NEW RESOURCES

Internet Archive: HyperCard On The Archive (Celebrating 30 Years of HyperCard). “To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Hypercard, we’re bringing it back. After our addition of in-browser early Macintosh emulation earlier this year, the Internet Archive now has a lot of emulated Hypercard stacks available for perusal, and we encourage you to upload your own, easily and quickly.” I miss HyperCard. Get off my lawn.

Quartz: The evolution of American anxieties, in words added to the dictionary since 1980. “When the American English dictionary Merriam-Webster adds new words, it also records the year the word was first printed. A new tool from the dictionary-maker, called Time Traveler, lets you search words by the year of their first appearance in the language. By proxy, it reveals the sometimes highly specific anxieties of each historical moment.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BetaNews: Opera 47 (finally) adds bookmarks export, smoother video playback. “Opera Software has unveiled Opera 47.0 for Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s a fast turnaround from Opera 46, taking less than the usual six-week development cycle to go from alpha to final release. As a result, the new release is light on major features, but does boast a number of improvements, including smoother video and exportable bookmarks. It also updates the underlying Chromium engine to version 60.”

Google Doodles: 44th Anniversary of the Birth of Hip Hop. “On August 11, 1973, an 18-year-old, Jamaican-American DJ who went by the name of Kool Herc threw a back-to-school jam at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, New York. During his set, he decided to do something different. Instead of playing the songs in full, he played only their instrumental sections, or ‘breaks’ – sections where he noticed the crowd went wild. During these ‘breaks’ his friend Coke La Rock hyped up the crowd with a microphone. And with that, Hip Hop was born.” I had way too much fun playing with this.

CNET: Snapchat’s Spectacles fade faster than a Snap. “Snap’s Spectacles are careening into irrelevancy. Second-quarter sales of the glasses, which are embedded with a camera to make it easier for you to take photos or videos for a Snap, declined to $5.4 million from more than $8 million in the first quarter. At $130 a pop, that’s 41,000 people who bought Spectacles.”

USEFUL STUFF

Phys.org: De-jargonizing program helps decode science speak . “To help scientists recognize which words are jargon and should be avoided or explained when engaging with the public, researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and HIT–Holon Institute of Technology have created a program that automatically identifies terms the average person may not know. In a recent paper published in PLOS One, the free of charge and scientist-friendly De-Jargonizer… is introduced. Once a text is uploaded or pasted, the algorithm color codes words in the text as either frequent or intermediate level general vocabulary, or jargon. This is based on frequency of the words on an internet news site, designed and written for the public. The corpus will be updated periodically, and can be expanded to include other sources and languages.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Fossbytes: What Is Sarahah? How To Use This Viral ‘Anonymous’ Messaging App?. “Sarahah anonymous messaging app is currently one of the most popular apps on App Store. Created by a Saudi developer, Sarahah mobile app helps you discover your friends and co-workers and leave a feedback. You can also share your own profile link to invite “honest” feedback from others. While this app has garnered a huge following in a short span of time, it’s also facing flak due to cyber bullying possibilities.”

TechDirt: Facebook, Twitter Consistently Fail At Distinguishing Abuse From Calling Out Abuse. “Time and time again, we see that everyone who doesn’t work in the field of trust and safety for an internet platform seems to think that it’s somehow “easy” to filter out “bad” content and leave up “good” content. It’s not. This doesn’t mean that platforms shouldn’t try to deal with the issue. They have perfectly good business reasons to want to limit people using their systems to abuse and harass and threaten other users. But when you demand that they be legally responsible — as Germany (and then Russia) recently did — bad things happen, and quite frequently those bad things happen to the victims of abuse or harassment or threats.”

Wired: How Baidu Will Win China’s AI Race—and, Maybe, The World’s. “A company can have the best technology in the world. It can have the strongest talent. It can have the coolest product ideas. But to train the algorithms that will deliver the intelligence to transform our cities, it needs data. To wit: The company with the most data wins. That’s why earlier this year, after leaving Microsoft the previous fall, legendary engineer Qi Lu headed to Beijing to become Baidu’s chief operating officer.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Register: Schoolboy bags $10,000 reward from Google with easy HTTP Host bypass . “A teenager in Uruguay has scored big after finding and reporting a bug in Google’s App Engine to view confidential internal Google documents.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Phys. org: What social media reveals about your personality. “Since the inception of social media, a prodigious amount of status updates, tweets, and comments have been posted online. The language people use to express themselves can provide clues about the kind of people they are, online and off. Current efforts to understand personality from writing samples rely on theories and survey data from the 1980s. New research from the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) uses social media data to successfully identify differences and similarities between users without prior assumptions. This is a step toward building a better understanding of the psychology of human personality.” The researchers started with Reddit, which I thought was interesting.

Mediakix: Are Fake Instagram Influencers Deceiving Brands?. “To prove whether or not it’s possible for accounts with fake followers and engagement to secure brand sponsorship deals, Mediakix created two fictitious Instagram influencer accounts grown completely with bought followers and engagement (likes and comments) and applied to campaigns on popular influencer marketing platforms.” 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 love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!