Twitter, Celebrity Endorsements, iPhone Document Scanning, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 24, 2022

Twitter, Celebrity Endorsements, iPhone Document Scanning, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 24, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Guardian: Elon Musk ‘orders Twitter to remove suicide prevention feature’. “The removal of the feature, known as #ThereIsHelp, has not been previously reported. It had shown at the top of specific searches contacts for support organisations in many countries related to mental health, HIV, vaccines, child sexual exploitation, Covid19, gender-based violence, natural disasters and freedom of expression.”

Sportico: Tom Brady, Steph Curry Connection to FTX Highlighted in SEC Complaint. “While spokespersons and endorsers are usually not liable for the unlawful acts of a sponsored company, these celebrities allegedly held larger roles, including as investors and customers, and arguably possessed more knowledge than an ordinary endorser and a higher duty of care. They, in turn, promoted FTX and in some instances urged their fans to take their advice and spend their money on FTX.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: This Is the Best Free Scanning App on iPhone. “There’s a pretty nifty document scanner built into your iPhone’s Notes app. It’s great at automatically figuring out the edges of your doc, and it will even detect text for you. But the problem is, the scanned text will save to the note itself as a PDF, meaning you have to then manually export the document to do something actually useful with it. You can significantly improve this workflow by using the completely free QuickScan app.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CNN: Some universities are now restricting TikTok access on campus. “A small but growing number of universities are now blocking access to TikTok on school-owned devices or WiFi networks, in the latest sign of a widening crackdown on the popular short-form video app.”

TechCrunch: Questions linger over Facebook, Twitter, TikTok’s commitment to uphold election integrity in Africa, as countries head to polls. “A dozen countries in Africa, including Nigeria, the continent’s biggest economy and democracy, are expected to hold their presidential elections next year, and questions linger on how well social media platforms are prepared to curb misinformation and disinformation after claims of botched content moderation during Kenya’s polls last August.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

UC San Diego: New Web Tracking Technique is Bypassing Privacy Protections. “Two years ago, several browsers that prioritize user privacy — including Safari, Firefox, and Brave — began to block third-party cookies for all users by default. This presents a significant issue for businesses that place ads on the web on behalf of other companies and rely on cookies to track click-through rates to determine how much they need to get paid. Advertisers have responded by pioneering a new method for tracking users across the Web, known as user ID (or UID) smuggling, which does not require third-party cookies.”

India Today: Social media influencers to pay Rs 50 lakh fine if they fail to declare paid promotions . “The government is planning to impose fines of up to Rs 50 lakh on social media influencers if they fail to inform their followers about paid promotions.” That’s a bit over $60,000 USD.

RESEARCH & OPINION

Brookings Institution: Impact of disinformation on democracy in Asia. “In Asia and around the world, disinformation campaigns — perpetrated by foreign actors seeking to shore up power at home and weaken their competitors abroad and by domestic actors seeking political advantage — are increasingly putting pressure on democratic societies.”

Cardiff University: New public policy research and knowledge exchange academic network launched . “PolicyWISE is led by The Open University (OU) and works with researchers from Cardiff University, Trinity College Dublin, Queen’s University Belfast, The University of Edinburgh and University College London to enable governments in all five countries to learn from each other’s approaches to pressing policy challenges. An initial series of workshops with policymakers and academics from across the nations has already explored approaches to tackling violence against women and girls; improving mental health; post-Covid educational inequalities; children and young people’s health and net zero.”

ABC News (Australia): 3D imaging of Batavia shipwreck silverware uncovers new insights into 17th century shipping trade. “Researchers and the public will soon be able to get a better view of priceless silverware recovered from the Batavia shipwreck in a collaboration between institutions in Western Australia and Amsterdam.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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December 25, 2022 at 01:26AM
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National Heat Vulnerability Index, Riffusion, TikTok, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, December 24, 2022

National Heat Vulnerability Index, Riffusion, TikTok, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, December 24, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Yale School of Public Health: National Heat Vulnerability Index Reveals Neighborhoods at High Vulnerability to Heat. “A team of researchers at the Yale School of Public Health has developed a metric to gauge heat vulnerability at the census-tract level and created a color-coded interactive map for public use.”

MusicRadar: Riffusion is a free web app that uses AI to create music from your text prompts. “Riffusion works by generating images from spectograms, which are then converted into audio clips. We’re told that it can generate infinite variations of a text prompt by varying the ‘seed’.” This isn’t as polished as an image generator, but it’s interesting. I found that the longer I let the audio run, the better it sounded.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ars Technica: TikTok cops to running “covert surveillance campaign” on Western journalists. “Following an internal investigation, TikTok owner ByteDance today confirmed reports from this fall that claimed some of its employees used the popular app to track multiple journalists, including two in the US. The ByteDance employees’ goal? To identify anonymous sources who were leaking information to the media on the company’s ties to the Chinese government, according to The New York Times.”

9to5 Google: Google Calendar bug creating random events based on emails and newsletters from Gmail. “Over the past day or so, Google Calendar has been showing randomly created all-day events based on Gmail messages that don’t necessarily relate back to any specific event. There’s no clear pattern with this bug, though it does seem that emails with dates mentioned may be one trigger.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Associated Press: Invisible military aircraft not captured on Google Maps. “A video said to show an invisible military aircraft at an Air Force base just outside Abilene, a city 150 miles (241 kilometers) west of Fort Worth, Texas, has spread widely on social media in recent days.”

Search Engine Land: How Google Autocomplete works. “You enter a word or a single letter, and Google will populate the search box with a list of ‘predictions’ before you’ve even finished typing. This Google feature is called Autocomplete. But what exactly is it? How does Google come up with those predictions? Read on to find out how Google Autocomplete works.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Moscow Times: Yandex Registers New Companies to Bypass Sanctions – RTVI. “Russian tech giant Yandex has registered holding companies in Armenia and the U.S. in order to bypass international sanctions on Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, Russian-language TV channel RTVI reported on Thursday.”

NBC News: California police say member of Elon Musk’s security team is a suspect following stalker claim. “The Dec. 13 incident in a Los Angeles-area highway has become a flashpoint for a debate about online speech and the dissemination of personal information, although authorities had previously said little about what happened. In a statement Tuesday, police in South Pasadena said that the incident involved a member of Musk’s security team, whose vehicle hit the car of a man he alleged was following him.”

Gizmodo: Dozens of Former Twitter Employees File Complaint Alleging the Mass Layoffs ‘Targeted Women’. “Twitter received complaints on Tuesday from 100 former employees who accused the company of gender discrimination and illegal termination. The lawsuit was first filed earlier this month and addresses CEO Elon Musk’s decision to lay off over half the company. The lawsuit claims women were primarily targeted for layoffs and accuses the company of failing to pay the promised severance.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Washington Post: They came to TikTok for fun. They got stuck with sexualized videos. “We spoke to five people who have struggled to get sexual content out of their feeds, and tested each of the apps ourselves as new users with no history on the sites. We found that sexual content was suggested by default to new users on four of the five apps, although the material rarely violated community guidelines.”

Mirage News: UNECE to Launch Global Database on Transport CO2 Emissions. “Since May this year, UNECE and other key stakeholders forming the Transport Data Commons Initiative have been working to create an open data platform to share the existing data on CO2 emissions in the transport sector. On 9 December 2022, UNECE was chosen by the initiative to host a prototype database to be developed by May 2023.”

Analytics India: ChatGPT is Great, but Competing with Google Takes More than That. “In a tweet, Margaret Mitchell, an AI researcher based out of Seattle, pointed out that ChatGPT taking over Google search would be the same as reinventing the wheel. According to her, if we see the search engines before the emergence of Pagerank, a web search query meant putting in a sequence of text as a query, and getting back websites with the most likely sequences of text following your query. This, according to her, is ‘similar to where we are with ChatGPT today. Except, the websites are erased; you get snippets of likely response text extracted from different websites’.” I don’t agree entirely with this opinion but I’m more in alignment with it than all the other Chicken Little Hot Takes I’ve been seeing. Good morning, Internet…

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December 24, 2022 at 06:29PM
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Meda Chesney-Lind, Twitter, Overture Maps Foundation, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, December 23, 2022

Meda Chesney-Lind, Twitter, Overture Maps Foundation, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, December 23, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

University of Hawaii News: Papers from nationally-recognized UH criminologist now available. “Research into the brutal shakedown of the Oʻahu Community Correctional Center in 1981, and the experience and backgrounds of delinquent girls and incarcerated women in Hawaiʻi are highlights of the work of former University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa women’s studies program director and professor emerita Meda Chesney-Lind, which is now available online. University Archives has made Chesney-Lind’s collection of research and academic work as a scholar and activist with a focus on women and crime available on ArchivesSpace.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Interesting Engineering: Teenager who tracks Elon Musk’s jet sets up a new Twitter account, with a small difference. “Elonjet, the account that was allegedly banned for ‘doxxing’ Elon Musk’s live location is now back on Twitter under a new name. To comply with Musk-led Twitter’s new privacy policies, the account will post updates about Musk’s private plane but with a slight change.”

CNN: Twitter layoffs continue under Elon Musk. “Additional Twitter employees were terminated Thursday as part of ongoing, rolling layoffs under new owner Elon Musk, including from the public policy and media and entertainment teams, according to tweets from affected employees.”

The Verge: Geohot resigns from Twitter. “George Hotz, known for being the first person to carrier-unlock an iPhone and jailbreaking the PS3, both under his hacker alias ‘geohot,’ has resigned from his Twitter internship, he announced Tuesday evening on Twitter. ‘Appreciate the opportunity, but didn’t think there was any real impact I could make there,’ he wrote.”

USEFUL STUFF

New York Times: How to Use Parental Controls on Your Child’s New Phone. “The holiday season is here, and if you’ve decided to give in and get your child a smartphone or tablet, you may be nervous about safety, supervision and screen time. Software can’t solve everything, but it can help. Here are a few of the tools available to help parents or caregivers guide children’s first solo steps into the digital age.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

AFP: Google rivals join forces in online maps. “Meta, Microsoft, TomTom, and Amazon Web Services have now introduced what they call the Overture Maps Foundation, the goal of which is to make comprehensive mapping data openly available for use by whoever may need it, the nonprofit Linux Foundation said in a release.”

The Register: Paperwork decision scraps Google’s $600m Minnesota datacenter project . “The facility, first announced in 2019, was effectively ended after Google partner Honeycrisp Power failed to file the necessary paperwork for Xcel Energy to provide the power for the project, the Star Tribute reported this week. In response, the Minnesota-based utility terminated its electric service agreements with Google earlier this month.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

WIRED: Hands On With Flipper Zero, the Hacker Tool Blowing Up on TikTok . “If you had only heard about Flipper Zero through TikTok, where the tool has gone viral, you might think that it was a toy that could make ATMs spit out money, cars unlock themselves, and gas spill out of pumps for free. I spent the last week testing one to determine whether the world was as vulnerable to Flipper Zero as social media made it out to be.”

TechCrunch: Google appeals against India’s fine over ‘unfair’ business practices on Android. “Google said on Friday it has appealed against the Indian antitrust body’s order against the firm over alleged anti-competitive practices surrounding Android mobile devices in the key overseas market.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Greater Good Magazine (Berkeley): How Social Media Can Add to Your Well-Being (Not Detract From It). “It is not sufficient to say social media is bad, don’t use it. We need a more proactive approach. The question often missing from the discussion is: How can social media use be optimized to enhance our well-being and flourishing?”

Harvard Business Review: The Risks of Empowering “Citizen Data Scientists”. “…with great business insight, augmented with auto-ML, can come great analytic responsibility. At the same time, we cannot forget that data science and AI are, in fact, very difficult, and there’s a very long journey from having data to solving a problem. In this article, we’ll lay out the pros and cons of integrating citizen data scientists into your AI strategy and suggest methods for optimizing success and minimizing risks.”

Stanford University: New Stanford study shows choices of virtual environments and avatars can promote positive psychological outcomes in the metaverse. “In a new study, Stanford University researchers examined how being able to completely transform one’s appearance and digital environment significantly impacts social interactions in the metaverse.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 23, 2022 at 06:27PM
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Edward Bellamy, Opera Browser, Quora, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 22, 2022

Edward Bellamy, Opera Browser, Quora, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 22, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Reminder: Edward Bellamy Association opens digital archive. “As an extension of their historical footprint, the Edward Bellamy Memorial Association announced a new digital archive on Nov. 29. The collection of historic remnants from author Edward Bellamy’s life joins the Edward Bellamy House as significant artifacts from the former author and Chicopee resident.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

PC World: Opera’s new Lucid Mode makes older video look like new. “Opera today has added Lucid Mode to its browser—an automatic feature that will sharpen and clarify older video on a variety of sites. Opera didn’t say what version of its desktop browser Lucid would be added to, but you’ll be sure to get it if you keep Opera up to date.”

TechCrunch: Quora launches Poe, a way to talk to AI chatbots like ChatGPT. “Signaling its interest in text-generating AI systems like ChatGPT, Quora this week launched a platform called Poe that lets people ask questions, get instant answers and have a back-and-forth dialogue with AI chatbots.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Business Insider: Google’s management has reportedly issued a ‘code red’ amid the rising popularity of the ChatGPT AI. “Google’s management issued a ‘code red’ amid the launch of ChatGPT — the buzzy conversational AI chat bot created by OpenAI — as it’s sparked concerns over the future of the Google search engine, The New York Times reported.”

Hold the Front Page: Lockdown demand prompts weekly to escalate digital archive project. “The Herald Digital Archive Project was first launched by the Farnham Herald in November 2019, but its progress was stalled by the Covid-19 lockdowns. However, the lockdowns also prompted an increase in local interest for local newspaper archive material and the Herald has now got the project back on track. With the help of volunteers over the past year, 80pc of the Tindle-owned Herald’s physical paper archives – totalling some 785 volumes of newsprint – have now been inventoried, while 99,000 photo negatives have been indexed.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: ByteDance Inquiry Finds Employees Obtained User Data of 2 Journalists. “ByteDance, the China-based parent company of TikTok, said on Thursday that an internal investigation found that employees had inappropriately obtained the data of U.S. TikTok users, including two reporters.”

ProPublica: The IRS Hasn’t Released Nearly Half a Million Nonprofit Tax Records. “According to a ProPublica review of public IRS data, which powers our Nonprofit Explorer database, the agency is behind on releasing nearly half a million tax records, known as Form 990s, for tax-exempt organizations. The delays, which began two years ago, are stymying access to key financial information that governments, the public and grantmakers use to evaluate the nation’s tax-exempt companies.”

Bleeping Computer: FBI warns of search engine ads pushing malware, phishing. “The FBI warns that threat actors are using search engine advertisements to promote websites distributing ransomware or stealing login credentials for financial institutions and crypto exchanges.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

News@Northeastern: Twitter, Meta And Tiktok Dominated 2022. What Will The Social Media Landscape Look Like In 2023?. “Social media is such an integral part of modern life that any change on a platform can be seismic, and this past year was defined by change. TikTok’s star continued to rise, Meta struggled to maintain relevance as Mark Zuckerberg committed to the Metaverse and Twitter imploded under Elon Musk. Northeastern University experts say the social media landscape in 2023 will continue to be defined by these power players––but in ways that we might not expect.”

Boston University: Unearthing a Long Ignored African Writing System, One Researcher Finds African History, by Africans. “In the same way that the Roman alphabet has been adopted to write English, French, and Spanish languages, [Fallou] Ngom’s research revealed that people in Senegal, Guinea, Nigeria, and other parts of West Africa use a modified Arabic alphabet to write in a number of local languages: Wolof, Hausa, Fula, Mandinka, Swahili, Amharic, Tigrigna, and Berber among them. It was an enormous discovery. This writing system, called Ajami, dispelled the false notion peddled by European colonialists that large swaths of communities in sub-Saharan Africa were illiterate, with no native written languages of their own.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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December 23, 2022 at 01:51AM
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18th/19th Century Cookbooks, Bing Maps, BeReal, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, December 22, 2022

18th/19th Century Cookbooks, Bing Maps, BeReal, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, December 22, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Google Blog: Digitized Cookbooks on the Getty Research Portal for your Holiday Feasting. “The Getty Research Portal’s newest Virtual Collection, Cookbook Collection (Getty Research Institute), is available just in time for the holiday season!… The Virtual Collection includes more than 100 digitized cookbooks from the Anne Willan and Mark Cherniavsky Gastronomy Collection.” Took a quick glance and saw a lot of 18th and 19th century stuff.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bing Blog: Discover New Roads with Bing Maps. “The Microsoft Maps AI Team has detected 47.8M km of all roads and 1.16M km of missing roads from Open Street Maps (OSM). These new roads were detected using Bing Maps imagery collected between 2020 and 2022 including sources from both Maxar and Airbus. The complete set of roads is also shared on Github with the open data community and is freely available for download and use under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL).”

Mashable: How to access your BeReal 2022 recap video . “With BeReal Memories, the app compiles all your 2022 posts into a dizzying recap video that represents a good cross-section of how you spent your year. Unsurprisingly, these recap videos have quickly become fodder for other platforms. Last year, before you knew about BeReal, trendsetting French teens were sharing their 2021 BeReal recap videos, and now that the app has gone mainstream this year’s compilations have the opportunity to become a proper trend.”

USEFUL STUFF

Search Engine Journal: An In-Depth Guide To Get Started With Looker Studio (The New Google Data Studio). “Google Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) syncs all of your data sources into one unified reporting experience. It enables users to create informative and visual dashboards that are easy to interpret, share, and customize.”

How-To Geek: No Time to Read? Turn Web Articles Into Podcast Episodes. “The internet is full of great written content, but it can be challenging to find time to read it all. What if you could turn every article you wanted to read into an episode in your own personal podcast feed?”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Irish Times: Eir says thousands of customer emails irretrievably deleted in error. “Thousands of emails sent and received over the last two decades by eir customers with eircom.net addresses have been permanently deleted in error by the company, The Irish Times has learned. While the company declined to say precisely how many of the subscribers to its email service were affected by the system failure, it said four per cent of its user base have had all emails sent or received longer than 45 days ago deleted and these cannot be recovered.”

CogDogBlog: Toot in/em bed. “In the interest of… well curiosity, I have been mulling over the ways to embed mastodon posts (TheThingsFomerllyKnownButInSomePlacesStillAreToots) in WordPress.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNN: Brooklyn hospital network reverts to paper charts for weeks after cyberattack. “A network of three hospitals in Brooklyn, New York, has had to work off paper charts for weeks following a cyberattack on its computer systems in late November, the hospital group’s chief executive told CNN Monday.”

NBC New York: FTX Co-Founder, Former Alameda Research CEO Both Plead Guilty to Federal Charges. “Federal charges have been filed against Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, and Gary Wang, the co-founder of FTX, for their roles in the alleged fraud that contributed to the crypto currency exchange’s collapse, according to prosecutors. The Southern District of New York announced Wednesday night that both Ellison and Wang have already pleaded guilty to the charges, and both are cooperating with prosecutors, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said.”

Reuters: German Cartel Office Ends Proceedings Against Google News Showcase. “Germany’s cartel office has concluded proceedings against Google over its online news service after the tech giant made several changes benefiting publishers, the office said on Wednesday.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WIRED: The Internet Is at Risk of Driving Women Away. “It isn’t just famous or highly visible women who are facing enough online abuse to consider leaving social media. A YouGov poll commissioned by the dating app Bumble showed that almost half of women age 18 to 24 received unsolicited sexual images within the past year. UK Member of Parliament Alex Davies-Jones put the phrase ‘dick pic’ into the historical record during the debate on the UK Online Safety Bill when she asked a male fellow MP if he had ever received one. It is not, as she said, a rhetorical question for most women.”

Yale News: Digitally rebuilding a lost city. “The ancient city of Dura-Europos, on the bank of the Euphrates River in present-day Syria, has long fascinated archaeologists and historians for its cultural diversity — Jewish, Christian, Mithraic, and other religious groups lived and worshiped close to each other…. [Holly Rushmeier and Anne Chen] recently received a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a digital archive of materials related to the archaeological site of Dura-Europos.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 22, 2022 at 06:34PM
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Count Basic Papers, Indiana University Bloomington, Google, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 21, 2022

Count Basic Papers, Indiana University Bloomington, Google, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 21, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Rutgers University Libraries: Institute of Jazz Studies Launches Count Basie Family Papers and Artifacts Finding Aid. “A native of Red Bank, New Jersey, William James ‘Count’ Basie (1904–1984) was one of the giants of jazz, a global icon, and still one of the most influential, popular, and recognized figures in American music. The Institute acquired Basie’s papers and artifacts in 2018 and is responsible for ensuring its long-term preservation. The roughly 200-cubic-foot collection, consisting of more than 1,000 items, is unparalleled in its size and thorough documentation of Basie’s life and career, as well as those of his wife, Catherine, and daughter, Diane.”

Indiana University: ‘Windows to the World’ brings digital artifacts to K-12 classrooms. “If K-12 students don’t have the resources to travel to Indiana University Bloomington’s campus and visit its museums, a new digital toolkit will bring items from IU’s collections to them. Windows to the World: Digital Artifacts for Global Educators, a collaboration between several area studies centers within the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, will help teachers incorporate items from IU’s collections into their curriculum.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Google search is getting better at displaying bilingual results. “Google is improving how Google search presents information in two languages, alongside developing its voice search feature to understand inquiries that use a mix of languages.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker Australia: You Can Disable Google Sign-in Pop-ups on All Websites. “You may have noticed an increasing number of websites that now display a ‘Sign In With Google’ pop-up every time you open the page…. If you don’t want to use Google’s sign-in across all sites, there are a couple easy ways to block these pop-ups across the web.”

SlashGear: How To Use An Old Android Phone As A Digital Photo Frame. “When you have an old Android phone, you typically hand it down to a younger relative, sell it, or trade it in somewhere so it won’t add to the pile of growing electronic waste around the world. But what if your phone’s really ancient and no one wants to use it anymore? No, don’t just put it back inside your drawer. Instead of letting it collect dust, you can repurpose it as a digital picture frame.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Wall Street Journal: The Failed Promise of Online Mental-Health Treatment. “Remote treatment of mental-health problems surged in the pandemic, as in-person treatment became difficult while pandemic-driven isolation increased anxiety and depression. Digital mental-health companies plunged in, promising to provide millions with access to high-quality care by video, phone, and messaging. Many of the businesses, however, put a premium on growth. Investor-backed, they deployed classic Silicon Valley tactics such as spending heavily on advertising and expansion while often using contractors instead of employees to control costs.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: Clean Energy Quest Pits Google Against Utilities. “At the heart of their campaign, Google and its tech giant allies want to dismantle a decades-old regulatory system in the Southeast that allows a handful of utilities to generate and sell the region’s electricity — and replace it with a market in which many companies can compete to do so.”

CNN: Elon Musk’s security team sought for questioning over incident he cited as reason to ban journalists. “Police in Southern California are looking to speak with Elon Musk and his security team over an alleged assault last week that Musk claimed involved a ‘crazy stalker’ and led to the suspension of a private jet-tracking account on Twitter as well as several prominent journalists.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Guardian: Becoming a chatbot: my life as a real estate AI’s human backup. “For one weird year, I was the human who stepped in to make sure a property chatbot didn’t blow its cover – I was a person pretending to be a computer pretending to be a person”

WIRED: Let Twitter Devolve Into Porn . “WITHOUT MODERATORS OR advertisers, swaths of Twitter are now mangy empty lots crawling with vandals, lechers, con men, and swastikas. The time is perhaps right for porn, then. Porn abhors a vacuum. Especially where it can be ennobled as constitutional duty. How in the world is this good news? I’ll tell you why it’s good news to me. Not only will it make Twitter2 easily quittable, but it’s pleasing to see things become what they deep down are.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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December 22, 2022 at 01:28AM
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Auto Design & Sketching, AI, Flickr Foundation, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, December 21, 2022

Auto Design & Sketching, AI, Flickr Foundation, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, December 21, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Core77: Free Online Auto Design Course by the Petersen Automotive Museum. “The Petersen Automotive Museum has partnered with online education company Yellowbrick to release ‘Auto Design & Sketching,’ a free online course. Auto design history, principles, case studies, theory and of course sketching are all covered.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Los Angeles Times: A.I. is here, and it’s making movies. Is Hollywood ready?. “Artificial intelligence will do to motion pictures what Photoshop did to still ones, said Robert Wahl, an associate computer science professor at Concordia University Wisconsin who’s written about the ethics of CGI, in an email. ‘We can no longer fully trust what we see.'”

Flickr: Hello, World! . “Welcome to the new home of the Flickr Foundation! We are a new US 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to keeping the wonderful Flickr collection around for 100 years. Big goals, little steps.”

Engadget: TikTok will explain why it recommends videos on its ‘For You’ page. “The algorithm that powers TikTok’s ‘For You’ page has long been a source of fascination and suspicion. Fans often remark on the app’s eerie accuracy, while TikTok critics have at times speculated the company could subtly manipulate its algorithm to influence its users in more nefarious ways.”

USEFUL STUFF

Boing Boing: Getting better YouTube transcripts. “YouTube provides transcripts—sort of. They’re often missing, especially on old videos, and the formatting leaves much to be desired. The cunningly-named ‘YouTube Transcripts’ website promises superior wordification.” I tried this. Blazing fast and the transcripts weren’t bad. They aren’t formatted, though, so you’ll have to do some cleanup before using them anywhere. If you struggle with understanding accented English in non-captioned YouTube videos (it me) this will be really handy. Bookmarked.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

UConn Today: UConn Library’s Connecticut Digital Archive Receives Connecticut Humanities Partnership Grant to Build Local Histories. “Connecticut Humanities (CTH) has awarded a Partnership Grant of $173,711 to the Connecticut Digital Archive (CTDA) for an exciting new project called My Town, My Story. My Town, My Story is focused specifically on helping Connecticut public libraries build digital collections of local histories and encourage individuals and community groups to contribute to the common memory of their town.”

Financial Times: Elon Musk’s Twitter is ‘stirring up’ digital polarisation, says Bill Gates. “A ‘seat-of-the-pants’ decision-making style at Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover is worsening digital polarisation, according to Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and co-chair of the world’s largest private philanthropic organisation.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: Ex-Google Contractor Settles Lawsuit Over Religious Sect. “Kevin Lloyd, 34, said in the suit that he had been fired after complaining that the Fellowship of Friends, a religious organization based in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, dominated a business unit called Google Developer Studios, which makes videos showcasing the company’s technologies.”

Politico: Elon Musk invited to testify in the European Parliament. “Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk has been invited to testify in the European Parliament, according to a letter obtained by POLITICO. European Parliament President Roberta Metsola Monday sent a letter to the tech billionaire asking him to appear for a ‘frank exchange in public’ with lawmakers.”

NBC New York: Face Recognition Tech Gets Girl Scout Mom Booted from Rockettes Show — Due to Where She Works. “An attorney whose firm is in litigation with MSG Entertainment was barred from attending a Radio City Rockettes’ show with her daughter and other Girl Scouts because the company’s facial recognition technology knew where she worked.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Georgia: Study links social media, gaming addiction to emotions. “Social media scrolling and gaming can be addictive, but a new study out of the University of Georgia found these two behaviors are particularly habit forming for kids who have trouble regulating their emotions.”

ProPublica: Inside Google’s Quest to Digitize Troops’ Tissue Samples. “The tech giant has long sought access to a priceless trove of veterans’ skin samples, tumor biopsies and slices of organs. DOD staffers have pushed back, raising ethical and legal concerns, but Google might win anyway.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 21, 2022 at 06:28PM
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