Russia Anti-War Street Art, AI-Assisted Web Building, Resistance Mapping, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, December 15, 2023

Russia Anti-War Street Art, AI-Assisted Web Building, Resistance Mapping, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, December 15, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Global Voices: Museum of Russian anti-war street art opens online. “Russian anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova and her colleagues have been collecting the examples of anti-war street-art — stickers, graffiti, leaflets, and complex installations — for 1.5 years. Now, everyone can see photos of 471 works from 48 Russian cities meticulously classified, carefully translated into English and clearly explained in one place.”

Mozilla Blog: Introducing Solo, an AI website builder for solopreneurs. “At Mozilla and our commitment to a healthier internet, we believe that exploring ideas that can enable solopreneurs an admirable vision. Today we are excited to introduce a new Mozilla Innovation Project, Solo, an AI website builder for solopreneurs.”

Rochester Institute of Technology: Resistance Mapping project provides a digital home for antiracist educational resources for K-12 educators. “The Resistance Mapping website functions as a living, digital archive that documents the history of racist housing and other place-based policies in Rochester and the surrounding region. The materials explore how Rochester’s current segregation emerges from that history and confronts these realities through stories of past and present activism, along with creative imagined possibilities for our community’s future.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNN: Sports Illustrated publisher fires CEO after AI debacle. “A spokesperson for The Arena Group declined to go into further detail to explain the ouster of Ross Levinsohn, who served as chief executive for three years. But the move came after an embarrassing debacle in which Sports Illustrated was caught publishing stories with fake author names and profile photos generated by artificial intelligence.”

Ars Technica: Google Fiber’s 20-gig service is coming to these cities for $250 a month. “In October, Google Fiber announced a ridiculously fast new tier of its Internet service: 20Gbps symmetrical. While that’s 1,000 times faster than what some Internet providers offer (especially going by upload speeds), what we didn’t know was the cost. A new blog post reveals who can get this new service, and they’ll be paying $250 a month for it.”

USEFUL STUFF

Electronic Frontier Foundation: No Robots(.txt): How to Ask ChatGPT and Google Bard to Not Use Your Website for Training. “As norms continue to develop around what kinds of scraping and what uses of scraped data are considered acceptable, it is useful to have a tool for website operators to automatically signal their preference to crawlers. Asking OpenAI and Google (and anyone else who chooses to honor the preference) to not include scrapes of your site in its models is an easy process as long as you can access your site’s file structure.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

SiliconAngle: OpenAI inks content licensing deal with Axel Springer. “OpenAI will license news content from Axel Springer SE, the parent company of Politico and Insider, to improve its large language models. The partnership was announced this morning. It comes a few months after OpenAI inked a similar content licensing agreement with the Associated Press.”

Mashable: Sex workers are cloning themselves with AI to make sexy chatbots. “It’s 4:30 p.m. on a Tuesday and I’m sexting with award-winning porn star Riley Reid. ‘I want to kiss your body all over,’ she tells me via voice note, ‘lick your sweet spots, and make you moan with pleasure.’ Sounds cool, I respond over text. Then – and I’m embarrassed to admit this – I ask, What are you wearing? ‘I’m sorry, but I’m just a digital copy of Riley Reid, so I’m not really here in the physical sense,’ she replies. ‘But if I were…'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Dropbox spooks users by sending data to OpenAI for AI search features. “On Wednesday, news quickly spread on social media about a new enabled-by-default Dropbox setting that shares your Dropbox data with OpenAI for an experimental AI-powered search feature. Dropbox says that user data shared with third-party AI partners isn’t used to train AI models and is deleted within 30 days.”

Citizen (South Africa): Caxton tells Competition Commission that Google and Meta threaten free press in SA. “Caxton outlined the central challenges that the news media industry is facing in the digital age of media consumption, highlighting the dominance of Google and Meta (Facebook) in digital markets.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

PsyPost: ChatGPT-created letters of recommendation are nearly indistinguishable from human-authored letters, study finds. “In a new study published in the journal AEM Education and Training, researchers discovered that academic physicians could only slightly better than guesswork differentiate between recommendation letters written by humans and those generated by artificial intelligence (AI). The study raises critical questions about the future role of AI in academic assessments, the need for ethical considerations in its use, and the potential reevaluation of the current practices in recommendation letters.”

CNBC: Google is rolling out new AI models for health care. Here’s how doctors are using them. “Google on Wednesday announced MedLM, a suite of new health-care-specific artificial intelligence models designed to help clinicians and researchers carry out complex studies, summarize doctor-patient interactions and more.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 15, 2023 at 06:31PM
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MotorTrend, Encyclopedia of Smell History and Heritage, 1931 Census of Canada, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, December 14, 2023

MotorTrend, Encyclopedia of Smell History and Heritage, 1931 Census of Canada, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, December 14, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

MotorTrend: It’s MotorTrend’s 75th Anniversary and We’re Celebrating With Cool Stuff For You!. “MotorTrend is further memorializing our legacy through the release of our archive in a digital format, available now. The MotorTrend Digital Archive features 75 years of MotorTrend issues dating back to 1949, all available for free right here.”

Smithsonian Magazine: A New Encyclopedia Explores Europe’s Smelly History. “Odeuropa has officially launched its products—a Smell Explorer search engine, which offers insight into how the past smelled, as well as how people described, depicted and experienced those smells, and the Encyclopedia of Smell History and Heritage, with entries ranging from car interiors to coffeehouses. Odeuropa also hosted a one-day Smell Culture Fair in Amsterdam on November 28 to share the overall project’s final results.”

Government of Canada: 1931 Census of Canada launch: phase two complete!. “Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is pleased to announce that in collaboration with Ancestry® and FamilySearch International, we are providing a free, searchable index of the 1931 Census of Canada through Census Search. This marks the completion of phase two of the plan to make the census accessible to Canadians on our website following the initial release of the census earlier this year.”

National Library of the Netherlands: Release of the Design Drawings Damage Atlas . “The Design Drawings Damage Atlas specifically assists in recognising and categorising damage on architectural design drawings. Additionally, it provides information on their management and preservation. It contains details about materials, techniques, signs of use, and damages. Furthermore, you can learn about the origins of the design drawings and their specific characteristics. All texts in the damage atlas are available in both Dutch and English…. The Design Drawings Damage Atlas can be ordered for free via our webshop.” I tried the webshop link and it gave me an error, so here is the direct link: https://webwinkel.kb.nl/product/schadeatlas-ontwerptekeningen-design-drawings-damage-atlas .

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bloomberg: Musk’s X 2023 Ad Sales Projected to Slump to About $2.5 Billion. “Elon Musk’s X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, is on track to bring in roughly $2.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2023 — a significant slump from prior years, according to people familiar with the matter.” Kind of amazed it’s still that high.

Mashable: Here’s every new emoji we got in 2023. “There isn’t much we ask for around here, but one of those things is new emojis. Thankfully, the Unicode Consortium heard our cries and blessed us with over 118 new emojis approved in 2023. However, this doesn’t mean they’re usable right now. In February, as part of its iOS 16.4 update, Apple added 21 emojis that were approved in 2022.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

WIRED: YouTube Is Now Hiding Which Channels Get a Cut of Ad Revenue. “YouTube unleashed an influential generation of new internet celebrities in 2007 when it started to share ad revenue with select video creators. For the past couple of years, a snippet of code on YouTube’s website revealed which channels are part of the secretive and exclusive club. But users and activists who had come to rely on that flag suddenly found themselves in the dark last month.”

BBC: Disney goes punk: TikTok sends Welsh covers band viral. “So how did a south Wales quartet end up playing Disney tunes and children’s TV theme music in a rock festival? Like many of the weird events of recent years, you can thank (or blame, depending on musical taste) Covid. A TikTok video of the band playing a cover of the Lion King’s Just Can’t Wait To Be King went viral as everyone was cooped up inside in 2020, and it snowballed.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NBC News: Media Matters sues Texas attorney general over response to Elon Musk dispute. “Media Matters for America sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in federal court late Monday, alleging that Paxton violated the First Amendment last month and chilled its work when he opened an investigation into the organization over its reporting into Elon Musk’s X app.”

Courthouse News Service: Twitter investors’ suit against Elon Musk to proceed, judge rules. “A federal judge ruled Monday to advance a class action by Twitter investors against Elon Musk claiming that he manipulated Twitter stock leading up to his $44 billion buyout of the social media platform in April 2022.”

Salon: Jack Smith wants to use Trump’s Twitter account and phone data to track his steps on Jan. 6. “Special counsel Jack Smith has obtained Donald Trump’s cell phone data from his time in the White House and plans to use it as prosecutorial evidence as part of the former president’s election subversion trial in D.C., a Monday filing shows.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

John Scalzi: Abandoning the Former Twitter: A Four-Week Check-In. “Ultimately, however, I pretty strongly feel that whatever I got from old-school Twitter — good conversation, interesting things to read, a place to let people know what I’m up to — is now amply covered by [Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.] Moreover, nearly everyone I know as a friend, colleague or notable personality/celebrity, has an outpost on at least one of these sites. Where these people go, their friends and fans will eventually follow. That’s bad news for the former Twitter, but then, Musk did that to himself.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 14, 2023 at 06:31PM
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Lee Harvey Oswald, Washington WIC Program, Michigan FOIA Requests, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 13, 2023

Lee Harvey Oswald, Washington WIC Program, Michigan FOIA Requests, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 13, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Boing Boing: Finland declassifies its long-secret intelligence report on JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald . “Merry Christmas, America! Finland has declassified its 60-year-old intelligence report into Lee Harvey Oswald, who stayed in Helsinki before heading on to the Soviet Union. Oswald, an assassin of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, made a quixotic attempt to defect there; the commies saw him coming and only let him stay because he tried to kill himself after they told him to go home.”

KGMI (Washington): Dept. of Health launches new WIC Nutrition Program Clinic locator. “The state has released a new tool to help pregnant women and young children get access to vital resources. The Women, Infants and Children Nutrition Program offers monthly food benefits and health screenings to mothers and their infants. The program’s new clinic locator gives information on the more than 200 WIC clinics across Washington, including five in Whatcom County.”

Michigan Advance: Benson unveils new online FOIA portal for Michigan Department of Elections. “Calling FOIA ‘one of the most important tools citizens can use to hold their government accountable,’ [Secretary of State Jocelyn] Benson said the new online portal would make document requests easier and the results more accessible than they’ve ever been. In fact, she said once a FOIA request has been made, many of the responsive documents will be publicly available on the department’s website. ”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Mozilla Blog: Mozilla VPN Update: New privacy features, plus independent security audit results. “This year, we’ve been working on the many ways to protect your data when you use Mozilla VPN, our fast and easy-to-use Virtual Private Network service. Over the summer, we rolled out new security features like malware blocking, and performance improvements like the server location recommendations. We also expanded to 16 new European countries.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Tom’s Guide: I pitted Google Bard with Gemini Pro vs ChatGPT — here’s the winner. “Google has incorporated its new AI large language model, Gemini Pro, into its popular chatbot, Bard. With this comes the promise that it will perform at least as well, if not better, than OpenAI’s free version of ChatGPT. To better understand whether it has achieved this goal, I decided to pit the two chatbots against one another with a series of questions designed by an independent arbiter.”

Omaha World-Herald: UNL Professor preserves Nebraskan Holocaust stories for educational impact. “In April 2022, former Gov. Pete Ricketts signed LB888 into law, requiring the State Board of Education to adopt standards for education on the Holocaust and other acts of genocide. Dotan’s dissertation for her doctorate studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, ‘Integrating Narratives with Digital Humanities Tools to Inform Holocaust Education Pedagogies,’ aims to provide a framework for Holocaust education in Nebraska by creating a digital archive of maps, letters, and artifacts from seven Nebraskans touched by the events of the Holocaust.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bloomberg: Google’s Epic Legal Defeat Threatens $200 Billion App Store Industry. “Google’s legal defeat at the hands of Fortnite maker Epic Games Inc. threatens to roil an app store duopoly with Apple Inc. that generates close to $200 billion a year and dictates how billions of consumers use mobile devices. The loss — handed down by a San Francisco jury on Monday — is a blow to the two companies’ business model in apps, where they charge commissions of as much as 30% to software developers who typically have few other options.”

ABC News (Australia): Fitbit fined $11 million after misleading consumers about smart watches and fitness trackers. “The Federal Court issued the penalty against the US firm on Tuesday after it admitted making false, misleading or deceptive claims to 58 customers between 2020 and 2022. In several cases, Fitbit representatives claimed customers only had 45 days to return a faulty device.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

UPI: Many U.S. teens report using social media ‘almost constantly,’ study says. “The new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. teens, released Monday, shows that while YouTube is the most widely used platform among 13- to 17-year-olds — at 90% — TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram also remain popular with between 59% and 63% of teens viewing those sites everyday.”

AFP: Fungi and flatworms: Scientists want more diverse nature emojis. “Too many cats, not enough crustaceans: The current emoji catalog doesn’t accurately represent the breadth of biodiversity seen in nature — and that hurts conservation efforts, according to scientists. An analysis published Monday in the journal iScience found that while animals are well represented by the current emoji catalog, plants, fungi, and microorganisms get short shrift.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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December 14, 2023 at 01:47AM
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Canada Environmental Health, USDA Rural Development Funding, Silicon Valley, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, December 13, 2023

Canada Environmental Health, USDA Rural Development Funding, Silicon Valley, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, December 13, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

McGill University Health Centre: Find your neighbourhood and see which environmental factors influence your health . “… a new tool combines environmental datasets from different sources with demographic data from the Canadian census to present a portrait of environmental equity in over 125 cities across Canada. It identifies avenues for tackling climate change risks and environmental inequities while improving public health.”

CBS 2 Iowa: USDA launches new website services to help individuals & agencies find access to federal services. “The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Development unveiled two new web resources on Monday…. One of the new features should make it easier to find federal resources in one place, with an easy-to-use search function to find what you need. The Find Programs and Opportunities tool includes hundreds of millions of dollars in financing and technical assistance opportunities.”

EVENTS

Cornell Chronicle: Tech companies capitalize on misconceptions of ‘free speech’. “Since the 1980s, doxing, harassment and extremism have all found a home on the internet. Today’s social media companies could limit this type of speech but often choose not to because it serves their bottom line, said Mary Anne Franks, the Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard Professor in Intellectual Property, Technology and Civil Rights Law at George Washington Law School, in a presentation Dec. 7 at Gates Hall.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNN: Elon Musk’s welcoming of extremists puts a spotlight on the NFL’s mega-partnership with X amid renewal talks. “The sports and entertainment juggernaut is in talks to renew its $100 million deal with Elon Musk’s troubled social media platform, X, formerly known as Twitter, The Wall Street Journal reported in November. But Musk’s unhinged behavior and the surge in hate and extremism on his platform have complicated the partnership, which The Journal reported expires in April, and raised the question of whether the NFL will renew its deal with the imperiled social media company.”

Search Engine Land: Google Ads updates Cryptocurrencies and related products policy. “Google is updating its Cryptocurrencies and related products policy to provide clear guidance on the scope and requirements for advertising Cryptocurrency Coin Trusts. Starting Jan. 29, advertisers offering Cryptocurrency Coin Trust targeting the U.S. will need to be certified and meet Google’s specific requirements, according to Google’s announcement.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Dexerto: Arthur “cooks” Elon Musk in “savage” official TikTok. “The original clip has to do with Arthur being surprised by his friends, who he believed were tied up ‘solving unsolvable problems.’ They reveal they simply stopped trying to solve the problem and left. In the remix of the clip, titled To Each Their Own, Arthur’s friends are labeled ‘X’s Advertisers’ in the captions. When two other characters conclude there is nothing to learn from the unsolvable problems, they’re labeled as Elon.”

Boing Boing: Meet the man who spreads joy and connection across the globe by asking, “Can you teach me your favorite dance move?”. “Meet Ed People, a content creator and dancer originally from Belgium, who travels around the world asking strangers: ‘Can you teach me your favorite dance move?’ He then learns and performs the dances with his newfound friends, films the heartwarming interactions, and shares them on his social media.”

Absolutely appalling, from Reuters: Meet Ashley, the world’s first AI-powered political campaign caller. “Ashley is not your typical robocaller; none of her responses are canned or pre-recorded. Her creators, who intend to mainly work with Democratic campaigns and candidates, say she is the first political phone banker powered by generative AI technology similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. She is capable of having an infinite number of customized one-on-one conversations at the same time.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Verge: Epic win: Jury decides Google has illegal monopoly in app store fight . “Three years after Fortnite-maker Epic Games sued Apple and Google for allegedly running illegal app store monopolies, Epic has a win. The jury in Epic v. Google has just delivered its verdict — and it found that Google turned its Google Play app store and Google Play Billing service into an illegal monopoly.”

Vice: The Names of Thousands of Neo-Nazi Music Fans Just Got Leaked. “For years if a white supremacist wanted to get their hands on select neo-Nazi music one of their likely stops would be Midgård, a Scandinavian online shop specializing in racist tunes. While the site offered a wide range of neo-Nazi music, clothing, and paraphernalia, its customers learned last week one thing they didn’t offer was infosec. This tough lesson was taught by AFA Sweden, a group of Stockholm-based anti-fascists, who ruined thousands of the site customers’ holidays by releasing Midgård’s customer register.”

Hollywood Reporter: Elon Musk Twitter Takeover Lawsuit Gains Steam as Judge Advances Investors’ Claims. “On Monday, a federal judge advanced a lawsuit from investors who say they suffered losses when they sold their shares in Twitter, now known as X, because of posts from Musk claiming the platform has a major issue with fake accounts and that he could wiggle out of the deal because of it. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer found that several of Musk’s statements were false or misleading, in part, because he waived due diligence.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

US National Science Foundation: NSF launches EducateAI initiative. “The U.S. National Science Foundation is excited to announce the EducateAI initiative. The goal of the initiative is to enable educators to make high-quality, audience-appropriate artificial intelligence educational experiences available nationwide to K-12, community college, four-year college and graduate students, as well as adults interested in formal training in AI.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 13, 2023 at 06:31PM
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Mayfield Tornado Oral History Project, Ireland Child Development, Google Search Trends 2023, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 12, 2023

Mayfield Tornado Oral History Project, Ireland Child Development, Google Search Trends 2023, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 12, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

University of Kentucky: Mayfield Tornado Oral History Project commemorates loss, celebrates resilience of Western Kentucky community . “Six months after the disaster, Rebecca Freihaut, Ph.D., a risk and crisis communications expert who works at the University of Central Florida and UK alumna, partnered with University of Kentucky Libraries Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History to speak with Mayfield residents about their experiences…. The result is the Mayfield, Kentucky 2021 Oral History Project, a harrowing but hopeful collection of interviews that commemorates a tragic loss of life while also capturing stories of survival, resilience and regrowth.”

Government of Ireland: New Early Learning and Childcare Data website launched by Minister O’Gorman . “Roderic O’Gorman, Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth today launched the Early Learning and Childcare Data website. This new website will include a series of interactive dashboards that will be released by Pobal on behalf of the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth (DCEDIY) over the coming weeks and months. The first two interactive dashboards – ‘Overview of Service Providers’ and ‘Capacity’ – are released today.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

NBC Chicago: What did you Google in 2023? ‘Barbie,’ Israel-Hamas war are among the year’s top internet searches. “Your Google search history for 2023 has arrived. Well, actually, the world’s. On Monday, the California-based tech giant released its ‘Year in Search,’ a roundup of 2023’s top global queries, ranging from unforgettable pop culture moments (hello, Barbenheimer), to the loss of beloved figures and tragic news carrying worldwide repercussions.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Sky News: Elon Musk fact-checked on X by his own system – but claims it has been ‘gamed by state actors’. “The billionaire has promoted the community-based fact-checking system as his flagship policy to tackle disinformation on the social media platform since his $44bn (£38bn) takeover in October last year. But on Sunday, one of his own posts was marked with a community note, after he commented on the detention of US YouTuber Gonzalo Lira in Ukraine.”

New York Times: Using A.I. to Talk to the Dead. “Some people are turning to A.I. technology as a way to commune with the dead, but its use as part of the mourning process has raised ethical questions while leaving some who have experimented with it unsettled.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BBC: Russia hacking: ‘FSB in years-long cyber attacks on UK’, says government. “The UK is accusing Russia’s Security Service, the FSB, of a sustained cyber-hacking campaign, targeting politicians and others in public life. The government said one group stole data through cyber-attacks, which was later made public, including material linked to the 2019 election. Russia has repeatedly denied claims it is involved in such activities.”

Washington Post: Air Force disciplines 15 people in Discord leaks investigation. “The Air Force disciplined 15 members of the Air National Guard after an internal investigation found that a ‘lack of supervision’ and a ‘culture of complacency’ helped enable a 21-year-old airman to share hundreds of classified documents online in the sprawling leak of U.S. military secrets that rocked the national security establishment this spring.”

CNN: Supreme Court won’t let RFK Jr. intervene in case challenging efforts to combat social media disinformation. “The Supreme Court on Monday declined to let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. join a challenge to a case concerning the Biden administration’s communications with social media companies about online posts the government views as disinformation. Conservative Justice Samuel Alito said in a brief dissent that he would have allowed Kennedy to intervene in the case, which the high court will hear this term.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Science: Leading scholarly database listed hundreds of papers from ‘hijacked’ journals. “Scopus, a widely used database of scientific papers operated by publishing giant Elsevier, plays an important role as an arbiter of scholarly legitimacy, with many institutions around the world expecting their researchers to publish in journals indexed on the platform. But users beware, a new study warns.” This rang a bell so I checked the Firehose. Nature had a similar story in February 2021..

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Boing Boing: The Arizona Daily Star collaborates with local artists to turn newspaper into wrapping paper. “How cool is this? The Arizona Daily Star collaborated with local Tucson artists to create holiday wrapping paper. Each day between December 3 and December 14, a full page of wrapping paper is included in the print newspaper. You can also visit the website to download each day’s featured art-as-wrapping-paper.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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December 13, 2023 at 01:40AM
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Conservation Documentation Archive, AudioGames, YouTube Premium, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, December 12, 2023

Conservation Documentation Archive, AudioGames, YouTube Premium, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, December 12, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Duke University Preservation Underground: Announcing the Conservation Documentation Archive. “Today we are excited to publicly announce the launch of The Conservation Documentation Archive (CDA). This is the culmination of several years of work to digitize and make available all of the conservation documentation that has been produced as part of caring for Duke’s collections for the last 26 years.”

New-to-me and discovered via a conversation on Mastodon: AudioGames. From the front page: “Using sound, games can have dimensions of atmosphere, and possibilities for gameplay that don’t exist with visuals alone, as well as providing games far more accessible to people with all levels of sight. This site exists as a community portal for all things to do with audiogames. Here you will find news, articles, an active community forum and our database of over 500 titles on platforms from Microsoft Windows to iOS.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Tubefilter: Some YouTube Premium users have held onto lower rates. They can expect price hikes in 2024.. “More price hikes are coming to YouTube Premium. Or, to put it more accurately: Users who were previously exempt from price hikes will be required to pay up just like anyone else.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Mashable: Elon Musk’s AI assistant Grok roasts its creator. “Grok, the AI assistant on X (formerly Twitter), launched on Friday for Premium+ subscribers (those who pay $16/month) and has already spun a flurry of conversation. Nearly immediately, users noticed that Grok is ‘woke’; it doesn’t share its creator Elon Musk’s right-wing political or cultural views. For instance, as Mashable’s Cecily Mauran pointed out, Grok isn’t aligned with Elon Musk’s anti-trans beliefs, responding to a question of whether trans women are women with ‘yes.’ Not only that but, apparently, Grok isn’t afraid to roast its creator.”

Route Fifty: Data literacy: the drive to educate the public sector workforce. “There are certain positions in state and local government that everyone recognizes as essential to the successful use of data. They’re the obvious ones: data analysts, data scientists and experts in privacy and ethics. Those roles are hard to fill, but even when they are, there’s still a missing link. Michelle Littlefield, the chief data officer for the city and county of San Francisco, refers to this link as ‘upskilling the workforce.'”

WIRED: Fake Taylor Swift Quotes Are Being Used to Spread Anti-Ukraine Propaganda. “The disinformation campaign, which was launched in November, reached at least 7.6 million people on Facebook alone, according to a database of the ads reviewed by WIRED and collected by Reset, a nonprofit that provides grants to those tackling disinformation. It’s still in progress, and two separate groups of disinformation researchers believe the campaign is run by a notorious Russian influence operation dubbed Doppelganger that has in the past been linked to the Kremlin.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Associated Press: Google Antitrust Trial Focused on Android App Store Payments to Be Handed off to Jury to Decide. “A federal court jury is poised begin its deliberations in an antitrust trial focused on whether Google’s efforts to profit from its app store for Android smartphones have been illegally gouging consumers and stifling innovation.”

Washington Post: 2024 could be the ‘deepfake’ election. Few states are acting.. “As the 2024 election campaign heats up, there’s virtually no doubt that political actors of all stripes — including some deliberately trying to mislead voters — will turn to AI and deepfakes as the latest weapon in the political communications arsenal. They will do so in an environment in which just a handful of states have passed laws designed to limit the forgeries’ influence, while Congress has introduced a few pieces of legislation that have gone nowhere, at least to date.”

Europol: Europol warning on the criminal use of Bluetooth trackers for geolocalisation. “Based on the technological capabilities of Bluetooth trackers, and the information shared with Europol, it is confirmed that drug traffickers use them to track the transit of illicit cargo. Through the trackers, cargo can be traced after arrival in ports, and onward by road towards storage locations in European markets. They are likely also used to locate illicit shipments upon arrival in ports. To warn about the misuse of this technology, Europol has issued a restricted early warning notification to all EU Member States, as well as a public version.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Brookings Institution: What should be done about the growing influence of industry in AI research?. “Enabling academic researchers to play a larger, publicly-minded role in AI will require a variety of initiatives. To ensure academia has sufficient talent, academic researchers will need direct support to keep them from leaving for industry, and more open immigration policies will be needed to attract and retain promising researchers from other countries. To let academic researchers work on cutting-edge projects, investments will need to be made in public computing platforms and data.”

The Guardian: Scrawled bits of paper and an A-Z: How I went cold turkey on Google Maps. “Google Maps is an important and often necessary part of modern life. However, it has its problems. It has no time for meandering. The blue dot does not allow for distraction and discovery. It is there to get you from A to B. Removing it from my life has turned journeys around the city into richer, more enriching experiences. It has allowed me to feel part of things, and has made me feel more engaged with the place in which I live. That, I think, makes the occasional wrong turn well worth it.” I was glad to read this article because it’s an excellent metaphor for how I feel about AI-generated search results, even when they are correct.

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

BBC: The pro gamer who has to rely upon sound alone. “In the competitive world of professional gaming, one gifted player goes by the username Rattlehead. At the tournaments he attends in the US, his opponents quickly spot that he, real name Carlos Vasquez, is, by his own description, ‘completely blind’. They then let their guard down, wrongly thinking that they are set for an easy game of popular fighting series Mortal Kombat. And he often beats them.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 12, 2023 at 06:31PM
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US Civil War History, COP Conference Tracker, Google, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 11, 2023

US Civil War History, COP Conference Tracker, Google, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 11, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Cowboy State Daily: Casper-Based Database Revolutionizes Virtual Access For Civil War Buffs. “The website allows historians — amateur and professional — to dig into the nitty gritty of Civil War regiments, weapons and uniforms, or just to see how that great-great-great uncle lived on the battlefields from 1861-1865.”

Circular: New AI tool can analyse and explain all COP documents. “Pentatonic’s COP Tracker allows users to search the hundreds of pages of conference session documents, such as draft decisions, conclusions, and action reports, that the summit publishes each year. Users can generate ‘bespoke’ AI summaries and interact with a chat function to ask questions.” The site also makes it easy to hide the AI components if you’re just interested in the documents.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Roundtable: Google Search Results Super Volatile Days After Reviews Update Completed. “The last likely Google confirmed update of the year, the November 2023 reviews update, completed last Thursday afternoon on the 7th. But days after it completed the Google search results are still super volatile and the fluctuations and chatter are heated.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Gizmodo: Google’s NotebookLM Could Be the Ultimate AI-Based Notes App if It Doesn’t Lie to You. “NotebookLM lies, makes stuff up, and does it in some of the strangest ways possible. As an experiment, I plugged in a story I wrote a few years ago, along with a few supplementary documents, into NotebookLM and asked it to craft a query letter to send to literary agents. It got some parts right about my story but then misinterpreted whole swathes of its structure and plot. It then tried to lie and say I was a graduate of the University of California Berkeley (I’m not) and that I’m a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.”

The Messenger: X Looks to Small Advertisers After Elon Musk Attacks Big Brands: Report. “After antisemitic content was found near advertisements bought by major brands on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, some of the world’s largest companies pulled their spending on the platform. Now, X is going after a new demographic: small businesses.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Stuff New Zealand: Social media vitriol has ‘profound effect’ on council staff. “‘Yous are proving to be ABSOLUTELY USELESS,’ reads one, under a Tasman District Council post about a cycle lane. ‘You f**cken clowns, no brains at all.’ ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING??!? WHO IS MAKING THESE INCOMPETENT DECISIONS!?’ another shouts. Stuff contacted Tasman and Nelson councils to ask how they dealt with social media vitriol after a council employee, who asked to remain anonymous, got in touch to express their distress about such comments.”

New York Times: That QR Code You’re About to Scan Could Be Risky, F.T.C. Warns. “Scammers have used QR codes to steal personal information by imitating legitimate companies or sending deceptive emails and text messages, the Federal Trade Commission said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

MIT News: MIT group releases white papers on governance of AI. “Providing a resource for U.S. policymakers, a committee of MIT leaders and scholars has released a set of policy briefs that outlines a framework for the governance of artificial intelligence. The approach includes extending current regulatory and liability approaches in pursuit of a practical way to oversee AI.”

University of Waterloo: Is Alexa sexist? In short, yes. “University of Waterloo professor and Canada Research Chair in Technology and Social Change Dr. Lai-Tze Fan analyzed hundreds of Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa’s voice-driven skills. Dr. Fan’s goal was to better understand how the encoded technology mirrors and reinforces traditionally feminized labour and sociocultural expectations.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Ars Technica: Marbled paper, frosty fireworks among 2023 Gallery of Fluid Motion winners. “Marbled paper is an art form that dates back at least to the 17th century, when European travelers to the Middle East brought back samples and bound them into albums. Its visually striking patterns arise from the complex hydrodynamics of paint interacting with water, inspiring a winning video entry in this year’s Gallery of Fluid Motion.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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December 12, 2023 at 01:31AM
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