New Zealand Soccer News, Google, Google Assistant, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 14, 2024

New Zealand Soccer News, Google, Google Assistant, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 14, 2024
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Friends of Football (New Zealand): READ: New Zealand’s national Soccer News magazine from fifty years ago. “Fifty years ago, New Zealand football fans followed the sport through various publications, including the national monthly magazine Soccer News. Published and edited by Wellington-based John Ewan, the magazine covered the national team, national competitions such as the Rothmans Soccer League and the Chatham Cup… The publication has been converted to digital format by Friends of Football as part of an ongoing project to preserve the heritage of the game in New Zealand.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Google pulls Binance, other global crypto apps from India store. “Google pulled many crypto exchanges, including Binance and Kraken, from its Play Store in India on Saturday in what is the latest blow to the world’s second largest internet market’s already dwindling web3 dream. The ban comes two weeks after these global crypto exchanges were flagged for operating ‘illegally’ in the South Asian market.”

The Verge: Google removes 17 features from Google Assistant. “Several ‘underutilized’ Google Assistant features will soon be joining the infamous Google graveyard — such as the ability to use your voice to send an email, video, or audio messages — as the search giant introduces changes it says will make the feature easier to use. The company is also changing how the microphone works in the Google app and Pixel Search bar.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

WIRED: Scammy AI-Generated Book Rewrites Are Flooding Amazon. “When AI researcher Melanie Mitchell published Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans in 2019, she set out to clarify AI’s impact. A few years later, ChatGPT set off a new AI boom—with a side effect that caught her off guard. An AI-generated imitation of her book appeared on Amazon, in an apparent scheme to profit off her work. It looks like another example of the ecommerce giant’s ongoing problem with a glut of low-quality AI-generated ebooks.”

Yale School of Management: A New Course Prepares Students for a Workplace Transformed by AI. “Large Language Models: Theory and Application debuted this fall. Taught by Kyle Jensen, the Shanna and Eric Bass ’05 Director of Entrepreneurial Programs, and K. Sudhir, the James L. Frank ’32 Professor Private Enterprise and Management and professor of marketing, the course aims to equip students with the fundamentals of how large language models (LLMs) work and explore their far-reaching impact in the marketplace.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

StateScoop: Nonprofit behind FTC complaint about automated fraud-detection software hopes for more responsible AI use. “The group behind the recent Federal Trade Commission complaint against Thomson Reuters’ automated public-benefit fraud detection software — which is used by 42 state governments — hopes the filing will bring about more responsible use of artificial intelligence by governments and the vendors they contract.”

CBC: Toronto Public Library storing returned books at 12 trailers off site in wake of cyberattack. “The Toronto Public Library says it is storing returned books at 12 trailers off site following an October cyberattack. The books are being stored securely and have yet to be checked in, the library said in an email on Thursday.”

Fightful: NJPW Issues Copyright Strike Against…..NJPW. “New Japan Pro-Wrestling strikes again. NJPW is notorious for issues copyright strikes from users who upload their videos on YouTube and social media platforms and their latest victim is one of the biggest platforms in the world of wrestling. NJPW.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

BBC: Our fingerprints may not be unique, claims AI. “There is a belief that each fingerprint on one person’s hand is completely unique but that is now being challenged by research from Columbia University. A team at the US university trained an AI tool to examine 60,000 fingerprints to see if it could work out which ones belonged to the same individual. The researchers claim the technology could identify, with 75-90% accuracy, whether prints from different fingers came from one person.”

Los Angeles Times: Opinion: I bought a flip phone and tried to get by without my smartphone. Here’s how that went. “When they were little, my sons loved to play a game in which they would hide under the covers while I wondered aloud, ‘Where is he?’ Then they would throw off the blankets and yell, ‘Here I am! I was here the whole time.’ How much of their lives have I missed while looking at my screen? Every year, I see kids get phones and disappear into them. I don’t want that to happen to mine. I don’t want that to have happened to me. So I quit. And now I have this flip phone.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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January 15, 2024 at 01:52AM
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Scotland Spirituals, Elections Canada, OpenAI, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, January 14, 2024

Scotland Spirituals, Elections Canada, OpenAI, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, January 14, 2024
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Scotsman: Gaelic: ‘Sacred and spiritual’ songs of Highlands and Islands preserved for the future. “Dr Frances Wilkins, a Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology with the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen, has spent the last six years undertaking fieldwork in the Hebrides and West Highlands to explore and record sacred and spiritual singing from the region… Many of the sound recordings, photographs and videos made during the project can be found [online].”

CBC: Elections Canada launches online disinformation tool to prepare voters for next federal election. “Elections Canada is trying to insulate Canadian voters from false narratives and information during the next federal election by launching an online tool to help voters cut through misinformation and disinformation about the electoral process in Canada. The ElectoFacts website, launched this week, provides factual information to debunk the most common misconceptions observed by Elections Canada officials in recent years.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Futurism: OpenAI’s GPT Store Already Filling Up With “AI Girlfriends”. “The AI company’s equivalent of Apple’s App Store allows developers to share their own GPT models, from coding tutors to book recommendation bots, with other paying ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Enterprise users. At least, those are the examples OpenAI gives in its announcement. The reality looks considerably different.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Tablet: Pope Calls for Investing in Preservation of Church’s Audiovisual Archives. “There is a growing and urgent need to invest in and plan concrete initiatives to preserve and share the Catholic Church’s rich but fragile audiovisual heritage, Pope Francis said. By investing now, he said, ‘the economic costs will certainly be lower than those that will be paid from a historical, cultural and religious point of view with the irreparable loss of so much Catholic audiovisual heritage.'”

The Herald (Scotland): Final part of Alasdair Gray archive bought by National Library. “The National Library of Scotland has bought the last and final tranche of archive material by renowned author, artist and playwright, Alasdair Gray. The Library’s collection of Alasdair Gray material is the largest and most comprehensive collection of Gray’s literary and personal materials.”

The Independent: Formula E team ditches AI social media influencer ‘Ava’ after backlash. “Formula E team Mahindra Racing have been forced to discard a bizarre plunge into artificial intelligence whereby they created a fake social media influencer ahead of the new season. The team created a fake influencer powered by AI called ‘Ava’ to promote the team, their drivers and sustainability campaigns throughout the season, which starts this weekend in Mexico.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Sky News: Hundreds of items missing from English museums including Queen Victoria drawing and prehistoric jaw fragment . “The findings from Freedom of Information requests to museums and galleries receiving public money comes after a member of staff at the British Museum was sacked in August after jewellery and gems from its collection were found to be missing, stolen or damaged.”

ABC News (Australia): Legal experts warn naming and shaming alleged criminals on social media can itself be a crime. “Posting on social media about neighbourhood crime has become an increasingly popular trend, however experts have warned it can be risky. Online feeds and community pages are littered with images and videos of alleged criminals caught on CCTV, along with call-outs to identify them.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Android Police: Google is messing with Driving Mode again, and I’ve had enough of this nonsense. “Google doesn’t like me. That’s the only assumption I can make when it consistently finds ways to make my life more difficult. Google+, Inbox, Pixelbook, these are dead Google products that I love, but at least I could find alternatives for them easily enough. The same can’t be said for driving apps. Google has messed with its driving apps for the worse twice now, and it looks like it’s about to happen again.”

Diplomatic Courier: Preserving Institutional Democracy In The Age Of AI. “It is time for leaders to challenge and disrupt the status quo in their own ways and not be guided by the whims of technology. We must try to move faster than AI, or at least fast enough to ensure the healthy perseverance, yet improvement of democratic institutions and democratic resiliency.”

Business Insider: Putin’s social media ban cost Russia’s economy more than $4 billion last year. “Including time lost from social media bans in the first year of its war, Russia experienced 1,353 hours of internet shutdown in 2023, which affected 113 million of its internet users, according to a study from the VPN reviewer Top10VPN. The report found that cost its economy $4.02 billion last year, measuring the losses using the Cost of Shutdown Tool from the internet monitor NETBLOCKS.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Cultured: Are Artist-Produced Zines the Antidote to Social Media?. “Interest in zines—small, self-published printed texts and images—has ballooned in recent years. The spike can be attributed to young people’s growing disengagement with social media as a tool for political communication coupled with a renewed interest in community-based advocacy and tactile, IRL cultural objects.” Good morning, Internet…

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January 14, 2024 at 06:31PM
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Map Books of 2024, Twitter, YouTube, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 13, 2024

Map Books of 2024, Twitter, YouTube, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 13, 2024
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Map Room has launched a page for map-related books coming out in 2024. From the page: “Here are the map, cartography and geospatial-related books that, to my knowledge, have been published or are scheduled to be published in 2024. This page will be updated throughout the year as I receive new information. Which is to say that this information is subject to change and often in flux (publishers reschedule books all the time).”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

AFP: Elon Musk’s X tells watchdog it has shed 1,000 ‘safety’ staff. “Elon Musk’s X has shed more than 1,000 staff globally from teams responsible for stopping abusive content online, according to new figures released Thursday by Australia’s online watchdog. Australia’s eSafety Commission said these ‘deep cuts’ and the reinstatement of thousands of banned accounts had created a ‘perfect storm’ for the spread of harmful content.”

Search Engine Land: YouTube rolls out new Shorts editing tools. “YouTube video layouts can now be edited when converting long-form clips into Shorts. The new editing feature, compatible with all Remix tools, is currently accessible only on iOS but will be rolled out to Android in the near future.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Mint: China’s Weibo blocks trending hashtag on ‘Taiwan election’ amid voting. “China’s Weibo social media platform on Saturday blocked a hashtag on the Taiwan presidential election after it became one of the site’s top-trending topics following polls opening on the self-ruled island, AFP reported.”

Kyiv Post: Ancient Graffiti to be Digitized in Kyiv’s St. Sophia. “The National Conservation Area ‘St. Sophia of Kyiv’ has launched a project to digitally document the graffiti array of the eleventh and early eighteenth centuries. This was reported by the press service of the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy in Telegram, Ukrinform reports.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Reddit must share IP addresses of piracy-discussing users, film studios say. “For the third time in less than a year, film studios with copyright infringement complaints against a cable Internet provider are trying to force Reddit to share information about users who have discussed piracy on the site.”

IEEE Spectrum: How Tech Automated the January 6 Investigations: Three years on, databases, not tipsters, are generating more criminal charges. “Josh Coker’s Facebook page doesn’t show any MAGA memes or Trump quotes. He wasn’t live-streaming on 6 January 2021, and no one has ever stepped forward to identify him as one of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol that day. But on 10 October last year, the Department of Justice charged Coker, who lives in Oregon, Ohio, with five counts connected to the failed insurrection. The FBI was able to identify Coker and gather information about his actions using only location data from his phone and image-recognition technologies.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TechCrunch: Google to help build the first subsea cable directly connecting South America with Asia-Pacific. “Google is set to build a new subsea cable connecting Chile with Australia, via French Polynesia — the first such cable to directly connect South America with Asia-Pacific.”

University of Copenhagen: New study pinpoints the weaknesses in AI. “ChatGPT and other solutions built on Machine Learning are surging. But even the most successful algorithms have limitations. As the first in the world researchers from University of Copenhagen has proven mathematically that apart from simple problems it is not possible to create algorithms for AI that will always be stable.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Publishers Weekly: North Carolina’s Firestorm Books Offers Free Books Banned in Florida . “Firestorm Books, a collectively-owned radical bookstore in Asheville, N.C., has acquired 22,500 copies of 46 children’s books that were banned from the Duval County Public School system in Florida. Under a campaign named ‘Banned Books Back!,’ the bookstore plans to distribute these books to children and families across the United States, starting with Florida.” The bookstore is fundraising for shipping costs. Good morning, Internet…

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January 14, 2024 at 01:11AM
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Wi-Fi 7, Artifact News App, Amazon, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, January 13, 2024

Wi-Fi 7, Artifact News App, Amazon, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, January 13, 2024
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

How-To Geek: Wi-Fi 7 Has Officially Arrived. “We saw more than a few Wi-Fi 7 routers in 2023, and a lot more are coming in 2024. However, you couldn’t actually use Wi-Fi 7 on the first batch of routers, because the standard wasn’t finalized and there were hardly any devices that supported it. Now, Wi-Fi 7 is finally here, and all those routers will probably get retroactively certified.”

Artifact Team: Shutting down Artifact. “We’ve made the decision to wind down operations of the Artifact app. We launched a year ago and since then we’ve been working tirelessly to build a great product. We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Ars Technica: Lazy use of AI leads to Amazon products called “I cannot fulfill that request”. “Amazon users are at this point used to search results filled with products that are fraudulent, scams, or quite literally garbage. These days, though, they also may have to pick through obviously shady products, with names like ‘I’m sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy.'”

Polygon: Capcom adds new DRM to old PC games, raising worries over mods. “Publisher Capcom has been adding file-protection software to its back catalog of games on Steam, seemingly as part of the company’s efforts to crack down on piracy — but also on PC mods, which the company claims are ‘no different than cheats’ for its games.”

TechCrunch: Google will allow more real-money games on the Play Store. “Google announced today that the company plans to support more real-money games (RMG) on the Play Store this year by allowing more types of games in the category following local laws. The search giant said that the program with extended support for real-money gaming will start in India, Brazil and Mexico in June, with rollout in more countries planned in the future.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Stanford Law: Artificial Intelligence and the Law. “As the use of generative AI expands, so does the capacity of large language models to cause serious harm. Mark Lemley (BA ’88), the William H. Neukom Professor of Law, worries about a future in which AI provides advice on committing acts of terrorism, recipes for poisons or explosives, or disinformation that can ruin reputations or incite violence. The question is who, if anybody, will be held accountable for these harms?”

Newswise: Dark web fentanyl-selling operations have grown rapidly, offer steep discounts. “Overdose deaths in North America have skyrocketed, primarily because of the spread of illegally manufactured fentanyl. In a new study, researchers analyzed an early and prominent fentanyl-selling operation on the dark web. The organization sustained a significant growth rate, which allowed it to offer consumers steep discounts. In light of these findings, the authors conclude that it might be challenging to constrain supply by shuttering individual organizations since remaining organizations could grow rapidly to fill unmet demand.”

BBC: HelloFresh fined over millions of spam texts and emails. “Food delivery company HelloFresh has been fined for sending millions of spam emails and texts to customers. The recipe box firm was told to pay £140,000 following a 2022 investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). It found 79 million emails and one million texts were sent out over a seven-month spamming campaign.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Laughing Squid: AI Humanoid Robot Makes Silly Faces in the Mirror. “Ameca, the engaging AI humanoid robot by Engineered Arts, amazingly responded to its own image in the mirror by making silly faces, using an even wider range of expressions than it had in previous years.”

NBC News: Google and Bing put nonconsensual deepfake porn at the top of some search results. “NBC News found that deepfake pornographic images featuring the likenesses of female celebrities were the first images Google and other top search engines surfaced in searches for many women’s names and the word ‘deepfakes,’ as well as general terms like ‘deepfake porn’ or ‘fake nudes.’ The searches were conducted with safe-search tools turned off.

Open Library of Humanities: OLH launches a new journal . “We’re delighted to announce the launch of a new Open Library of Humanities journal. Political Philosophy is edited by Prof. Robert Goodin (Australian National University) along with co-editors Christian Barry (Australian National University), Chiara Cordelli (University of Chicago), Jeffrey Howard (University College London), Nicholas Southwood (Australian National University), and Lea Ypi (London School of Economics). All the former Associate Editors and virtually all members of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Political Philosophy will serve in the same capacity at the new journal, which has the full support of the international academic community.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Northwestern News: Dirt-powered fuel cell runs forever. “A Northwestern University-led team of researchers has developed a new fuel cell that harvests energy from microbes living in dirt…. To test the new fuel cell, the researchers used it to power sensors measuring soil moisture and detecting touch, a capability that could be valuable for tracking passing animals…. Not only did the fuel cell work in both wet and dry conditions, but its power also outlasted similar technologies by 120%.” Good morning, Internet…

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January 13, 2024 at 06:31PM
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Translating Luxembourgish, The Carolina Times, ChatGPT, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 12, 2024

Translating Luxembourgish, The Carolina Times, ChatGPT, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 12, 2024
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

RTL Today: New Luxembourgish translation app goes online . “The translation functionality extends bidirectionally, allowing users to translate both from Luxembourgish into English and vice versa. Scheduled for release next week on GCore’s website, this versatile application will be accessible through standard web browsers.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

DigitalNC: The 2000-2010 Issues of The Carolina Times Now Available!. “The next decade of The Carolina Times (Durham, N.C.) is now available online at Digital NC, thanks to our partner UNC Chapel Hill…. These volumes also offer commentary on a myriad of issues affecting the Black community, both in Durham and nationwide. Prominent topics range from civil rights, societal and political inequality, and police brutality.”

How-To Geek: ChatGPT’s Store of Custom Chatbots is Finally Live. “OpenAI’s GPT Store is finally launching, as announced by the company. The store will be home to both GPTs developed by OpenAI’s partners as well as ones made by third-parties, and users will be able to search for them in different categories such as writing, lifestyle, among others.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: Supercharge Your Browsing Experience With Mouse Gestures. “Sometimes it’s the less widely used, more niche browsers that have the best ideas. Take, for example, mouse gestures, which let you perform actions like going back a page or closing a tap with a swipe of the mouse (or a swipe across the trackpad). That means no need to keep looking down at the keyboard to find shortcut combinations, or hunting around on screen for a toolbar button or menu option. Once you’re used to them, mouse gestures can really speed up the way you get around the web.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

NBC News: Elon Musk criticized by civil rights groups over claim that diversity efforts make flying less safe. “Tech billionaire Elon Musk drew a swift rebuke from two of the nation’s best known civil rights organizations Wednesday, after he criticized efforts by United Airlines and Boeing to hire nonwhite pilots and factory workers. The criticism came after Musk claimed in a series of posts on X that efforts to diversify workforces at those companies have made air travel less safe. He offered no evidence for the claim, and one of his replies directed attention to a post by someone else speculating about the IQ of Black airline employees.”

Hackaday: Adding AI To NPCs Is Easy, Doing It Well Is Hard. “Adding natural language interfaces to software is easier than ever, and that led [creikey] to prototype a game that hinges on communicating with NPCs. The prototype went through multiple iterations during which he mainly discovered things that did not work well. Ultimately, it led to [creikey] settling on a western-themed game called Dante’s Cowboy which he hopes to release as an experiment.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BBC: Eight ‘suspicious’ US deaths in Colombia linked to dating apps. “US citizens travelling to Colombia have been warned against using dating apps in the country after the ‘suspicious deaths’ of eight American tourists in two months. The US embassy in Bogota said some victims were drugged and robbed after meeting people on these apps.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Dartmouth University: Zeroing In On the Origins of Bias in Large Language Models. “In a recent paper published in the Proceedings of 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, co-authors Weicheng Ma, a computer science PhD candidate at the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies, and Soroush Vosoughi, assistant professor of computer science, look at how stereotypes are encoded in pretrained large language models.”

Northeastern Global News: Who believes ‘fake news’? Regardless of age and politics, people who endorse lies are aware they could be made up, research says. “Northeastern researchers say that when confronted with ‘fake news,’ Republicans and younger people are more likely to say they believe the false headlines than Democrats and older people. But across the board, participants who were incorrect about news headlines being true or false had an inkling they were wrong, lead author and Northeastern professor Briony-Swire Thompson says.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Boing Boing: An interactive map of tiny islands around the world. “The Obscure Islands website contains a map of them around the world, and it’s so much fun to explore. Each island on the map comes with a description about its land and history.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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January 13, 2024 at 02:33AM
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New Mexico Uranium Mines, HyperVerse, YouTube, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, January 12, 2024

New Mexico Uranium Mines, HyperVerse, YouTube, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, January 12, 2024
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

New Mexico Environment Department: Environment Department releases interactive dashboard of
formerly operating uranium mine and mill sites. This link goes to a PDF file. “Today, the New Mexico Environment Department’s (NMED) Office of Strategic Initiatives has released an interactive dashboard to simplify researching the extent of uranium impacts and easily access the federal and state government agencies involved in each site’s management. The dashboard allows members of the public to easily find information on these legacy mines and milling operations in their area.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Guardian: ‘I do feel bad about this’: Englishman who posed as HyperVerse CEO says sorry to investors who lost millions. “The man who posed as the chief executive of the collapsed crypto scheme HyperVerse has confirmed he was paid to act the part, receiving 180,000 Thai baht (about A$7,500 or £4,000) over nine months and a free suit as payment.”

Phone Arena: YouTube is really serious about podcasts, launches new tool for creators. “YouTube is one of the services that has already been pushing podcasts to its consumers as much as possible. To make it easier for creators to reach bigger audiences, YouTube is now rolling out a new feature that will allow podcast creators to upload episodes directly from their RSS feeds.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

National Library of the Netherlands: Statement on commercial generative AI. “The KB makes written resources widely accessible and expects re-users to respect copyright, indicate sources and process personal data responsibly. In our opinion, AI companies are failing in that respect. In our view, the way many commercial AI models are now trained – by crawling websites without permission – does not serve the public interest. … We have therefore adapted our terms of use and taken technical measures to combat crawling of our websites Delpher and DBNL by commercial parties from now on. ”

New York Times: Kim Reynolds Has Another Account, @Kimberl26890376, and Opinions About Donald Trump. “Not long after the calendar turned to 2024, Kim Reynolds, the Republican governor of Iowa, signed into X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, and posted about the presidential primary, where she has emerged as a key backer of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida over former President Donald J. Trump. But she was not posting from her publicly verified @KimReynoldsIA account.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Verge: eBay will pay $3 million over bizarre cyberstalking campaign. “eBay has agreed to pay $3 million in connection with a 2019 harassment campaign directed at a Massachusetts couple that had been critical of the e-commerce site. The US Department of Justice announced the maximum criminal penalty on Thursday and said the company committed six felony offenses.”

Reuters: Google’s $2.7 Billion EU Antitrust Fine Should Be Upheld, Court Adviser Says. “Alphabet unit Google’s 2.42-billion-euro ($2.7 billion) EU antitrust fine should be upheld by Europe’s top court, an adviser to the court said on Thursday, dealing a potential blow to the world’s most popular internet search engine.”

PC Magazine: In a First, Google Lobbies to Pass Right-to-Repair Law. “Not long ago, the tech industry tried its best to squash the Right to Repair movement. But Google is now the latest company to vocally support it, as well as right-to-repair legislation. On Thursday, the search giant formally endorsed a right-to-repair bill being considered in Oregon, with the hopes that other states follow suit.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Cincinnati: Let me check my phone again: UC Blue Ash students publish research on smartphone usage. “New research conducted by students and a professor at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College finds that smartphone usage can increase and even become unhealthy for those who have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a psychiatric disorder with symptoms related to unwanted and distressing thoughts that can lead to repetitive and disruptive behaviors.”

University of British Columbia: ChatGPT has read almost the whole internet. That hasn’t solved its diversity issues. “AI language models are booming. The current frontrunner is ChatGPT, which can do everything from taking a bar exam, to creating an HR policy, to writing a movie script. But it and other models still can’t reason like a human. In this Q&A, Dr. Vered Shwartz (she/her), assistant professor in the UBC department of computer science, and masters student Mehar Bhatia (she/her) explain why reasoning could be the next step in AI—and why it’s important to train these models using diverse datasets from different cultures.”

Publishers Weekly: OverDrive: Record Number of Libraries Hit One Million Digital Lends in 2023. “OverDrive reps reported this week that a record 152 library systems and consortia across seven countries—including 41 states and seven Canadian provinces—surpassed the one million digital lends benchmark in 2023, which includes e-books, digital audiobooks, and digital magazines. The numbers represent a significant jump from the 129 library systems that hit the milestone in 2022.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Ars Technica: Those Games turns crappy mobile game ads into actually good puzzles. “Their full title is Yeah! You Want ‘Those Games,’ Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let’s See You Clear Them!, originally in all caps. Developer Monkeycraft, makers of the Katamari Damacy Reroll titles, has now made many of the games that don’t seem to exist. They’ve just arrived for the PlayStation, having already provided their public service on Nintendo Switch and Windows on Steam.” 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. See my other nonsense at WikiTwister, SearchTweaks, RSS Gizmos, Mastodon Gizmos, and MegaGladys.

January 12, 2024 at 06:31PM
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Food Waste Reduction Grants, Google Advertising, Twitter, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 11, 2024

Food Waste Reduction Grants, Google Advertising, Twitter, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 11, 2024
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Natural Resources Defense Council: New Database of Federal Grants for Food Waste. “ReFED’s analysis shows that an annual investment of $18 billion can reduce food waste across the food system by more than 21 million tons each year and generate $78 billion in annual net financial benefit. Capital from public, private, and philanthropic sources is needed. The federal government has long funded food loss and waste solutions, and over the past year it has made unprecedented investments in the space. To help potential applicants find and understand these crucial federal grant opportunities, ReFED and NRDC partnered to create a database of grants that could be used to fund food waste reduction work.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Journal: Google Expands Sensitive Events Policy To Limit Exploitation Of Emergencies. “As per the updated policy, a sensitive event is defined as an unforeseen or unexpected situation that poses a significant risk to Google’s ability to provide high-quality, relevant information while reducing insensitive content in prominent and monetized features. Sensitive events include those with major social, cultural, or political impact such as civil emergencies, natural disasters, public health crises, terrorism, conflict, or mass violence.”

The Verge: Google confirms it just laid off around a thousand employees. “Turns out Google’s postpandemic reckoning didn’t just hit the Google Hardware team responsible for Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit products — it’s taken similarly sized bites out of Google’s core engineering and Google Assistant teams too. Google just confirmed to The Verge that it’s eliminated ‘a few hundred’ roles in each of these divisions, meaning Google has confirmed layoffs of around a thousand employees on Wednesday alone, if we use a reasonable definition of ‘few’.”

Reuters: US FBI, SEC join probe of fake social media post from regulator. “U.S. authorities including the Federal Bureau of Investigation are probing a fake post made on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s account on X, an SEC spokesperson said on Wednesday after the incident roiled the already volatile bitcoin market.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The National (Scotland): Google ‘fixes’ map error after cars get stuck on central Edinburgh staircase. “GOOGLE has fixed a bug that told drivers to head down a set of stairs in central Edinburgh. The news comes after two cars became stuck on the same steps off Leith Walk at the foot of Calton Hill, Edinburgh Live reported.”

Variety: AI-Generated George Carlin Drops Comedy Special That Daughter Speaks Out Against: ‘No Machine Will Ever Replace His Genius’. “More than 15 years after his death, stand-up comedian George Carlin has been brought back to life in an artificial intelligence-generated special called ‘George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead.’ The hour-long special, which dropped on Tuesday, comes from Dudesy, a comedy AI that hosts a podcast and YouTube show with ‘Mad TV’ alum Will Sasso and podcaster Chad Kultgen.” The headline should be something like “AI Imitating George Carlin Drops Comedy Special.”

Engadget: Amazon won’t support AirPlay or Chromecast, but will adopt Matter Casting instead. “Amazon is the first big company to add support for the Matter open casting standard, it announced at CES 2024 in Las Vegas. Matter Casting is an open protocol that lets you send videos and related content from an app to a hardware device, just like Apple AirPlay and Google Chromecast. The feature just launched for the Prime Video app and will allow casting to various Amazon hardware devices.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bloomberg: US Prosecutors’ Message for Whistleblowers: Let’s Make a Deal. “The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced a new pilot program, aimed at enticing tips from employees at private companies, financial institutions and investment funds that expose corruption and white collar crime.” Why am I mentioning this in ResearchBuzz? Because as far as I can tell the tech industry runs more and more on money and less and less on innovation.

404 Media: Deepfaked Celebrity Ads Promoting Medicare Scams Run Rampant on YouTube. “Shoddy AI clones of celebrities including Joe Rogan, Taylor Swift, Steve Harvey, Ice Cube, Andrew Tate, Oprah, and The Rock are hawking Medicare and Medicaid scams to millions of people on YouTube with seemingly little intervention from Google. Ads connected to this scam have been viewed more than 195 million times on YouTube according to a playlist of more than 1,600 videos compiled by a tipster who shared them with 404 Media.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Radio Prague International: World’s oldest wooden object soon to be on display in Czechia. “A 7,000-year-old well found in Czechia’s Pardubice region six years ago will soon be on display as part of an archaeological exhibition at the Museum of East Bohemia. The wooden well, which has been in the care of restorers for the last few years, is, according to analyses, the oldest wooden man-made object in the world.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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January 12, 2024 at 01:48AM
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