NEW RESOURCES

CNN: Looking for a job? This university shared its database with thousands of remote job openings. “California State University, East Bay published a public database of remote job vacancies across the country to help people struggling to find employment due to the pandemic.”

BBC: Directory of female musicians could end gender imbalance at festivals. “When festivals finally resume in 2021, the line-ups could be more gender balanced than ever before, thanks to a new database of female artists. The F-list provides details of more than 4,500 musicians in all genres of music, and is free to use. It was compiled by equality campaigner Vick Bain, who first uploaded it as a sprawling online spreadsheet.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Google’s ‘Verse by Verse’ AI can help you write in the style of famous poets. “If you’ve ever fancied yourself as a poet but don’t quite have the lyrical and rhythmic skills one might require, Google’s Verse by Verse tool can help you to craft the most delectable verse. The company’s latest experiment with AI-driven poetry offers suggestions in the style of America’s most renowned wordsmiths.”

CNET: Google Assistant can set times for controlling internet-connected devices. “Smart assistants like Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri have been able to handle home automation tasks for years. In a new update, however, it now looks like at least Google’s virtual helper has recently been learning a new trick.”

Google Blog: The new conversational Search experience we’re thankful for. “This year, Google Search rolled out new ways to get you to the information you want, using context from your recent activity. Thanks to our newest language understanding capabilities, it’s now easier for you to get to a more specific, on-topic search, navigate a topic you’re interested in and find additional information relevant to that topic. Let’s check out how this improved understanding can help around this time of year.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Spot Mail Fraud and Online Scams This Holiday Season. “Studies suggest Americans will spend over $400 billion in total on holiday gifts, goodies, and travel, making it a big target for scammers. So, here’s how to spot mailing scams during the holidays and keep yourself safe.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

University of Kansas: Bringing Black Authors’ Work Out Of Digital Shadows. “First, the Project on the History of Black Writing worked to preserve physical copies of novels by Black writers, often rescuing works from dusty attics and estate sales. In the 21st century, HBW began digitizing its library. And now, with the help of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, it is moving to make the collection even more accessible to future scholars worldwide. For Maryemma Graham, the HBW project — growing out of her grad school discoveries in 1983 — came with her to the University of Kansas in 1999. Now the Distinguished Professor of English is one of three principal investigators for a $500,000, two-year grant that will bring the collection out of the digital shadows.”

The Guardian: Oxford Dictionaries: 2020 has too many Words of the Year to name just one. “For the first time, the Oxford English Dictionary has chosen not to name a word of the year, describing 2020 as ‘a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in one single word’. Instead, from ‘unmute’ to ‘mail-in’, and from ‘coronavirus’ to ‘lockdown’, the eminent reference work has announced its ‘words of an “unprecedented” year’.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Russia opens case against Google for not deleting banned content -TASS. “Russia’s communications watchdog Roskomnadzor has opened a case against U.S. tech giant Google for failing to remove some content prohibited in Russia, the TASS news agency reported on Monday.”

Vice: Secret Amazon Reports Expose the Company’s Surveillance of Labor and Environmental Groups. “Dozens of leaked documents from Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center reveal the company’s reliance on Pinkerton operatives to spy on warehouse workers and the extensive monitoring of labor unions, environmental activists, and other social movements.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: My Name Is GPT-3 and I Approved This Article. “GPT-3 is the culmination of several years of work inside the world’s leading artificial intelligence labs, including OpenAI, an independent organization backed by $1 billion dollars in funding from Microsoft, as well as labs at Google and Facebook. At Google, a similar system helps answer queries on the company’s search engine. These systems — known as universal language models — can help power a wide range of tools, like services that automatically summarize news articles and ‘chatbots’ designed for online conversation.”

Stevens Institute of Technology: A.I. Tool Provides More Accurate Flu Forecasts. “Predicting influenza outbreaks just got a little easier, thanks to a new A.I.-powered forecasting tool developed by researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology. By incorporating location data, the A.I. system is able to outperform other state-of-the-art forecasting methods, delivering up to an 11% increase in accuracy and predicting influenza outbreaks up to 15 weeks in advance.” Good morning, Internet…

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