NEW RESOURCES

University of California, Irvine News: New U.S. Carbon Monitor website compares emissions among the 50 states. “Near real-time, state-level emissions estimates are now available at the U.S. Carbon Monitor website to serve the academic community, policy makers, the news media and the general public. As a companion to launch of the public website, the team today also released an explanatory paper on the EarthArXiv preprint server.”

Guinness World Records: Ocean Rowing Society International launches the first real adventure database. “The new database consists of various interactive and interrelated statistics: tables of expeditions, explorers, vessels, an interactive map that displays expeditions in any given area and period, a page where two expeditions can be compared by the system, and an outline page that summarizes all the facts as numbers on one page.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

MIT Technology Review: Facebook’s ad algorithms are still excluding women from seeing jobs. “Facebook is withholding certain job ads from women because of their gender, according to the latest audit of its ad service. The audit, conducted by independent researchers at the University of Southern California (USC), reveals that Facebook’s ad-delivery system shows different job ads to women and men even though the jobs require the same qualifications. This is considered sex-based discrimination under US equal employment opportunity law, which bans ad targeting based on protected characteristics. The findings come despite years of advocacy and lawsuits, and after promises from Facebook to overhaul how it delivers ads.”

USEFUL STUFF

CNET: How to make a TikTok Duet (on Instagram, too). “If you’re on TikTok — or have seen TikTok videos reposted elsewhere — you’ve likely seen a Duet. Sometimes TikTok creators film videos specifically designed for other users on the app to add to. They can range from dances to singing songs or lip-syncing songs to viral challenges to blind reacts and more.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BuzzFeed News: Despite A Ban, Facebook Continued To Label People As Interested In Militias For Advertisers. “For months after it banned violent extremist groups, Facebook’s advertising preference system, which lets advertisers deliver targeted ads, continued to identify and categorize some people as interested in militias.”

Middle East Monitor: Algeria president calls on France to return Ottoman archive. “Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune has called on France to return archives dating back to the Ottoman era, smuggled out of the country during the French colonial era from 1830 to 1962, Anadolu reported.”

Mother Jones: The TikTok Trend That Has Immigration Lawyers Worried. “TikTok’s ecosystem of immigration lawyers is a diverse one. There are plenty of zealous advocates attempting to explain in digestible sound bites convoluted, ever-changing policies. There is also potentially misleading content. Many of the advertisements seem to target undocumented Latin American immigrants with strong ties to the United States and few to no existing options for obtaining legal status.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NIKKEI Asia: Myanmar junta targets 100 celebrities active on social media. “Myanmar’s junta has placed at least 100 celebrities on its wanted list for allegedly inciting protests against its seizure of power, taking aim at those with big social media followings. Since Friday, the nightly news on state television has named 20 prominent figures accused of violating the law. The list is later reprinted the next day in a government-controlled newspaper. The list swelled to 100 on Tuesday night.”

CNN: 500 million LinkedIn users’ data is for sale on a hacker site. “Information scraped from around 500 million LinkedIn user profiles is part of a database posted for sale on a website popular with hackers, the company confirmed Thursday. The sale of the data was first reported on Tuesday by cybersecurity news and research site CyberNews, which said that an archive including user IDs, names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, professional titles and links to other social media profiles was being auctioned off on the forum for a four-figure sum.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

ZDNet: IBM’s new tool lets developers add quantum-computing power to machine learning. “IBM is releasing a new module as part of its open-source quantum software development kit, Qiskit, to let developers leverage the capabilities of quantum computers to improve the quality of their machine-learning models. Qiskit Machine Learning is now available and includes the computational building blocks that are necessary to bring machine-learning models into the quantum space.”

Washington Department of Ecology: State reviews record amount of water quality data in effort to prioritize improvements. “With 65 million data points analyzed and loaded into an online database, the Washington Department of Ecology is now sharing the state’s draft Water Quality Assessment. Taking the form of an interactive online tool, the Assessment pulls together existing data for fresh and marine water.”

Rochester Institute of Technology: NYSP2I creates new tools to help New York municipalities reduce wasted food. “The New York State Pollution Prevention Institute (NYSP2I)—led by Rochester Institute of Technology’s Golisano Institute for Sustainability—has developed a free, interactive toolkit that municipalities can use to design, implement, and manage food waste programs at the local level. The three-part guide, How to Build a Municipal Food Waste Strategy: A Toolkit for New York State Municipalities, is designed to assist communities large and small with building programs for reducing wasted food that are realistic and results-driven.” 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!