet…

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October 18, 2023 at 05:31PM
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Tuesday, October 17, 2023

My Big Fat Greek Manuscript, Lexicon of New Jewish Literature, Twitter, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 17, 2023

My Big Fat Greek Manuscript, Lexicon of New Jewish Literature, Twitter, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 17, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog: The largest Greek manuscript?. “Add MS 35123 comprises more than 600 leaves, almost 1,300 larger-than-A4 pages, bound tightly between heavy medieval wooden boards that weigh almost 10 kilograms. This giant tome is a late-12th century Biblical manuscript, containing the first eight books of the Old Testament: the five from Moses appended by Joshua, Judges and Ruth.” The first eight books of the Old Testament and LOTS of commentary.

Forward: The comprehensive lexicon of Jewish writers is now accessible on the Internet. This article has been translated from Yiddish. “Researchers and simply lovers of the Yiddish word have long been interested in a digital encyclopedia of all writers who published in Yiddish. Now, in honor of its 75th anniversary, the Jewish Cultural Congress has digitized the Jewish original and installed a search function. His current website includes the entire content of the eight-volume Lexicon of New Jewish Literature, as well as the supplemental volume on Soviet Jewish writers.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Rolling Stone: War Misinfo Is Everywhere. So Twitter Is Cracking Down on … Nudity . “X, formerly Twitter, may sound like a porn site, but it’s growing more hostile to adult content. Although currently awash in misinformation and extremist hate speech related to the ongoing war between Israeli armed forces and Hamas militants, the platform is apparently focused on keeping nudity out of users’ feeds rather than how it may be fueling violence and geopolitical instability.”

National Library of Norway: New Bokhylla agreement gives you digital access to 400,000 books. (Translated from Norwegian.) “Soon you will have digital access to all books published in Norway up to and including 2005 in the Nettbiblioteket at nb.no. The new Bokhylla agreement, which has been entered into between the National Library and Kopinor, covers 400,0000 Norwegian books subject to rights. This is 175,000 more than today.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Preservation Underground (Duke University Libraries): Automatic Text Generation Fail. “We discovered that Microsoft Word will now automatically generate Alt Text (alternative text) descriptions of the images you insert into your documents after it described an Ethiopic scroll as a roll of toilet paper. Clearly the robots have some training to do on cultural heritage materials.”

Tubefilter: Dude Perfect gets its own streaming service. “Dude Perfect has officially launched its own streaming service. The Texas-based YouTube trickshot group–aka longtime friends Tyler Toney, Garrett Hilbert, Cody Jones, and twins Cory and Coby Cotton–first unveiled the free-to-watch service (and accompanying app) this past June, during its Pandemonium Tour.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: Your Face May Soon Be Your Ticket. Not Everyone Is Smiling.. “Facial recognition software is speeding up check-in at airports, cruise ships and theme parks, but experts worry about risks to security and privacy.”

Engadget: The EPA won’t force water utilities to inspect their cyber defenses. “The EPA is withdrawing its plan to require states to assess the cybersecurity and integrity of public water system programs. While the agency says it continues to believe cybersecurity protective measures are essential for the public water industry, the decision was made after GOP-led states sued the agency for proposing the rule.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Search Engine Journal: Research: GPT-4 Jailbreak Easily Defeats Safety Guardrails. “Researchers discovered a new way to jailbreak ChatGPT 4 so that it no longer has guardrails to prohibit it from providing dangerous advice. The approach, called Low-Resource Languages Jailbreak,” achieves a stunning 79% total success rate.”

WIRED: The Curse of the Creator Economy. “Seldom do I crawl out of a TikTok rabbit hole feeling well-informed and more knowledgeable about complicated subjects. And then there’s the trust issue. Some people gleefully anticipate the end of gatekeepers. But the creator ecosystem has insufficient protections against toxic, even racist content. An oft-cited drive of creators is getting famous, and that compass too often points to the lowest common denominator. Creators are also all too eager to sell out their followers with that might in other venues be called bribes.” Good afternoon, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I live at Calishat.



October 18, 2023 at 12:14AM
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Missouri Vital Records, Little Case Bots, African Fact-Checking Awards, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, October 17, 2023

Missouri Vital Records, Little Case Bots, African Fact-Checking Awards, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, October 17, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Reclaim the Records: A Million New Records From Missouri. “The Missouri Birth Index has been updated with 588,542 new records from 1910-1919 and 2016-2022, for a total of 8,090,516 records covering 1910-2022. The Missouri Death Index has been updated with 482,900 new records from 2016-2022, for a total of 3,081,382 records covering 1968-2022.”

Free Law Project: Rise of the Little Case Bots! . “Each of these bots is professionally curated by a legal observer in the particular field. For example, writers at The Verge follow numerous court cases in the tech field, the folks at the American Economic Liberties Project follow antitrust cases, and so forth. With the launch of these bots, you can now easily ride on their coat tails. To do so, simply click the links above, and then follow their bots on Twitter or Mastodon.”

EVENTS

Africa Check: Work on police brutality, inauthentic online campaigns and workers’ rights the big winners at 2023 African Fact-Checking Awards. “Moussa Ngom of La Maison Des Reporters and Laureline Savoye of Le Monde Afrique were this year’s winners in the ‘Fact Check of the Year by a Working Journalist’ category at the African Fact-Checking Awards ceremony held in Mauritius on 6 October. The two Senegalese journalists were recognised for their work on the infiltration of security forces during political demonstrations in March 2021 and June 2023.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ars Technica: Ubuntu 23.10 is a Minotaur that moves faster and takes up less space. “Ubuntu 23.10, codenamed Mantic Minotaur, is the 39th Ubuntu release, and it’s one of the three smaller interim releases Canonical puts out between long-term support (LTS) versions. This last interim before the next LTS doesn’t stand out with bold features you can identify at a glance. But it does set up some useful options and upgrades that should persist in Ubuntu for some time.”

NiemanLab: Elon Musk took the headlines away from Twitter — but you can bring them back with this one weird trick. “It’s a browser extension named Control Panel for Twitter. (Yes, Twitter, not X.) Control Panel offers lots of little tweaks to the Twitter user interface — some of which amount to personal preferences, but others that reverse bad choices the Musk-era company has made. (It can even replace that cheap Unicode X with the old familiar blue bird.)” I installed it. It’s really nice. It replaces the tab icon as well, so you can see a pleasant blue bird instead of that big weird x.

TechCrunch: TikTok’s Effect Creator Rewards fund now has lower eligibility requirements, an updated payout model and more. “TikTok is updating its Effect Creator Rewards program with lower eligibility requirements, a revamped payout model, reduced payout increments and a lower threshold to start collecting rewards. The $6 million fund, which launched in May, rewards creators for the effects they make through TikTok’s AR development platform, Effect House.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: You Can Automatically Make Your iPhone Less Addicting at Bedtime. “Switching to grayscale mode is one of the most effective ways to reduce your screen time. It’s easy to enable on your smartphone, and when all the bright colors are gone, you’ll notice that it’s much easier to put your phone away. I’ve found this hack to be very effective, but I’ve always ended up disabling grayscale mode within a week. This time though, I discovered a clever but effective way to make it stick—automation.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bloomberg: Google Ad Changes Leave Marketers Flying Blind, Expert Says. “Alphabet Inc.’s Google quietly made changes to its advertising platform that significantly limits the amount of information marketers have about where their spending is going, according to an expert called on behalf of the federal government in an ongoing antitrust trial against the search giant.”

New York Times: ‘Start-Up Nation’ Is Tested as Israel’s Reservists Leave Their Desks. “Israel’s defense forces have called up about 360,000 reservists for duty. Such numbers will test the resilience of the technology community that contributes about 20 percent of the country’s economy — and a significant portion of global activity in cutting-edge areas including cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and semiconductors.”

The Verge: YouTube is the latest large platform to face EU scrutiny regarding the war in Israel. “European Commissioner Thierry Breton sent a letter to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai reminding him of the company’s obligations under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) as a large online platform to keep illegal content and disinformation from being shared on YouTube surrounding Israel’s war with Hamas.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CNBC: YouTube passes Netflix as top video source for teens. “Teens polled by the bank said they spent 29.1% of their daily video consumption time on Google-owned YouTube, beating out Netflix for the first time at 28.7%. Time on YouTube rose since the spring, adding nearly a percentage point, while Netflix fell more than two percentage points.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Smithsonian Magazine: This New Hand-Painted Video Game Takes Place Inside Claude Monet’s Eyeball. “Australian designer and developer Pat Naoum spent seven years creating the game… To progress in the game, players must solve puzzles while running along green vines and through scenes depicted in some of Monet’s paintings. In doing so, they also help Monet complete his works. Naoum hand-painted the entire game, a process that took over 2,000 hours. He then learned to code so he could digitize his artwork and make it interactive—all while holding down a day job as a web designer.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I live at Calishat.



October 17, 2023 at 05:31PM
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Monday, October 16, 2023

Plastic Health Map, Cities in Fiction, Boston Slavery, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 16, 2023

Plastic Health Map, Cities in Fiction, Boston Slavery, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 16, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Environmental Health News: Massive new database on how plastic chemicals harm our health. “Experts from the Minderoo Foundation published today a large, open-access database, called the Plastic Health Map, that includes the findings from more than 3,500 studies from 1961 to 2022 on how plastic chemicals impact human health.”

Scroll (India): An archive project is creating a database of Indian cities in fiction – and you can contribute to it. “The Cities in Fiction project was started by researcher Divya Ravindranath and writer, editor, and translator Apoorva Saini to build a database of real-world cities in fiction… and to see how South Asia is constructed in the fictive imagination. At present, the list primarily covers India, but Ravindranath said that suggestions have been pouring in from all over South Asia since the project’s website went live.”

Boston Globe: Boston researchers have compiled what may be the country’s first city-commissioned database of enslaved people. “The database, which is now posted on the city’s website, lists 2,357 Black and Indigenous people enslaved in Boston between 1641 and 1783, the year Massachusetts abolished slavery. And researchers believe that number is only a fraction of what they can ultimately compile.”

City Monitor: NYC Street Map: A city app now lets you look at historical streets. “The Department of City Planning (DCP) has rolled out an updated version of the NYC Street Map tool, providing users with a record of not just the altered streets but also the original ones dating back to the early 20th century. The tool offers a digital compilation of the entire history of New York City’s 32,000-plus streets.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

How-To Geek: Tor Browser 13.0 Finally Adds a Landscape Aspect Ratio. “The Tor Browser 13.0 update introduces several long-awaited improvements, including a landscape aspect ratio, a fix for the ‘red screen of death,’ and several enhancements from Mozilla’s Firefox ESR 115. Updated app icons and GUI elements are also part of the mix, though Tor Browser retains its basic look and feel.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Architect Magazine: Meet the New Mellon Foundation Initiative That Is Keeping and Shaping Our Places. “The New York–based organization’s newest program area, Humanities in Place, has deployed $136.6 million since its inception in 2020 to expand the capacity of communities to keep and shape their places and built environments through grants for design projects and the social and cultural infrastructure they provide.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Fast Company: Fake airline reps are helping disgruntled passengers rebook flights in the latest bizarre X scam. “Earlier this month, Jason Rabinowitz—an aviation enthusiast who goes by @AirlineFlyer on social media and cohosts the AvTalk podcast from flight-tracking site FlightRadar24—noticed an uptick in bots replying to people who were tweeting at airlines for flight updates and customer service—with Air Canada among the common airlines whose customers ended up getting peppered with tweets. As someone who’s followed the airline industry for the past decade, Rabinowitz says the uptick in bot replies is unprecedented.”

9to5 Mac: Google search payment makes up 14-16% of Apple’s profits; if that’s banned, what then?. “The Google search payment – the annual amount Google pays to Apple in return for being the default search engine in Safari – reportedly makes up 14-16% of the Cupertino company’s total profits. With that payment now threatened by the antitrust case against Google, Bernstein analysts look at what that could mean for Apple.” Amazed that a company as old as Apple got that reliant on one revenue source.

RESEARCH & OPINION

Northeastern Global News: Do comics help as a STEM learning tool? Northeastern professor’s study aims to answer that question . “The National Science Foundation awarded [Luke] Landherr a grant to examine this in one of the first studies of its kind on whether comics help as a visual learning tool. Landherr will create a series of comics for a core introductory chemical engineering course that will be used at five partner institutions, as well as Northeastern. Landherr will then look at grades as well as concept testing to determine if student understanding and engagement improves when comics are used.”

The Next Web: Google’s AI could soon consume as much electricity as Ireland, study finds. “A new study published this week suggests that the AI industry could consume as much energy as a country like Argentina, Netherlands, or Sweden by 2027. What’s more, the research estimates that if Google alone switched its whole search business to AI, it would end up using 29.3 terawatt-hours per year — equivalent to the electricity consumption of Ireland.” Good afternoon, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I live at Calishat.



October 17, 2023 at 12:05AM
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Super Street Magazine, Whole Earth Catalog, Ransomlooker, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, October 16, 2023

Super Street Magazine, Whole Earth Catalog, Ransomlooker, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, October 16, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

MotorTrend: Super Street Magazine Digital Archive Now Available—for Free!. “The Super Street Network continues delivering current feature cars and in-depth event coverage digitally, but don’t think that all those print issues that once landed in your mailbox and cluttered your desk space are long gone. They’re back! Over 170 past issues dating back to 2002 have been digitized and made available for you to view online for free with your registration on MotorTrend+ (U.S. and Canada).” In other words, registration is free but you do have to register.

Gizmodo: You Can Now Read the Whole Earth Catalog Online. “Remember the Whole Earth Catalog? If you’re a fan of the anarcho-libertarian magazine that helped usher in a popular interest in all things tech and internet culture, there’s good news: a nearly complete collection of the publication’s archive has been digitized and uploaded to the web for easy browsing.”

SecurityAffairs: Ransomlooker, A New Tool To Track And Analyze Ransomware Groups’ Activities . “Cybernews presented Ransomlooker, a tool to monitor ransomware groups’ extortion sites and delivers consolidated feeds of their claims worldwide. The researchers have created the tool to help cybersecurity experts in their daily jobs by providing real-time updates and actionable insights. It offers various statistical insights into data, the ability to determine attack perpetrators, and incorporates filtering by country, industries, time span, and other parameters for journalistic investigations.”

EVENTS

International Centre for Investigative Reporting: ICFJ seeks entries to investigate election disinformation. “THE International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) is calling for applications for its Disarming Disinformation programme, sponsored by the Scripps Howard Fund…. Journalists worldwide interested in combating electoral disinformation can apply for the programme, which will take place on November 7, 8, and 9.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

WordPress: WordPress 6.3.2 – Maintenance and Security release. “This security and maintenance release features 19 bug fixes on Core, 22 bug fixes for the Block Editor, and 8 security fixes. WordPress 6.3.2 is a short-cycle release.”

Ars Technica: Google.com tests a news-filled homepage, just like Bing and Yahoo. “Google is still wondering if it should make major changes to its homepage. The last experiment we saw filled the usually stark white page with info cards showing things like the weather and stocks, but this new experiment, spotted by the site MSPoweruser, has a much bigger focus on news.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: If Every Brand Is Funny Online, Is Anything Funny?. “For a decade, marketers have found success on social media by roasting customers, and even flirting with them. But with Gen Z, and platforms like TikTok on the rise, the jokes may be wearing thin.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bloomberg Law: New Disclosure Site Slow to Post Judicial Stock Trading Reports. “Delays in posting stock transactions and other financial disclosures by US judges to a new database are limiting the utility of a tool designed to improve public transparency of the court system, watchdogs said.”

The Messenger: Supreme Court Extends Block on Biden and Social Media Company Communication. “The Supreme Court on Friday extended a preliminary injunction blocking the Biden administration from contacting social media companies to question posts on their platforms.”

CNBC: Elon Musk’s X illegally fired employee who publicly challenged return-to-work plans, NLRB alleges. “Elon Musk’s X broke the law in firing an employee who criticized management’s return-to-work policy, the National Labor Relations Board alleged, in its first formal complaint against the company formally known as Twitter.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Illinois State University: Virtual reality technology and individuals with communication disorders. “For the past three years, Dr. Jennine Harvey, Dr. Isaac Chang, Dr. Megan Cuellar, and Dr. Gabriela Fonseca Pereira have investigated the efficacy of virtual reality environments for speech-language pathology intervention. This interdisciplinary team has developed a real-world virtual environment to examine the potential of VR technology and innovative applications in evidence-based practice in SLP intervention, clinical training, and pedagogy.”

Northeastern Global News: How can cities use AI? These professors are creating guidelines for how artificial intelligence could be used for public interest.. “The Public Interest Technology University Network recently awarded a Network Challenge Grant to Northeastern University and its Boston Area Research Initiative, run by Dan O’Brien and Kim Lucas, both of whom teach public policy in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs. The grant funds projects dedicated to growing public interest technology. O’Brien and Lucas will use the grant to research how AI can be used by the city of Boston and to educate residents on its usage.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I live at Calishat.



October 16, 2023 at 05:31PM
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Sunday, October 15, 2023

Mindanao Biodiversity, Rhode Island Geospatial Data, Google, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 15, 2023

Mindanao Biodiversity, Rhode Island Geospatial Data, Google, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 15, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Biodiversity Data Journal: The MOBIOS+: A FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) database for Mindanao’s terrestrial biodiversity . “This initiative seeks to enhance our comprehension of biodiversity trends in Mindanao over temporal and spatial dimensions, while also creating an openly-accessible database. The database we present here is the first of its kind and currently the most comprehensive attempt to establish the largest consolidated database for Mindanao biodiversity, based on publicly available literature.”

Brown University Library News: The Ocean State Spatial Database . “Frank Donnelly (Head of Library GIS and Data Services) and his team of student workers at GeoData@SciLi recently released the Ocean State Spatial Database (OSSDB), a geodatabase for conducting basic geographic analysis and thematic mapping within the State of Rhode Island. This open source database is intended to serve as a foundation for contemporary mapping projects, and as an educational tool for supporting GIS coursework and introducing spatial databases and SQL.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Land: Google Search officially stops indented results. “Google has stopped showing indented results in the Google search listings. Google has historically showed an indented search result under the main result when it was from the same domain but over the past few weeks, Google stopped indenting those results.”

Irish Times: Social media firms deploying ‘crisis teams’ to combat Gaza ‘misinformation’. “Ireland’s Digital Services Commissioner, John Evans, has said there has been a ‘heightened sense of activity” among social media platforms in response to misinformation about the conflict in Israel and Gaza. He said some of the platforms had deployed crisis response teams and experts with specific language skills to respond to posts about the conflict in Gaza.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Make Your TikTok Videos More Accessible: 5 Essentials. “TikTok is one of the most popular platforms for short-form video. But how can you ensure that your videos can be enjoyed by everyone? Here are some tips on how to make your TikTok videos more accessible so that people with disabilities and certain medical conditions can watch them comfortably too.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Boing Boing: Firefox to have built-in “fake review detector”. “The web browser Firefox will warn users when they’re looking at fake reviews online. The feature follows the foundation’s acquisition of Fakespot, a web service that specializes in doing just that.”

CNBC: Google is opening a cafe, store and event space to the general public near its headquarters. “Google is opening a sliver of its main campus to the general public starting this week. The company opened its doors to what it’s calling its ‘Visitor Experience’ center the public Thursday, following a ceremony where Google executives and local leaders gathered hear its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Apple AirTags stalking led to ruin and murders, lawsuit says . “Since the lawsuit was initially filed in 2022, plaintiffs have alleged that there has been an ‘explosion of reporting’ showing that AirTags are frequently being used for stalking, including a spike in international AirTags stalking cases and more than 150 police reports in the US as of April 2022. More recently, there were 19 AirTags stalking cases in one US metropolitan area—Tulsa, Oklahoma—alone, the complaint said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Stuff (New Zealand): Stuff Group withdraws from X (formerly Twitter). “Stuff, New Zealand’s biggest independently owned news business, will stop sharing content to X (formerly Twitter), effective immediately. The company, which owns this website, has flagged it is increasingly concerned about the volume of mis- and disinformation being shared, and the damaging behaviour being exhibited on and enabled by the platform.”

Nature: AI reads text from ancient Herculaneum scroll for the first time. “A 21-year-old computer-science student has won a global contest to read the first text inside a carbonized scroll from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, which had been unreadable since a volcanic eruption in AD 79 — the same one that buried nearby Pompeii. The breakthrough could open up hundreds of texts from the only intact library to survive from Greco-Roman antiquity.” Good afternoon, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I live at Calishat.



October 16, 2023 at 12:10AM
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Mathematical Puzzles, Social Media, Chrome, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, October 15, 2023

Mathematical Puzzles, Social Media, Chrome, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, October 15, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Dartmouth College: Math Puzzles for the Public. “The revised edition of the critically acclaimed 2000 book, Mathematical Puzzles—heralded as ‘the best collection of mind-stretching teasers ever assembled’ by celebrated computer scientist Donald Knuth—is now available free online on the mathematics department’s website. The classic collection, which features puzzles from every continent, is designed for amateur mathematicians of any age, no calculus skills required.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Reuters: SPAC to return remaining $533 million raise for Trump social media deal. “Digital World Acquisition Corp, the SPAC that plans to merge with former U.S. President Donald Trump’s media and technology company, said this week it would return to investors $533 million raised for the deal, after some have already backtracked on $467 million of commitments.”

Mashable: Google Chrome now lets you wipe the last 15 minutes of your cringey activities — here’s how. “Google has added some new, super-useful functionality for folks who want to quickly wipe 15 minutes worth of their Chrome history. The new tool, however, is only for Android users. All you need to do is click the three dots in the upper-right corner of Chrome before selecting ‘Clear Browsing Data.’ By default, this will delete the last 15 minutes of your browsing activity.”

Gizmodo: These Brands Are Still Going Down With NFT’s Sinking Ship. “Despite this downturn, there are still major companies that jumped on the NFT hype train last year and have yet to jump off. It’s a trolley problem for major brands. Either the company keeps on making NFTs in the vain hope it hasn’t wasted any money on a speculative tech bubble, or it bows its head and calls it quits.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

WIRED: A New Tool Helps Artists Thwart AI—With a Middle Finger. “Over the past year, as image-generating AI tools have grown in popularity, illustrators, photographers, and other visual artists have struggled to determine what they can do to have a say in how their work is used. Some are attempting lawsuits, others are asking regulators to step in. There’s nothing they can do to change how generators have been trained in the past. Starting today, though, the startup Spawning is launching a new tool to help artists who want to block new attempts to train AI on their work.”

Washington Post: Why we can’t stop watching terrible TikTok cooking videos. “With each second I spend watching these videos, the questions pile up in my head — mostly ‘Why?’ Why is he making French onion soup in a bathroom sink? Why did she stick a chicken drumstick in a jar of peanut butter? Why is this person putting dried pasta in a blender only to make ‘fresh’ pasta? Will they actually eat that? Is this a joke? Why are they making these kinds of videos? And why are they so popular?”

Semafor: OpenAI has quietly changed its ‘core values’. “ChatGPT creator OpenAI quietly revised all of the ‘Core values’ listed on its website in recent weeks, putting a greater emphasis on the development of AGI — artificial general intelligence. CEO Sam Altman has described AGI as ‘the equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a co-worker.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

AFP: EU to investigate Musk’s X for potential Hamas-Israel conflict disinfo. “The European Commission said Thursday it is opening an investigation into Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly Twitter, to determine if it has allowed the spread of disinformation about the conflict in the Middle East.”

Ars Technica: Thousands of WordPress sites have been hacked through tagDiv plugin vulnerability. “Thousands of sites running the WordPress content management system have been hacked by a prolific threat actor that exploited a recently patched vulnerability in a widely used plugin. The vulnerable plugin, known as tagDiv Composer, is a mandatory requirement for using two WordPress themes: Newspaper and Newsmag. The themes are available through the Theme Forest and Envato marketplaces and have more than 155,000 downloads.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Northwestern Now: AI just got 100-fold more energy efficient. “Northwestern University engineers have developed a new nanoelectronic device that can perform accurate machine-learning classification tasks in the most energy-efficient manner yet. Using 100-fold less energy than current technologies, the device can crunch large amounts of data and perform artificial intelligence (AI) tasks in real time without beaming data to the cloud for analysis.”

University of Central Florida: UCF Collaborates with the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum to Annotate Seminole Tribe Archives. “The community-based research project challenges colonial stereotypes in mid-20th century Florida newspapers to provide historical accuracy and context for anyone engaging with the museum’s database.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Engadget: Coin flips don’t appear to have 50/50 odds after all. “Conventional wisdom about coin flips may have been turned on its head. A global team of researchers investigating the statistical and physical nuances of coin tosses worldwide concluded (via Phys.org) that a coin is 50.8% likely to land on the same side it started on, altering one of society’s most traditional assumptions about random decision-making that dates back at least to the Roman Empire.” Good morning, Internet…

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October 15, 2023 at 05:31PM
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