Digital Services Terms and Conditions Database, Instrument Playground, Grape Belt Archive, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, December 4, 2023

Digital Services Terms and Conditions Database, Instrument Playground, Grape Belt Archive, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, December 4, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

European Commission: Commission launches new database to track digital services terms and conditions. “The Digital Services Terms and Conditions Database will serve as a go-to resource for users, regulators, and stakeholders. Regulators will be able to monitor the digital landscape and assess legal compliance with regulations. Researchers will have the opportunity to gain real-time insights into changing terms and conditions through the database.”

Google Blog: Create a festive jingle with instruments from around the world. “Why not create your own jingle this festive season? Instrument Playground is a new Google AI powered experiment from Simon Doury, Artist in Residence at Google Arts & Culture Lab, that lets you create music inspired by instruments from around the globe.”

Darwin R. Barker Historical Museum: Grape Belt Digital Archive. “The Grape Belt Archive is a collection composed of postcards, rare images, ephemera, agricultural catalogs, pamphlets, and photocopies of reference materials including biographies, academic journals, booklets, newspapers, correspondences, and research notes. Meticulously compiled and curated by John Thomas Slater, the collection’s scope includes artifacts from the grape industry across the Lake Erie Grape Belt, including in Fredonia.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Journal: GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After ‘Unexpected’ Delays. “In an email to GPT builders, OpenAI shared that the GPT Store, a highly anticipated venture in the realm of generative AI technologies, is set for launch early next year. Along with this announcement, the company revealed several enhancements to the GPT Builder tools.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Billboard: ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic’ Wrapped Video Blasts Spotify’s Artist Payout System: ‘Enough to Get Myself a Nice Sandwich’. “While everyone else is busy sharing their Spotify Wrapped lists on their socials this week, ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic took some time on Wednesday (Nov. 29) in his Wrapped video to share a different story. ‘It’s my understanding that I had over 80 million streams on Spotify this year,’ Yankovic said in his clip. ‘So, if I’m doing the math right that means I earned $12. Enough to get myself a nice sandwich at a restaurant. So, from the bottom of my heart, thanks for your support, and thanks for the sandwich.'”

Punch (Nigeria): Face the law, police tell driver using Google map. “The Lagos State Police Public Relations Officer, Benjamin Hundeyin, has told a driver to face the law for violating traffic rules while being led by Google Maps on Saturday night. The driver, Oyiga Michael, had cried out on social media that he was arrested by the police at Ijesha while trying to locate his way home using the Google Map app as a guide.”

The Art Newspaper: As Iceland braces for the winter, museums lobby for more storage. “The fallout of the British Museum scandal is on the minds of museum directors in Reykjavik, the tiny capital city of Iceland, thousands of miles from London. With winter coming, the directors of the country’s many museums and galleries are lobbying their government for better quality storage facilities, so they are fully able to account for their holdings and can ensure their collection is safe.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Vice: Trolls Tricked the QAnon Queen’s Followers Into Volunteering to Kill. “[Romana] Didulo is a QAnon influencer who has convinced a group of people that she’s the true Queen of Canada, as well as a spiritual leader here to save the world. … Didulo, who has traveled across Canada in a convoy with her closest followers, has largely been unwelcome everywhere she goes. And so she’s gained many detractors and enemies who want to take her down. So, when Didulo deploys a new tool as she did this week they can’t help but target it.”

The Guardian: Online gaming platforms such as Roblox used as ‘Trojan horse’ for extremist recruitment of children, AFP warns. “Australian children as young as 12 are being targeted by extremists who are infiltrating online gaming platforms, with a rising number of children being investigated for radicalised ideologies, according to the Australian federal police. The AFP says ideologically and religiously motivated extremists are seeking out new supporters online to coerce them into undertaking violent extremism for their cause.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Next Web: European VC ecosystem heavily biased against female founders. “Among the barriers European tech has to overcome, gender diversity is undoubtedly a pressing one. The numbers are telling. So far in 2023, female-founded startups have raised less than 2% of the total VC capital in Europe. A new study by global early-stage VC firm Antler shows that, unsurprisingly, female founders have to routinely deal with gender bias.”

Gizmodo: Generating AI Images Uses as Much Energy as Charging Your Phone, Study Finds. “Creating images with generative AI could use as much energy as charging your smartphone according to a new study Friday that measures the environmental impact of generative AI models for the first time. Popular models like ChatGPT’s Dall-E and Midjourney may produce more carbon than driving 4 miles.”

Biodiversity Data Journal: Envisaging a global infrastructure to exploit the potential of digitised collections . “While image analysis has become mainstream in consumer applications, it is still used only on an artisanal basis in the biological collections community, largely because the image corpora are dispersed. Yet, there is massive untapped potential for novel applications and research if images of collection objects could be made accessible in a single corpus.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 4, 2023 at 06:31PM
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WBE Data Dashboards, Executable LLMs, Elgin Marbles, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 3, 2023

WBE Data Dashboards, Executable LLMs, Elgin Marbles, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 3, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

CIDRAP: CDC revamps wastewater COVID data reporting. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently unveiled new wastewater data tracking dashboard to make it easier to track local and national trends, even by variant. Wastewater tracking is one of the early indicators health officials use to gauge the activity of SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses.”

Hackaday: Mozilla Lets Folks Turn AI LLMs Into Single-File Executables. “LLMs (Large Language Models) for local use are usually distributed as a set of weights in a multi-gigabyte file. These cannot be directly used on their own, which generally makes them harder to distribute and run compared to other software…. To help with that, Mozilla’s innovation group have released llamafile, an open source method of turning a set of weights into a single binary that runs on six different OSes (macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD) without needing to be installed.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Guardian: Rishi Sunak’s snub boosts Greek hopes for return of marbles. “In a week when the row over the fifth-century BC antiquities has erupted with renewed vigour, the goalposts have moved in unexpected ways. Which is why Nikos Stampolidis, classical archaeologist by profession, and for the past two years the museum’s director, is in ebullient mood. ‘It has been a magnificent week,’ he told the Observer. ‘I think it’s fair to say events are moving us forward and are in our favour. I’m hopeful and very optimistic.'” A good, thorough article which deserves a better headline.

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: The Best Chrome Extensions to Check Your Grammar. “Whether you’re working on a formal report or a casual business email, whatever you write is going to be read by someone else—which means it should be grammatically correct. There’s no shame in struggling with grammar when writing; everyone has their skills, and those might not be yours. But we’re lucky enough to live in an age in which our own failings can be accounted for with technology—like these five grammar-checking Chrome extensions that can help keep your writing clear, concise, and easily comprehensible.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Vice: Wikipedia Editor Who First Noted Henry Kissinger’s Death Has Become an ‘Instant Legend’. “Wikipedia users are celebrating the first user to edit Henry Kissinger’s Wikipedia page after the widely-hated American statesman and war criminal was announced dead on Wednesday at the age of 100.”

BBC: Could X go bankrupt under Elon Musk?. “For a company he bought for $44bn (£35bn) last year, bankruptcy might sound unthinkable. But it is possible. To understand why, you have to look at how reliant X is on advertising revenue – and why advertisers are not coming back.” Nice overview.

SECURITY & LEGAL

Korea Herald: Govt. rolls out measures to prevent public servants from livestreaming explicit content. “Following back-to-back incidents of public servants illegally going on livestreaming platforms to create sexual content, the government has rolled out a set of guidelines for public officials’ duties to prevent such incidents from happening, according to reports on Friday.”

Inquirer (Philippines): De Lima eyes suing bloggers that ‘degraded’ her as a woman. “Bloggers who had spread ‘fake news’ and malicious disinformation against recently released former Sen. Leila de Lima should brace themselves for possible court cases that are now “under study” by her legal team. ‘The charges could include libel, cyberlibel, defamation, slander, and assault to honor,’ said De Lima who was granted bail last month after almost seven years in detention at Camp Crame for drug-related charges filed against her during the previous administration.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Laughing Squid: How Social Media Causes People to Choose Sides by Overwhelming the Human Brain. “The incredibly insightful animated video series Kurzgesagt looks at the role social media has played in sowing tribal discord around the world and how the use of filter bubbles only makes us see the worst in each other.”

Brookhaven National Laboratory: Brainstorming with a Bot . “Kevin Yager—leader of the electronic nanomaterials group at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory—has imagined how recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) could aid scientific brainstorming and ideation. To accomplish this, he has developed a chatbot with knowledge in the kinds of science he’s been engaged in.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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December 4, 2023 at 02:02AM
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Palestine Web Archives, PlayStation Digital Content, Proton Mail, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, December 3, 2023

Palestine Web Archives, PlayStation Digital Content, Proton Mail, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, December 3, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Vice: The Palestinian Internet of the 90s Is Being Preserved, One GIF at a Time. “To many Palestinians, Israel’s ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip is destroying not just buildings and human lives, but a people and their history. With Israeli strikes expected to continue after a brief pause this week, one artist is trying to preserve that history with a digital archive that gathers remnants of the Palestinian internet as it existed in the late 90s and 2000s.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Kotaku: PlayStation To Delete A Ton Of TV Shows Users Already Paid For. “The promise of digital media is that it can last forever, pristine and undisturbed by the forces of entropy constantly buffeting the material world. Unfortunately, a mess of online DRM and license agreements means that we mostly don’t own the digital stuff we buy, as most recently evidenced by the fact that Sony is about to delete Mythbusters, Naked and Afraid, and tons of other Discovery shows from PlayStation users’ libraries even if they already ‘purchased’ them.”

How-To Geek: Proton Mail and Calendar Just Gained 38 New Improvements. “Members of the ‘Proton community’ should pat themselves on the back. Proton (perhaps still best known for its VPN) has updated its Mail and Calendar services with 38 new improvements, all of which were sourced from user requests and complaints.”

USEFUL STUFF

Larry Ferlazzo: This Week’s Free & Useful Artificial Intelligence Tools For The Classroom. “At least, for now, I’m going to make this a weekly feature which will highlight additions to THE BEST NEW – & FREE – ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS THAT COULD BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Engadget: Inside the ‘arms race’ between YouTube and ad blockers. “For many users, the battle between YouTube and ad blockers has largely been invisible, or at least ignorable, until now. The new wall dramatically changes this dynamic, forcing users to adapt their behavior if they want to access YouTube videos at all. Still, the ad blocking companies suggest it’s more of a policy change than a technical breakthrough — a sign of a new willingness on YouTube’s part to risk alienating its users.”

Hollywood Reporter: Linda Yaccarino’s Very Unmerry X Mess. “By now, just a few months later, the former head of advertising at NBCUniversal has become a lightning rod for rage arising from Musk’s erratic, impulsive and, in many cases, repulsive behavior, even as he has made it all but impossible for her to fulfill the mission of making Twitter an alluring place for advertisers. Through it all, Yaccarino has generally presented herself as oblivious to Musk’s conduct and its impact on the company that she at least nominally leads — behavior so maddening that she has been dragged on the very platform she supposedly runs.”

Mother Jones: How Telegram Became the Center of the Internet. ” In recent years, the messaging app and digital platform has recurringly become the place for the rawest, most direct coverage of massive international crises, first with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and now with Hamas’s October 7 attack and Israel’s subsequent month-long massacre of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ZDNet: You should probably update your Google Chrome browser this weekend. “If you are one of the millions of worldwide Chrome users, it’s time for yet another update. That’s right, a sixth zero-day exploit has been discovered in Chrome and, fortunately, the update was released shortly after.”

Reuters: Artists take new shot at Stability, Midjourney in updated copyright lawsuit . “A group of visual artists has filed an amended copyright lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney and other companies for allegedly misusing their work to train generative artificial intelligence systems. U.S. District Judge William Orrick dismissed parts of the lawsuit last month but gave the original plaintiffs permission to pursue their claims again in a new complaint.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Washington: AI image generator Stable Diffusion perpetuates racial and gendered stereotypes, study finds. “What does a person look like? If you use the popular artificial intelligence image generator Stable Diffusion to conjure answers, too frequently you’ll see images of light-skinned men. Stable Diffusion’s perpetuation of this harmful stereotype is among the findings of a new University of Washington study. Researchers also found that, when prompted to create images of “a person from Oceania,” for instance, Stable Diffusion failed to equitably represent Indigenous peoples. Finally, the generator tended to sexualize images of women from certain Latin American countries (Colombia, Venezuela, Peru) as well as those from Mexico, India and Egypt.”

TechCrunch: I’m watching ‘AI upscaled’ Star Trek and it isn’t terrible. “For years, dedicated Star Trek fans have been using AI in an attempt to make a version of the acclaimed series Deep Space 9 that looks decent on modern TVs. It sounds a bit ridiculous, but I was surprised to find that it’s actually quite good — certainly good enough that media companies ought to pay attention (instead of just sending me copyright strikes).” A really interesting deep dive and worth your time.

SF Gate: The end of Elon Musk. “So it’s over for you, Elon Musk. You are a public failure of a man. You’ll still be rich, but you no longer matter. That’s all you really wanted out of this, wasn’t it? You bought Twitter because you thought that owning it would make you the most special person in the whole wide world, only to reveal yourself as an unremarkable s—thead with no good ideas.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 3, 2023 at 06:31PM
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Jessica Stockholder, Creativity During Covid, Twitter, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 2, 2023

Jessica Stockholder, Creativity During Covid, Twitter, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 2, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

University of Chicago: Jessica Stockholder Digital Archive Available on LUNA. “The Visual Resources Center (VRC) is excited to announce the digital archive of Jessica Stockholder, now available to the UChicago community and beyond on the VRC’s digital collections platform, LUNA. The Jessica Stockholder Archive is the first LUNA collection dedicated to a near-comprehensive overview of the work of a single artist.”

University of Massachusetts Amherst: UMass Amherst Libraries Announce Jerry Russo Oral History Collection. “In March of 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, filmmaker and photographer Jerry Russo began working on an oral history project to interview visual artists and creatives all over the world. During the subsequent two years, he completed 249 interviews via Zoom. Russo donated the oral histories to the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center (SCUA), for which social change and the arts are major collecting focuses; more than 100 of the interviews are now available in SCUA’s digital repository, Credo.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Guardian: X struggling to win advertisers back after Elon Musk’s profane outburst. “Major advertisers like Disney, IBM and Apple are still withholding ad dollars from Elon Musk’s X two weeks after its owner endorsed an antisemitic tweet and two days after he launched an expletive-laden tirade to describe his feelings about the pull back. Marketing agencies are pulling back from it as well. In response, X has said it plans to attract smaller and medium-sized businesses to prop up its income.”

TechCrunch: Pinterest begins testing a ‘body type ranges’ tool to make searches more inclusive. “Pinterest is today expanding on its efforts to make its product more inclusive with respect to body type diversity with the test of a new consumer-facing tool that allows users to filter select searches by different body types. The feature, which will work with women’s fashion and wedding ideas at launch, builds on Pinterest’s new body type technology announced earlier this year.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Platformer: Amazon’s Q has ‘severe hallucinations’ and leaks confidential data in public preview, employees warn. “Three days after Amazon announced its AI chatbot Q, some employees are sounding alarms about accuracy and privacy issues. Q is ‘experiencing severe hallucinations and leaking confidential data,’ including the location of AWS data centers, internal discount programs, and unreleased features, according to leaked documents obtained by Platformer. ”

Galway Daily: University of Galway creating digital archive of letters from Irish expats c.1675 – 1950 . “The University of Galway has received funding to create a digital archive of letters from Irish expats in America over three centuries…. This funding will enable the development of an archival site which will provide the public with remote access to letters sent home to Ireland from America between 1675 and 1950 and more.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

WIRED: Telegram’s Bans on Extremist Channels Aren’t Really Bans. “A WIRED investigation reveals that rather than ban or delete Hamas channels or those run by right-wing extremist groups, Telegram is hiding them from the users of the two major app stores, but they are still there. Some of the content from restricted channels is being shared broadly in unrestricted ones—despite Telegram’s mechanisms for stopping the sharing of such content.”

CNN: Judge blocks Montana’s TikTok ban from taking effect on January 1. “A federal judge on Thursday temporarily halted Montana’s groundbreaking statewide TikTok ban, which was set to go into effect at the start of 2024, pending a trial on the matter.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Union College: Stigmatizing content on social media affects perceptions of mental health care, new study reveals. “Research has shown that social media can negatively impact people’s mental health. But can it affect people’s beliefs about mental health treatment? Yes, according to researchers at Union. In one of the first studies to examine the impact of social media on people’s perceptions of mental health care, researchers discovered that viewing just a few social media posts that mock mental health treatment can have a profound impact on some people’s attitudes toward treatment.”

University of Southern California: Social media posts that promote tobacco are increasing, AI detection technology finds. “A new study led by Vassey and Harvard Medical School researcher Chris J. Kennedy, PhD, used a form of artificial intelligence (AI) known as computer vision to track the prevalence of various tobacco-related objects on social media, finding that some content increased as much as 100% between 2019 and 2022. The results were just published in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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December 3, 2023 at 01:37AM
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A Passage of Water, USPTO, Social Media Advertising, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, December 2, 2023

A Passage of Water, USPTO, Social Media Advertising, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, December 2, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

NASA: Google’s ‘A Passage of Water’ Brings NASA’s Water Data to Life. “As part of the long-standing partnership between NASA and Google, NASA worked with Google Arts & Culture and artist Yiyun Kang to create an interactive digital experience around global freshwater resources titled ‘A Passage of Water.’ This immersive experience leverages data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites and new high-resolution data from the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission to illustrate how climate change is impacting Earth’s water cycle.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

US Patent and Trademark Office: USPTO’s new trademark search system to launch November 30. “To provide a modernized search experience that can adapt to the needs of the trademark community, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will be launching our cloud-based trademark search system on Thursday, November 30. This launch is the culmination of an eight-month partnership with our stakeholders. The new system provides a more stable search environment with a simplified search interface that also supports complex searching for advanced users.”

Reuters: Walmart says it is not advertising on social platform X. “Walmart said on Friday it is not advertising on social media platform X, one of the latest brands to say it has dropped the Elon Musk-owned site. ‘We aren’t advertising on X as we’ve found other platforms to better reach our customers,’ a Walmart spokesperson said.”

TechCrunch: Bluesky rolls out automated moderation tools, plus user and moderation lists. “Bluesky, the startup aiming to build a decentralized social network to take on Twitter/X, says it has begun deploying new safety tooling to help moderate content on the network through automation. Although still in private beta, the company has already made headlines for issues around content moderation in recent months after it initially didn’t ban a member making death threats, and later didn’t catch that some people were creating accounts with racial slurs in their usernames.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

TechRadar: EVE Online players are creating the first ‘AI empire’ guided by Chat GPT-4. “Just when you thought the sci-fi sandbox MMO couldn’t get more interesting after EVE Online was rocked to the core by a single player, pilots joined forces to create the Neural Nexus, an AI-led player corporation. This decision was made with a clear goal in mind. Firstly, it will reduce the reliance on a single leader as AI will now be available to all the corporation players at any time of the day. It also means that the AI leader will keep a clear and consistent vision for what the corporation should be, as well as give new dynamic role-playing opportunities for its members.”

Peninsula Daily News: Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe gets grant to digitize collections. “The Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe has received a $14,536 grant from the Office of the Secretary of State to find previously undigitized items from their collections, digitize them and add them to The House of Seven Generations Online Museum. The Washington Digital Heritage grant is among the 13 given local libraries in 2023. A total of $152,476 was awarded by the Office of the Secretary of State, which oversees the Washington State Library and the Washington State Archives, announced in late September.”

Washington Post: News outlets turn to Reddit as Musk’s X descends into chaos. “As Twitter continues to decline as a place to post news, media companies have been seeking out alternative platforms to promote their work, and more are turning to Reddit. But by promoting the article in a prominent snark subreddit, Business Insider’s Reddit account has raised questions about how media companies should navigate a new social media landscape dominated by freewheeling, self-policed groups.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Verge: Federal judge vows to investigate Google for intentionally destroying chats. “Judge James Donato is overseeing Epic v. Google, a case that could determine the future of the Android app store — but testimony in this case may have more repercussions for Google too. On Friday, Judge Donato vowed to investigate Google for intentionally and systematically suppressing evidence, calling the company’s conduct ‘a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice.'”

Associated Press: Brazilian city enacts an ordinance that was secretly written by ChatGPT. “City lawmakers in Brazil have enacted what appears to be the nation’s first legislation written entirely by artificial intelligence — even if they didn’t know it at the time. The experimental ordinance was passed in October in the southern city of Porto Alegre and city councilman Ramiro Rosário revealed this week that it was written by a chatbot, sparking objections and raising questions about the role of artificial intelligence in public policy.”

New York Times: Inside U.S. Efforts to Untangle an A.I. Giant’s Ties to China. “American spy agencies have warned about the Emirati firm G42 and its work with large Chinese companies that U.S. officials consider security threats.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

North Carolina State University: To Help Autonomous Vehicles Make Moral Decisions, Researchers Ditch the ‘Trolley Problem’. “Researchers have developed a new experiment to better understand what people view as moral and immoral decisions related to driving vehicles, with the goal of collecting data to train autonomous vehicles how to make ‘good’ decisions. The work is designed to capture a more realistic array of moral challenges in traffic than the widely discussed life-and-death scenario inspired by the so-called ‘trolley problem.'”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

State of Michigan: Gov. Whitmer Launches Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential . “Today, Governor Gretchen Whitmer officially launched operation of the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential, or MiLEAP. The new department, established by executive order in July, is tasked with improving outcomes from preschool through postsecondary so anyone can ‘make it in Michigan’ with a solid education and a path to a good-paying job.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 2, 2023 at 06:31PM
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Dutch and Flemish Art Collections, San Diego Music, PizzaGate, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 1, 2023

Dutch and Flemish Art Collections, San Diego Music, PizzaGate, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 1, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

CODART: More than 70 Summaries of Museums and Institutions with Dutch and Flemish Collections in the Netherlands Published. “As part of CODART’s 25th anniversary year, the summary texts of museum collections with Dutch and Flemish art on this website are being greatly expanded in two installments. In March we announced the addition of more than 40 summaries of Belgian collections, and now we announce the addition of around 70 new summary texts of public collections in the Netherlands with significant holdings of art from the Low Countries. The texts were written exclusively for the CODART website by, or in collaboration with, curators of the collection in question.”

New-to-me, from San Diego Reader: Jim MacDonald’s cellphone captures over 2,000 local performances. “Just a Fan Recording Local Music is the name of Jim MacDonald’s YouTube channel; it boasts over 2000 cell phone videos of live performances by local artists, 586 subscribers, and around 191,000 views. MacDonald resides in Ocean Beach, and in 2019, he started walking over to the Farmers Market bandstage on Wednesdays to check out performers like Yvonne Brown of the Kings.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Vice: Pizzagate Rears Its Head Again, and Not Just Because of Elon Musk. “Over the past several weeks, Elon Musk, a business genius, has further devalued Twitter, the website he owns and insists on calling X, by posting things and engaging with things supportive of Pizzagate. The 2016 conspiracy theory makes no sense on its own terms and has been repeatedly and roundly debunked anyway, including by a gun-wielding citizen carrying out his own investigation. (He found there were no children being held in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, which does not have a basement.)”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Futurism: Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers. “There was nothing in Drew Ortiz’s author biography at Sports Illustrated to suggest that he was anything other than human…. The only problem? Outside of Sports Illustrated, Drew Ortiz doesn’t seem to exist. He has no social media presence and no publishing history. And even more strangely, his profile photo on Sports Illustrated is for sale on a website that sells AI-generated headshots, where he’s described as ‘neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes.'”

Search Engine Land: Google Ads boss Jerry Dischler steps down. “The executive in charge of Google Ads, Jerry Dischler, stepped down after more than 15 years with Google. Google wouldn’t say whether Dischler will stay with the company, only that he would take on a ‘new challenge.’ Google confirmed to Search Engine Land that the decision was not related to the recent federal antitrust trial.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: How Your Child’s Online Mistake Can Ruin Your Digital Life. “Google-owned YouTube has A.I.-powered systems that review the hundreds of hours of video that are uploaded to the service every minute. The scanning process can sometimes go awry and tar innocent individuals as child abusers. The New York Times has documented other episodes in which parents’ digital lives were upended by naked photos and videos of their children that Google’s A.I. systems flagged and that human reviewers determined to be illicit. Some parents have been investigated by the police as a result.”

Europol: International collaboration leads to dismantlement of ransomware group in Ukraine amidst ongoing war. “In an unprecedented effort, law enforcement and judicial authorities from seven countries have joined forces with Europol and Eurojust to dismantle and apprehend in Ukraine key figures behind significant ransomware operations wreaking havoc across the world. The operation comes at a critical time, as the country grapples with the challenges of Russia’s military aggression against its territory.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Utrecht University: Revealed: this is what this 15th-century painting looked like before it was painted over. “Assistant Professor Sanne Frequin was one of the three speakers at the Paleissymposium, with King Willem-Alexander as host. Frequin spoke about her Lindau project, in which she and her team digitally restored the painting The Crucifixion (around 1425) and made a 3D print of the work. The 3D reconstruction was revealed for the first time during the symposium.”

University of Kentucky: UK researcher developing anti-tracking and robocall-free architecture. “The project, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), is led by Yang Xiao, Ph.D., assistant professor in Department of Computer Science in the UK Stanley and Karen Pigman College of Engineering. Its goal is to develop an anti-tracking and robocall-free mobile access architecture to provide maximum privacy protection for mobile users.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

AI Weirdness: AI Weirdness advent calendar 2023. “It’s 2023 and the combo of GPT-4/DALL-E3 can generate passable versions of the saccharine Christmas drawings in an advent calendar. They cannot, however, label them correctly. Also sometimes you get sweatermugs. This means the 2023 AI-generated advent calendar is happening!”

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December 2, 2023 at 01:43AM
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Medieval England, Library of Congress, Tokyo Laboratory, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, December 1, 2023

Medieval England, Library of Congress, Tokyo Laboratory, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, December 1, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Guardian: Archaeologists reveal life stories of hundreds of people from medieval Cambridge. “Archaeologists at Cambridge University have reconstructed the ‘biographies’ of hundreds of the city’s ordinary medieval residents by examining their skeletons in detail, using a wealth of scientific data to fill out the life stories of poor or disadvantaged people whose names were never recorded.”

EVENTS

Library of Congress: Join Us on 12/7 for Human Rights Day: Science Literacy and the Law. “We hope you can join us on December 7th at 3 p.m., via Zoom, for our Human Rights Day celebration…. Dr. Sarah Cooper will provide this year’s lecture on scientific literacy and the law. Science helps the law to understand the world in which legal policy, including human rights standards like the right to a fair and public trial, must operate. Yet, it is widely recognized that law and science approach the world in different ways: law must provide finality and stability, whereas science is encouraged to embrace new ideas so that we can better understand the natural world.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Anime News Network: Toho Archive Accepts Unclaimed Film Masters After Tokyo Laboratory Shuts Down. “Tokyo Laboratory (Tokyo Genzōsho, or Togen) announced on Thursday that the TOHO Archive will now take over the management of all of Tokyo Laboratory’s remaining unclaimed film masters, instead of the masters being destroyed. Tokyo Laboratory shut down on Thursday after 68 years of operation.”

New York Times: Advertisers Say They Do Not Plan to Return to X After Musk’s Comments. “At least half a dozen marketing agencies said the brands they represent were standing firm against advertising on X, while others said they had advised advertisers to stop posting anything on the platform. Some temporary spending pauses that advertisers have enacted in recent weeks against X are likely to turn into permanent freezes, they added, with Mr. Musk’s comments giving them no incentive to return.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Viet Nam News: New media art pioneers aim to create digital archive. “With a desire to experiment with technology and explore the capability of the human voice, two artists have developed a surreal art-technology project Voice Gems – a generative system and voice archive that transforms human voices into digital gems.”

Hollywood Reporter: The Rise of AI-Powered Stars: Big Money and Risks. “As the Hollywood guilds grapple with the potential for generative AI to transform film and TV production, tech firms are using the power of celebrities to introduce the underlying technology to the masses. ‘There’s a huge possible business there and I think that’s what YouTube and the music companies see, for better or for worse,’ says Gavin Purcell, the former executive producer of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon who now hosts the AI for Humans podcast. ‘The Facebook’s and the YouTubes are trying to get people onboarded with what they see as the next UGC, user generated content world, which is this AI stuff.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Vice: ChatGPT Can Reveal Personal Information From Real People, Google Researchers Show. “Previous work has already shown that image generators can be forced to generate examples from their training data—including copyrighted works—and an early OpenAI LLM produced contact information belonging to a researcher. But Google’s new research shows that ChatGPT, which is a massively popular consumer app with millions of users, can also be made to do this. Worryingly, some of the extracted training data contained identifying information from real people, including names, email addresses, and phone numbers.”

FedScoop: DHS releases commercial generative AI guidance and is experimenting with building its own models. “The Department of Homeland Security is leaning into the use of generative artificial intelligence by issuing new guidance on how its workforce should use commercial applications of the technology and experimenting with building its own models, the department’s top IT official told FedScoop.”

Associated Press: Congressmen ask DOJ to investigate water utility hack, warning it could happen anywhere. “Three members of Congress have asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate how foreign hackers breached a water authority near Pittsburgh, prompting the nation’s top cyberdefense agency to warn other water and sewage-treatment utilities that they may be vulnerable.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Sydney: Sydney researchers discover hidden structure in networks like Twitter. “Researchers at the University of Sydney have discovered new structural relationships in complex networks, such as X (formerly Twitter) and political blogs, that could help explain the digital flow of information.”

Ars Technica: New “Stable Video Diffusion” AI model can animate any still image. “On Tuesday, Stability AI released Stable Video Diffusion, a new free AI research tool that can turn any still image into a short video—with mixed results. It’s an open-weights preview of two AI models that use a technique called image-to-video, and it can run locally on a machine with an Nvidia GPU.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Music Radar: This web app randomly samples thousands of YouTube videos to create a playable grid of loops, giving you endless sonic inspiration. “Built by Technology Greg, Sonic Garbage pulls over 3000 randomly generated YouTube audio snippets into a colour-coded grid and sorts them by ‘audio energy’ (volume?) or length, giving you a playable set of randomized samples that is tons of fun to mess around with. Sure, the majority of them may not sound great, but play around for a few minutes and it’s remarkably easy to stumble on combinations of loops that fit together just right and create something unexpectedly musical.” It really is, I tried it. It was amazing to me how much random audio actually made half-decent samples. Good morning, Internet…

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December 1, 2023 at 06:31PM
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