Christianity in Africa, US State Press Freedom Index, Google, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 21, 2023

Christianity in Africa, US State Press Freedom Index, Google, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 21, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Princeton University: A Princeton humanities project shares a vast digital ‘Miracles of Mary’ collection of centuries-old African stories and art. “Website visitors can learn about more than 1,000 stories written about the Virgin Mary, see 2,500 Ethiopian paintings depicting stories about the Virgin Mary and learn more about the 1,000 parchment manuscripts in which the stories appear. The stories and paintings are searchable by date, manuscript, place of origin, language, title and many other categories.”

Reporters Without Borders: RSF launches U.S. State Press Freedom Index with Reynolds Journalism Institute. “Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is pleased to announce the launch of its U.S. State Press Freedom Index, a collaboration with the Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI). This new project will rate the press freedom records of all U.S. states and territories based on information gathered from working journalists and media experts around the country : an important tool before the 2024 presidential election.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Reuters: Google plans ad sales restructuring as automation booms – The Information. ” Alphabet-owned Google plans to reorganize a big part of its 30,000-person ad sales unit, The Information reported on Tuesday, citing a person with knowledge of the situation. Sean Downey, who oversees ad sales to big customers in the Americas, said at a department-wide meeting last week that Google plans to restructure its ad sales teams without specifying whether the move would include layoffs, according to the report.”

KWCH: Pranksters change names of Kansas schools on Google Maps. “Pranksters changed the name of Maize Middle School to ‘Maize Of Skibidi RizzMiddle School.’ They also hit Haysville West Middle School and Augusta High School.”

Detroit Free Press: Chevy dealership’s AI chatbot suggests Ford F-150 when asked for best truck. “Screenshots of an exchange over the weekend between someone online and the customer service chat system for Chevrolet of Watsonville dealership in California (and ‘powered by ChatGPT,’ according to the website) generated some amusement on the Threads social media site over the weekend. It’s not every day that a Chevy AI program heaps praise on an archrival, the Ford F-150.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

WIRED: The Obscure Google Deal That Defines America’s Broken Privacy Protections. “WIRED interviews with 20 current and former employees of Meta and Google who worked on privacy initiatives show that internal reviews forced by consent decrees have sometimes blocked unnecessary harvesting and access of users’ data. But current and former privacy workers, from low-level staff to top executives, increasingly view the agreements as outdated and inadequate. Their hope is that US lawmakers engineer a solution that helps authorities keep pace with advances in technology and constrain the behavior of far more companies.”

Associated Press: FTC proposes strengthening children’s online privacy rules. “The Federal Trade Commission is proposing sweeping changes to a decades-old law that regulates how online companies can track and advertise to children, including turning off targeted ads to kids under 13 by default and limiting push notifications.”

Armidale Express (Australia): eSafety Commission launches legal action against X. “The eSafety Commission has launched legal action against the owners of social media company X, formerly known as Twitter, for breaching online safety rules designed to protect children. The commission filed paperwork on Thursday in the Federal Court over X Corp’s alleged failure to comply with a transparency notice that was issued against the social media platform in February.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

MIT Press: European Sociological Association journals European Societies and European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology move to diamond open access at the MIT Press. “The MIT Press is thrilled to announce a groundbreaking partnership with the European Sociological Association (ESA), marking a significant step forward in the world of academic open access publishing. We are proud to welcome European Societies and European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology to MIT Press as premier diamond open access publications, with new issues commencing in 2025.”

University of Waterloo: Large language models validate misinformation, research finds. “In a recent study, researchers at the University of Waterloo systematically tested an early version of ChatGPT’s understanding of statements in six categories: facts, conspiracies, controversies, misconceptions, stereotypes, and fiction. This was part of Waterloo researchers’ efforts to investigate human-technology interactions and explore how to mitigate risks. They discovered that GPT-3 frequently made mistakes, contradicted itself within the course of a single answer, and repeated harmful misinformation.” 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.

December 22, 2023 at 01:56AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/ZKl324y

2022 Buffalo Blizzard, Newton School Waterford, Nursing Home Ownership, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, December 21, 2023

2022 Buffalo Blizzard, Newton School Waterford, Nursing Home Ownership, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, December 21, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

WKBW: Buffalo History Museum creates archive of the 2022 Christmas Blizzard. “We’re about to mark one year since the deadly Christmas blizzard dropped about seven feet of snow in some parts of Western New York. Now, the Buffalo History Museum is making sure the blizzard is remembered for years to come.”

Waterford News & Star: 225 Years Of Waterford’s Newtown School Archives Now Available Online In SETU Led Project. “People can now easily dive into the rich 225-year history of Newtown School Waterford, as a digital outreach project between the independent school and South East Technological University (SETU) hosts the freely available artefacts. The digital archive contains a wealth of information on the school, which has seen the likes of Erskine Barton Childers, Ralph Fiennes, Sinéad O’Connor, and Leslie Dowdall pass through its storied halls.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

ProPublica: ProPublica Adds Ownership Information to Our Nursing Home Database. “It can be hard to determine who is ultimately responsible for the quality of care in a nursing home. ProPublica’s Nursing Home Inspect tool now has detailed information on who owns a facility and who is responsible for running it.”

TechCrunch: Spill is now in open beta on iOS and Android . “It’s been more than a year since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, yet we’re still seeing the reverberations of that deal on other social platforms, including the new ones that have cropped up since. Spill, a platform founded by ex-Twitter employees, is closing out its first year on the market by opening up its beta to all users, whether they’re on iOS or Android.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Guardian: Tolkien and CS Lewis manuscripts among treasures made available to public in 2023 . “Manuscripts and books belonging to CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien – creators of two of the most popular fantasy worlds in literary history – are among the cultural objects being made available to the public this year. The brains behind Narnia and Middle Earth were close friends and fellow dons at Oxford University. Their previously unpublished correspondence is among an archive belonging to the estate of the literary adviser Walter Hooper that is being donated to the nation through the Acceptance in Lieu and Cultural Gifts schemes.”

StateScoop: How two tech startups are boosting public engagement in community planning. “The two companies, CitizenLab and Konveio, were introduced to one another through the CivStart tech startup accelerator program last year. Now hundreds of local governments use their software to reach more residents — CitizenLab claims more than 500 local governments across 18 countries use its software for community planning, such as transportation projects and how to use federal funding.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

404 Media: Largest Dataset Powering AI Images Removed After Discovery of Child Sexual Abuse Material. “The LAION-5B machine learning dataset used by Google, Stable Diffusion, and other major AI products has been removed by the organization that created it after a Stanford study found that it contained 3,226 suspected instances of child sexual abuse material, 1,008 of which were externally validated.”

Associated Press: A suspected cyberattack paralyzes the majority of gas stations across Iran. “Nearly 70% of Iran’s gas stations went out of service on Monday following possible sabotage — a reference to cyberattacks, Iranian state TV reported…. Israeli media, including the Times of Israel, blamed the problem on an attack by a hacker group dubbed ‘Gonjeshke Darande’ or predatory sparrow.”

Reuters: Russian court fines Google $50.8 million over ‘fake’ information on Ukraine war -TASS . “A Russian court hit Alphabet’s Google on Wednesday with a fine of 4.6 billion roubles ($50.84 million) for failing to delete so-called ‘fake’ information about the conflict in Ukraine, the TASS news agency reported.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Princeton University: Governor Murphy and Princeton announce plans to establish an artificial intelligence hub in New Jersey. “New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy joined University President Christopher L. Eisgruber on Monday to announce plans to create an artificial intelligence innovation hub for the state, in collaboration with the New Jersey Economic Development Authority.”

Axios: AI’s colossal puppet show. “Here’s an early New Year’s resolution for anyone who works with, deals with or writes about artificial intelligence: Stop saying ‘AI did this’ or ‘AI made that.’ Why it matters: AI doesn’t do or make anything on its own. It’s a software tool that people imagined and invented — the only capabilities and goals it has are those that people give it.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Hyperallergic: A Museum Uses Art to Prepare Future Doctors for End-of-Life Care. “For nearly a decade, future nurses and doctors enrolled at the University of Virginia have attended a workshop at the school’s Fralin Museum of Art to help prepare them for end-of-life care, a historically under-discussed subject in medical schools that has been increasingly incorporated into curricula in recent years.” 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.

December 21, 2023 at 06:31PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/47ruG91

AI in Literature, National Library of Finland, Microsoft Copilot, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 20, 2023

AI in Literature, National Library of Finland, Microsoft Copilot, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 20, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

EVENTS

The Ohio State University: Role of AI in literature is topic of Ohio State lecture by Pulitzer Prize finalist. “If artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve and becomes capable of producing first-rate literature, will the technology eventually replace human writers? Author, journalist and professor Vauhini Vara addressed the topic during a recent lecture at The Ohio State University’s Columbus campus.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

National Library of Finland: National Library to stop continuous collection of content from messaging service X for Finnish Web Archive. “The continuous harvesting effort has preserved content from the accounts of over 3,000 Finnish users representing fields including the media, cultural institutions, central government, universities, the legal system, politics, political parties, associations and the arts as well as various experts and social media influencers. As a result of recent changes in the X services and opportunities to preserve content, the National Library has decided to stop the continuous harvest of content from X as of this October.” The article was originally written in Finnish and released at the end of October.

TechCrunch: Microsoft Copilot gets a music creation feature via Suno integration. “Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft’s AI-powered chatbot, can now compose songs thanks to an integration with GenAI music app Suno. Users can enter prompts into Copilot like ‘Create a pop song about adventures with your family’ and have Suno, via a plug-in, bring their musical ideas to life. From a single sentence, Suno can generate complete songs — including lyrics, instrumentals and singing voices.”

USEFUL STUFF

Online Journalism Blog: How to combine two datasets to put a story into context (book extract). “One of the most common challenges in a data-driven story is combining two sets of data — such as events and populations — to put a story into context. In an extract from the ebook Finding Stories in Spreadsheets, I explain how to use lookup functions to combine two tables. The longer ebook version of this tutorial includes a dataset and exercise to employ these techniques.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: The Year in Social Media. “Algorithms are getting good, alarmingly so, at feeding you content targeted to your weird and wonderful and even secret interests. Still, a lot of interesting stories end up falling outside our digital castle walls. This list is an attempt to rectify that, revisiting the people, trends, feuds and frenzies that took off on social media platforms in 2023 but might not have broken into your personal World Wide Web.”

Reuters: Alphabet to limit election queries Bard and AI-based search can answer. “Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google said on Tuesday it will restrict the types of election-related queries its chatbot Bard and search generative experience can return responses for, in the run up to 2024 U.S. Presidential election. The restrictions are set to be enforced by early 2024, the company said.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ProPublica: How Verified Accounts on X Thrive While Spreading Misinformation About the Israel-Hamas Conflict. “With the gutting of content moderation initiatives at X, accounts with blue checks, once a sign of authenticity, are disseminating debunked claims and gaining more followers. Community Notes, X’s fact-checking system, hasn’t scaled sufficiently.”

The Verge: Rite Aid hit with five-year facial recognition ban over ‘reckless’ use. “Rite Aid isn’t allowed to use AI-powered facial recognition technology for another five years as part of a settlement it reached with the Federal Trade Commission. In a complaint filed on Tuesday, the FTC accuses Rite Aid of using facial surveillance systems in a ‘reckless’ manner from 2012 to 2020.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

VentureBeat: Google Gemini is not even as good as GPT-3.5 Turbo, researchers find. “Yes, you read that correctly: Google’s brand new LLM, the one that has been in development for months at least, performs worse at most tasks than OpenAI’s older, less cutting-edge, free model. After all, ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise paying subscribers can already access and use the underlying GPT-4 and GPT-4V (the multimodal offering) LLMs regularly, and have had access to the former for the better part of this year. That’s according to the work of a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and one from an enterprise identified as BerriAI.”

MIT Technology Review: These minuscule pixels are poised to take augmented reality by storm. “Tiny new displays, some small enough to fit on the tip of your finger, will contain micro-LEDs and micro-OLEDs (organic LEDs). They are set to deliver a wave of headsets that may convert even the most ardent AR skeptics. Apple’s Vision Pro, slated for release in 2024, will lead this change—though it might not shake the cyberpunk aesthetic. The fully enclosed headset, vaguely reminiscent of ski goggles, is intended for a mixture of AR and virtual reality (VR) that Apple calls ‘spatial computing.'” 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.

December 21, 2023 at 01:49AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/4bujC7I

Virginia Farming, Google Maps, Immigration Social Media, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, December 20, 2023

Virginia Farming, Google Maps, Immigration Social Media, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, December 20, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services: VDACS Launches Centralized Webpage with New and Beginning Farmer Resources. “The Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS) has curated a centralized list of valuable Resources for New and Beginning Farmers. This new website is designed to provide new and beginning agricultural producers with a list of available public resources to assist them in planning and starting their operations. The list of resources includes financial information, farm planning, training programs, technical assistance, conservation information, farm safety, and farm stress.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Google Maps pushes updates to enhance user experience in India. “Google Tuesday introduced a range of new features and updates for its mapping service in India as it wraps up for the year and sets the base for the coming year. One of the latest in the series of new additions is Lens in Maps, which will be launching in 15 cities across India by January, starting with Android.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: Live from the Jungle: Migrants Become Influencers on Social Media . “For more than a decade, cellphones have been indispensable tools for people fleeing their homelands, helping them research routes, find friends and loved ones, connect with smugglers and evade the authorities. Now, cellphones and social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and TikTok are drastically changing the equation once again, fueling the next evolution of global movement.” This is a gift link which should allow you to read the article without paywall.

AFP: Imran Khan deploys AI clone to campaign from behind bars in Pakistan. “Artificial intelligence allowed Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan to campaign from behind bars on Monday, with a voice clone of the opposition leader giving an impassioned speech on his behalf. Khan has been locked up since August and is being tried for leaking classified documents, allegations he says have been trumped up to stop him contesting general elections due in February.”

ZDNet: The rise and fall of Usenet: How the original social media platform came to be. “Long before Facebook existed, or even before the Internet, there was Usenet. Usenet was the first social network. Now, with Google Groups abandoning Usenet, this oldest of all social networks is doomed to disappear.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Hacker News: FBI Takes Down BlackCat Ransomware, Releases Free Decryption Tool. “The U.S. Justice Department (DoJ) has officially announced the disruption of the BlackCat ransomware operation and released a decryption tool that more than 500 affected victims can use to regain access to files locked by the malware.”

Washington Post: ‘Problematic pockets’: How Discord became a home for extremists. “Discord allows anonymous users to control large swaths of its online meeting rooms with little oversight. To detect bad behavior, the company relies on largely unpaid volunteer moderators and server administrators like [Jack] Teixeira to police activity, and on users themselves to report behavior that violates community guidelines.”

VICE: Police Arrest Alleged Leader of Horrific Child Sextortion Ring. “Authorities were led to Limkin by one of his alleged victims, according to the criminal complaint. The victim told authorities that they first encountered the man on Omeagle, an app that allows you to talk to random people online. [Kalana] Limkin allegedly showed the victim video of a 5-year-old being raped and brought her back to his Discord server.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Southern California: ‘Digital divide’ narrowing in California, but many low-income residents remain underconnected. “A survey by USC researchers and the California Emerging Technology Fund indicates that 91% of state households have broadband, yet challenges persist for low-income K-12 families.”

Northeastern Global News: A new AI model can predict human lifespan, researchers say. They want to make sure it’s used for good. “Researchers hope the model, built on a massive Danish data set and the technology that powers large language models like ChatGPT, can kickstart a public conversation about the power of these tools and how they should and shouldn’t be used.”

The Verge: 2023 in social media: the case for the fediverse. “If we do this correctly — if the next phase of how we congregate and communicate online is built for humans and not advertisers — there won’t be a new titanic company to rival Meta or a platform with eye-poppingly huge numbers like Facebook. What we’ll get instead is something much bigger: an entirely new infrastructure for our online lives that no company or platform controls.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: NASA’s Tech Demo Streams First Video From Deep Space via Laser. “NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications experiment beamed an ultra-high definition streaming video on Dec. 11 from a record-setting 19 million miles away (31 million kilometers, or about 80 times the Earth-Moon distance). The milestone is part of a NASA technology demonstration aimed at streaming very high-bandwidth video and other data from deep space – enabling future human missions beyond Earth orbit.” 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.

December 20, 2023 at 06:34PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/4NwuqXk

Black Plays Archive, TestFlight Teraleak, Flipboard, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 19, 2023

Black Plays Archive, TestFlight Teraleak, Flipboard, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 19, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Theatre Weekly: National Theatre celebrates tenth anniversary of the Black Plays Archive with launch of new digital platform. “The digital archive includes over 850 plays and over 300 Black British, African, and Caribbean writers…. Alongside the extensive database of plays, the archive also contains a vast range of resources including over 70 video and audio recordings of play extracts, a bibliography of essays on Black British theatre and video interviews with leading practitioners and academics in the field.”

The Verge: Game preservationists dig for lost apps in TestFlight ‘teraleak’. “A huge number of old mobile games and apps from TestFlight, which lets developers share in-development versions of their apps, have been discovered on the Internet Archive, as reported by Eurogamer. The 1.2TB cache, which is being called the ‘teraleak,’ could be a really big deal for preservationists, especially because many older apps are no longer available to download in any form.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Flipboard is moving to the fediverse. “Flipboard is the latest mainstream app to officially join the fediverse, the collection of decentralized services that run on the ActivityPub protocol. The news reading app, which has been experimenting with Mastodon for nearly a year, now plans to become fully interoperable with Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse.”

NBC News: Conservative social media app Parler planning to relaunch ahead of 2024 election. “Parler, one of the Trump-era social media apps that featured little content moderation and became popular among conservatives, has been sold again and is planning for a relaunch early next year ahead of the 2024 presidential election, its new owners said Monday.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Duke University Libraries: Rubenstein Library Acquires Archive of Danny Lyon, Whose Lens Captured Heroism and Violence of Civil Rights Movement. “The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University has acquired the archive of photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon, who shot some of the most powerful and enduring images of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.”

Library of Congress: 25 Films Selected for Preservation in National Film Registry. “Twenty-five influential films have been selected for the 2023 Library of Congress National Film Registry, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced today. The films are selected each year for their cultural, historic or aesthetic importance to preserve the nation’s film heritage.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Brazil’s first lady to sue Musk’s X over hacked account. “Brazilian first lady Rosangela ‘Janja’ Lula da Silva said on Tuesday she will sue Elon Musk-owned social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, after having her account hacked last week. The alleged hacker entered Janja’s account on Dec. 11 and posted several messages, including insults against the first lady and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, as well as misogynistic slurs.”

WMMT: Michigan State University trustees vote to release documents relating to Larry Nassar case . “Michigan State University trustees unanimously approved the release of documents related to the sexual assault scandal involving disgraced sports doctor Larry Nassar.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Public Radio of Armenia: TUMO expands its initiative to digitally preserve Armenian cultural heritage sites. “In 2018 and 2019, TUMO students made their first 3D scans of Armenian historical and cultural heritage monuments in a series of special learning labs. They used laser scanning and photogrammetry to document sites including the Matosavank monastery in Dilijan National Park, Amberd Fortress on Mount Aragats, the Dadivank monastery in Karvachar, and Ghazanchetsots Cathedral in Shushi. Since then, the number of scanned sites has reached 230, and will now expand to include all of Armenia’s important monuments over the coming years.”

Information Sciences Institute: AI can help journalists find diverse and original sources. “Researchers from the USC Information Sciences Institute are creating a source-recommendation engine designed to suggest references for journalists. ‘In practice, the software application would analyze a given text or topic and suggest relevant sources by cross-referencing against a database of potential interviewees, experts or informational resources,’ said Emilio Ferrara, a professor of computer science and communication at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. ‘The tool could provide contact details, areas of expertise and previous work of the sources,’ he added.” 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.

December 20, 2023 at 01:53AM
via ResearchBuzz https://researchbuzz.me/2023/12/19/black-plays-archive-testflight-teraleak-flipboard-more-tuesday-afternoon-researchbuzz-december-19-2023/

Liberian Newspapers, The Lambeth Bible, NARA, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, December 19, 2023

Liberian Newspapers, The Lambeth Bible, NARA, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, December 19, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Center for Research Libraries: Global Press Archive CRL Alliance Launches Open Access Liberian Newspaper Archive. “East View Information Services and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) have launched the Daily Observer Digital Archive… Comprising more than 35,000 pages, DODA is a comprehensive archive of the English-language Daily Observer, Liberia’s best-known independent national newspaper. Founded in 1981, the Daily Observer is notable for its coverage of the modern history of Liberia, from the Liberian Civil War through its current phase of development.”

Lambeth Palace Library Blog: A giant task: Digitising the Lambeth Bible. “The Lambeth Bible (MS 3) is one of around a dozen giant Romanesque Bibles that survive from England and alongside the Winchester Bible and Bury Bible, is one of the most finely illuminated. The manuscript is full of vibrant images decorated with gold, including six full-page paintings and twenty-four historiated initials, just a few of which are featured below.”

National Archives: New Online Exhibits: “Presidential Visits to the National Archives Building”. “The new, two-part online exhibit, ‘Presidential Visits to the National Archives Building: 20th Century’ and ‘Presidential Visits to the National Archives Building: 21st Century’ explore nearly 100 years of Presidential trips down Pennsylvania Avenue to the National Archives Building.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNN: Google to pay $700 million to US states, consumers in Play store settlement. “Google has agreed to pay $700 million and to allow more competition in its Play app store, according to the terms of an antitrust settlement with US states and consumers filed in federal court on Monday.”

The Bookseller: British Library to restore access to main catalogue on 15th Jan after cyberattack outage . “A reference-only version of the British Library’s (BL) main catalogue will be online again from 15th January 2024, when the library will begin a ‘phased return’ of some services after October’s cyberattack. An inter-library loan system will also be made available, alongside ‘increased on-site access’ to the library’s special collections and manuscripts, while the main catalogue will help with manual orders.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: You Need Felix the Cat? Early Popeye? Talk to the King of Silent Animation.. “Once a week, Mr. [Tommy José] Stathes heads from his small studio apartment in Queens to his enormous collection of vintage cartoons: a celluloid library of around 4,000 reels, some of the prints more than 100 years old. It is certainly one of the largest collections of early animated films anywhere in the world — and that accounts for the holdings of the Library of Congress, according to an archivist who does restoration there.”

ArtDaily: Project at Independence Seaport Museum to document lives of African-Americans from along Delaware River. “Furthering the Independence Seaport Museum mission as a maritime museum focused on the Delaware River, its people and the environment and how it connects to the larger world, the museum is embarking on a new, multi-year project, ‘Breaking Uncommon Ground on the Delaware River,’ an initiative that will collect oral histories from African-American Philadelphians who lived and worked along the Delaware River in the mid- to the late 20th- and 21st-centuries.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Associated Press: Justice Department creates database to track records of misconduct by federal law enforcement. “The U.S. Justice Department has created a database to track records of misconduct by federal law enforcement officers that is aimed at preventing agencies from unknowingly hiring problem officers, officials said on Monday.”

404 Media: Polish Hackers Repaired Trains the Manufacturer Artificially Bricked. Now The Train Company Is Threatening Them. “In one of the coolest and more outrageous repair stories in quite some time, three white-hat hackers helped a regional rail company in southwest Poland unbrick a train that had been artificially rendered inoperable by the train’s manufacturer after an independent maintenance company worked on it. The train’s manufacturer is now threatening to sue the hackers who were hired by the independent repair company to fix it.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

SiliconANGLE: New OpenAI safety team will have power to block high-risk developments. “OpenAI today announced a new safety plan that will give its board of directors veto power to overrule Chief Executive Sam Altman if it considers the risks of the AI being developed to be too high.”

Stanford Graduate School of Business: Generative AI Boost Can Boost Productivity Without Replacing Workers. “Since generative AI went mainstream a year ago, it has inspired an equal measure of hype and fear. Boosters of tools such as ChatGPT and DALL-E predict that they will transform our economy, while skeptics worry about their potential to produce inaccurate or harmful results and ultimately replace workers. But until recently, no one had tested what really happens when companies unleash generative AI at scale in real workplaces.”

Business Insider: I found an archive of old posts and Gmail chats from when I was 11 — and instead of cringing, it endeared me to that youthful, carefree version of myself. “Reading the posts, I was startled to find such joyful innocence and unfiltered emotion in myself at that age. There are numerous videos and forums online about people finding their old MySpace accounts and Facebook posts and saying they feel ‘cringed out,’ or embarrassed. For me, however, I wasn’t scared to re-meet my younger self. I was endeared by him.” 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.

December 19, 2023 at 06:31PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/R14A6SD

Congressionally Mandated Reports, Netherlands Institute for Art History, Maryland Catholic Church Misconduct, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 18, 2023

Congressionally Mandated Reports, Netherlands Institute for Art History, Maryland Catholic Church Misconduct, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 18, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

US Government Publishing Office: Congressionally Mandated Reports Submitted by Agencies Now Available. “The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) has made Congressionally Mandated Reports available to the public on GPO’s GovInfo. GPO fulfilled this responsibility ahead of its one-year implementation deadline set by Congress. Reports are now published and available for the public to access at https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/CMR. This marks the first time Congressionally Mandated Reports have been accessible to the public in a single location.”

CODART: RKD Launches RKD Research and Adds Millions of Digitized Documents and Images. “Netherlands Institute for Art History renewed its website and launched RKD Research. As of this month, millions of additional data can be consulted online using on the new platform. RKD Research replaces and expands RKD Explore, which was launched in 2013. The new platform allows the user to search seven online databases with over six million digitized documents and images. These databases are the main source for art historical research into the visual arts from the Low Countries in an international context and new data are continuously added.”

Baltimore Sun: New Sun database expands list of those accused in Catholic Church abuse beyond Baltimore archdiocese. “The Baltimore Sun has built the largest and only searchable database in the state, publishing Friday a list of 309 people with ties to the church who were accused of child sexual abuse or misconduct and lived or worked anywhere in Maryland, regardless of where the alleged acts occurred. It adds 107 names, researched by Sun reporters, to the people listed in the attorney general report issued in April.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: EU opens formal DSA investigation into X in wake of Israel-Hamas war. “X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, may have broken the European Union’s tough new Digital Service Act rules, regulators said as they announced the opening of a formal investigation today. A key concern of the investigation is ‘the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel,’ the European Commission says.”

Bloomberg: Yandex Founder Seeks Sanctions Removal After Condemning Russia’s Invasion. “Yandex NV co-founder Arkady Volozh shouldn’t have been sanctioned after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, as he was never close to the Russian president and has blasted Russia’s aggression toward its neighbor, a European Union court was told.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: Vera Molnar, Pioneer of Computer Art, Dies at 99. “Vera Molnar, a Hungarian-born artist who has been called the godmother of generative art for her pioneering digital work, which started with the hulking computers of the 1960s and evolved through the current age of NFTs, died on Dec. 7 in Paris. She was 99.”

Tom’s Guide: I just tried Google’s new AI music generator MusicFX — and it’s the best one yet. “It still isn’t a patch on the output an expert with a trained ear and actual musical abilities could produce with real instruments and a studio. However, like image and video AI generators, it is allowing everyone to express their creative side in new ways.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TechCrunch: News publisher files class action antitrust suit against Google, citing AI’s harms to their bottom line. “A new class action lawsuit filed this week in the U.S. District Court in D.C. accuses Google and parent company Alphabet of anticompetitive behavior in violation of U.S. antitrust law, the Sherman Act, and others, on behalf of news publishers. … It also specifically cites new AI technologies like Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) and Bard AI chatbot as worsening the problem.”

Reuters: Judge says TikTok must turn meeting records over in U.S. states probe. “A state judge on Friday ordered TikTok to comply with a request from the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office for records in a multistate investigation into whether the app puts young people at risk.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Stanford Medicine: How digital tools are heading off alcohol-related health problems. “Brian Suffoletto, MD, associate professor of emergency medicine, views interactions with patients in the Emergency Department as valuable opportunities to identify specific risks and then facilitate positive behavior changes post-ED discharge using digital devices. He has spent more than 10 years developing digital behavioral interventions for various medical risks from young adult binge drinking to distracted driving. In this Q&A, we asked Suffoletto about his work and research into digital tools that can both recognize and address the negative impact alcohol use can have on a person’s health.” 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.

December 19, 2023 at 01:25AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/uEIwgpx